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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

There's no guarantee this will favour the development of intelligence though. To take examples from nature, flighted birds are so optimised for weight that they would never develop large, heavy enough craniums to support sentient brains. Many selective criteria may turn out to favour optimisation patterns that could actualy exclude general intelligence, or at least might effectively close off evolutionary paths that could lead to it.

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Except that ravens and other corvids seems to be self aware and are highly intelligent, it's correct that evolving things does not guarantee high intelligence.

Insects and especially social insects like ants are good examples of very successful survivors with very little general intelligence.

As another user TheOtherHobbes noted, humans share this characteristic with insects to some extent:

> Wild solo humans are only a little smarter than wolves individually, but being able to share and externalise invention and learning created a massive advantage.

This seems to resonate with a strain of Philosophy of Mind https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/content-externalism/ which deals with our mental content being distributed not only around the brain and body, but on paper, computers and relations with other people.

On the other hand, one can possibly steer the evolution towards a direction that enables general intelligence to evolve. In nature there are many local minima due to biological constraints (body weight, cranium size, birth channel size, predators, payoff between energy investment into large neural networks vs large muscles, ecological niches). In a simulation one can probably avoid many of these local minima by changing the rules that govern the simulation.

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