Evolving to extinction nearly happened to Homo sapiens. This huge peacock’s tail of a brain—which we grew just to do chimpanzee tribal politics better—really, that was the entire reason—causes a massive metabolic drain and makes our reproduction horribly difficult, frequently killing the mother and leaving infants helpless for years and with a horrible early mortality rate.
If the bottleneck 50,000 years ago had killed all of us instead of leaving a couple of thousand, we’d be a perfect example for the next intelligent species to use.
We’re just lucky that evolution came up with general intelligence as a solution to convincing that other chimp to give you the fruit, and that general intelligence turned out to be quite useful for some other things.
In this spirit, I frequently remind myself, when the difficulties of dealing with other apes are getting to be too much to tolerate, that it’s a problem so hard that we evolved brains capable of maintaining a global technological civilization and figuring out quantum mechanics as a side effect of trying to solve it, and I should maybe cut myself some slack.
Hard to say if politics was the entire reason… We are also endurance hunters and trap layers and both of those require being able to predict what your intended prey will do many steps in advance...
Question is, which came first?
And really, evolution didn’t come up with a general intelligence to solve ape politics. Pay attention when you’re thinking about things. How often do you reflexively think of inanimate objects as “wanting” or “happy”? You’re probably modeling plants and animals and machines and complex physics as though it were another ape. Ape behaviour is so complex that other, complex systems can fit right into that rules processing engine, but that engine leaves its fingerprints all over the results...
Which is the entire reason this website exists. If we truly had a general-purpose intelligence most of the glitches in our thinking that we have to learn to be careful of wouldn’t be there to start with.
Evolving to extinction nearly happened to Homo sapiens. This huge peacock’s tail of a brain—which we grew just to do chimpanzee tribal politics better—really, that was the entire reason—causes a massive metabolic drain and makes our reproduction horribly difficult, frequently killing the mother and leaving infants helpless for years and with a horrible early mortality rate.
If the bottleneck 50,000 years ago had killed all of us instead of leaving a couple of thousand, we’d be a perfect example for the next intelligent species to use.
We’re just lucky that evolution came up with general intelligence as a solution to convincing that other chimp to give you the fruit, and that general intelligence turned out to be quite useful for some other things.
In this spirit, I frequently remind myself, when the difficulties of dealing with other apes are getting to be too much to tolerate, that it’s a problem so hard that we evolved brains capable of maintaining a global technological civilization and figuring out quantum mechanics as a side effect of trying to solve it, and I should maybe cut myself some slack.
Hard to say if politics was the entire reason… We are also endurance hunters and trap layers and both of those require being able to predict what your intended prey will do many steps in advance...
Question is, which came first?
And really, evolution didn’t come up with a general intelligence to solve ape politics. Pay attention when you’re thinking about things. How often do you reflexively think of inanimate objects as “wanting” or “happy”? You’re probably modeling plants and animals and machines and complex physics as though it were another ape. Ape behaviour is so complex that other, complex systems can fit right into that rules processing engine, but that engine leaves its fingerprints all over the results...
Which is the entire reason this website exists. If we truly had a general-purpose intelligence most of the glitches in our thinking that we have to learn to be careful of wouldn’t be there to start with.