Complex landscapes helped land animals evolve higher intelligence: study | Hacker News Reader

Complex landscapes helped land animals evolve higher intelligence: study

phys.org

65 pointsdnetesn63 comments

Is there a level cap for fish intelligence where an individual fish won't gain any more benefit from increased intelligence? Being the smartest fish may not help you as much as swimming with the pack would help you.

Are humans the same way? I feel like human intelligence is just on the verge of "knowing thyself" in a much bigger way. There are plenty of examples of super-intelligent people that can have a global platform now thanks to modernity, but until 100 years ago they may have suffered in their communities. How many would-be geniuses died without procreating because their brains were wired differently and it happened that any use for skills in which they excelled were not available to them at the time? You can't be the next Einstein if you died in the Steppes of Asia in 1292.

It probably depends on the definition of intelligence, as it mostly does. A human capable of creative and complex problem solving might have still had an advantage in 1292 in the steps of Asia. Maybe not by creating the theory of relativity, but by inventing hunting and warfare strategy, or solving some other problems in their society.

Einstein might have been enlisted by one of the great Khan's to build ballistic and siege weaponry

Or he might have been born a peasant or a slave, and getting out of that pit would be likely near impossible.

> Is there a level cap for fish intelligence where an individual fish won't gain any more benefit from increased intelligence?

Think of it this way: intelligence has costs (metabolic, anatomical, etc) as well as benefits. At some point, costs outweigh benefits. That point is highly dependant on environment.

The brain size has metabolic/anatomical costs.

What physiological costs does a 180 IQ human pay compared to one with IQ 80?

There is some evidence that high intelligence is correlated with mental and physical disorders. So there probably is a cost.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bad-news-for-the-...

anatomical, and I had this example in mind:

> The size of the neonatal skull is large relative to the dimensions of the birth canal in the female pelvis. This is the reason why childbirth is slower and more difficult in humans than in most other primates.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150422104244.h...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstetrical_dilemma

You’re missing out on societal costs as well. We as humans needed civilizations, eg farming, where one person could cultivate more than one persons food thereby freeing up time for others in the community to work on other things. If a community doesn’t have that the cost is too high to let one person whittle away days trying to invent.

Being the smartest person in the room almost always has advantages.

Da Vinci was offered several times the opportunity to procreate (I think even his brother's wife) just to grab some of that DNA.

Probably Ramanujan is the most famous example we can point to - whilst not 13th C steppes, rural Victorian India is not a hotbed of education, yet people around him recognized his genius (at least relative to them) and gave him what opportunity they could. (No idea about the offers of sex however)

Genius usually will out. For a fair society we need to worry about the rest of us. For a technologically prosperous society we need to ensure the few geniuses get a good education.

Luckily for us, we don't know where the geniuses will be born, so we need to build a fair society, and then we will get the technological advances for free - so glad that's solved.

survivorship bias

You're right this is survivorship bias, but I think it also illustrates that my premise is unfalsifiable. I'll try to restate it, keep in mind we are talking about evolution:

There must have been people throughout history who where of such high intelligence that it impeded their ability to procreate, while their circumstances didn't allow their exceptional abilities to be realized, and they died in obscurity. High profile, high intelligence historical figures cannot be an example of this because their circumstances allowed their intelligence to be realized.

In the best of circumstances, high intelligence can be exported from an individual and impact the entire culture, region, or even species (like a printing press). The meme can procreate without the individual procreating, and the impact of an individual like Leonardo da Vinci can permeate without him contributing DNA to the human experiment.

Here's my speculation: Maybe a gene that's too smart could possibly be self-defeating, and it won't be replicated.

Natural selection depends on environment, which changes all the time. A gene that is advantageous today might become fatal tomorrow so asking whether a gene is self defeating doesn't maker sense without specifying the environment. Floods, asteroids, droughts, fires, and so on are all random events that constantly change things up so only genes that are foundational to our biochemistry are immune to selective pressure - largely because most mutations in those genes are catastrophic or the genes are very redundant.

Humans have a complex social environment on top of everything else so whether a gene is useful or not might depend on which ideology is in power, the predominant religion of the day, or hygiene etiquette.

You're right, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Are there environments where genes that lend to intelligence do not thrive?

Pol Pot's purges come to mind, where he exterminated intellectuals, the educated, anyone wearing glasses, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if there were pre-industrial revolution tribes/city-states that were wiped out because they became "too smart" - i.e. focusing so much on education that they neglect their military.

Yes. Isnt it also said, that Mensa members (IQ needs to be 130+, if I remember correctly) do not correlate with success in life. It seems that probably conscientinousness is orthogonal to IQ and more important.

I think that joining an organisation which celebrates your (only?) positive feature is possibly indicative of a hidden variable which may correlate inversely with success in life... I'm not sure Mensa are an unbiased sample.

There is something to this: most people (i.e. the majority but not all), when faced with intelligence beyond their own, get excited and interested automatically. This is good for intelligent kids and gives them a fighting chance.

Those positive feelings aren't true of other evolutionary advantages in kids, like when people are faced with sociopathy beyond their own.

I think that a complete understanding of life and consciousness and the nature of reality would cause people to check out of the whole economic and reproductive cycle. What’s the point of doing anything if you’re just a collection of particles whirring around in a universe that doesn’t give a shit about you.

The continuation of the human race more or less depends on people not fully understanding reality and maintaining the illusion of the self.

These sort of simulations, like much evolutionary biology, feel like they ought to come with a '... in mice' warning.

We simulated 300 million years of evolution, using our own model, and proved that evolution happened because of ...

... in simulated mice ...

I'm sure the original paper has the equivalent of that, but yes, pop-science articles should start adding the IN MICE warning for sure. Also to many other categories of research findings, actually

https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice

It's even worse. At least we can compare and contrast mice and humans, but simulating evolution is incredibly arbitrary...

When I read articles like this, it seems to me that they are studying not evolution, nor animals, but computers.

These are really software projects. It is a chunk of the world that software has eaten, without it having much been recognized.

> And, no, dolphins and whales do not fall into the category of less intelligent sea creatures. Both are land mammals that recently (evolutionarily speaking) returned to water.

Maybe, but what about cephalopods? If aquatic seascapes are not conducive to intelligence, how do we explain octopus intelligence?

How does this explain Octopus and a few of the smarter never-on-land species, though?

Still, that explains why amphibians are mostly... Less "smart" than reptiles.

They may not have mentioned octopuses as they live on the seabed which may share similarities to the land they have been describing and encounter the "Goldilocks zone of obstruction and terrain differentiation". Any thoughts?

Sounds like the last part of the book "Born to Run" by Christopher McDougall. How to catch an antelope. Explained by natives. Very worth reading!

What does that mean for a space-faring civilization that can see almost infinitely farther than on land?

The smartest civilisation observes all and doesn't let itself be observed by anything else. Three-Body Problem-esque answer to the Fermi Paradox...

>> the supercomputer simulations for the new study (35 years of calculations on a single PC)...

Was the simulation saved all these years on a floppy disk running on an old 386 PC?

Would have liked more explanation of the quote.

I read it as 'we performed on our supercomputer (AWS?) the same number of calculations as would have taken 35 years on a normal PC'

But yes, even I tried to rewrite that twice and still cannot get the grammar to come out correctly.

Its one way of saying 'CPU year' I suppose.

> Ever wonder how land animals like humans evolved to become smarter than their aquatic ancestors?

I'm pretty sure dolphins are smarter than cows.

> And, no, dolphins and whales do not fall into the category of less intelligent sea creatures. Both are land mammals that recently (evolutionarily speaking) returned to water.

Dolphins are not sea creatures now? Uh, okay.

P.S. No mention of octopodes, wonder why.

Evolutionarily speaking, as was qualified, not really. They're more closely related to deer, pigs, camels and the like than anything else in the sea.

They can't live on land ergo they are sea creatures. ISTM it's a daft claim.

Only if you ignore context. The point is they have an evolutionary history of land-living. Fish don't. Nobody is trying to say they secretly sprout legs and spend most of their time on land.

Being evolved ultimately from fish, we have an evolutionary history of sea-living. Therefore humans are sea creatures by your logic.

No. The argument being made in the article is that living on land provides stimulus for developing intelligence that living in the ocean doesn't. Dolphins and humans have a history of land-living. "Sea creatures," in context, do not.

Maybe it was a poor choice of words, and maybe the argument doesn't work. But it doesn't fall apart simply because dolphins live in the sea.

So Intelligent seagoing mammals evolved their wit on land and kept it when they went aquatic, is how I read what you're saying. However whales have been around for a very long time, so I can't accept that argument. If intelligence was of little use in the sea, it would have died out quite quickly I'd expect. I can't see it being incidentally preserved for 45 million years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cetaceans

Hypothetically, some level of intelligence could still be useful in the ocean despite the ocean not providing sufficient pressure for that intelligence to develop.

Does that sound likely? Can you make a stronger case for or against that proposition?

It's just speculation on my part, assuming the idea put forward by the study is true.

Like if humans were to start living underwater, I don't think there would be evolutionary pressure on us to lose our intelligence.

More speculation: maybe it's not ocean vs. land itself, but the process of moving from one to the other. The smartest ocean-goers have the best chance at thriving on land; the smartest land-goers have the best chance at thriving in the ocean.

Dolphins and whales are even-toed ungulates. They only entered the ocean about 40m years ago.

I do not think "pouring jet fuel on something", meaning to make it go faster, is a legitimate English idiom.

Yeah agreed, it's quite an odd use of language.

We were able to immediately know what they meant, and also know that it didn't look like exactly what they meant. I'd have to read the article to know if language drove brain development, or vice versa.

I didnt know what was meant. I thought they meant it was poison for evolution.

Jet fuel is kerosene, which doesn't flash easily. So this would probably put out any fire. Perhaps that was the idiom they were going for?

Legitimate? Since when were idioms a question of legitimacy?

The only languages which do not change are dead ones. - David Crystal

I suppose it’s more a question of efficacy.

If an idiom obfuscates the intended meaning then it’s not very good. In this case it really does just get in the way because the metaphor doesn’t really make sense...

The colloquial meaning is "pouring something onto a fire that is even more flammable than what was already burning".

Interesting - as I've heard it used regularly in exactly that context, and wouldn't have questioned it otherwise. Then again, I was surprised when someone I knew didn't understand what "poster child" meant.

I just poured jet fuel on my brain an besides the awful smell it does not seem to have a large effect. Maybe it takes a few days, so I will leave it on for a while.

In case you wondered how I got access to my brain, this old tool proved helpful: https://www.catawiki.de/l/14535665-trephine-skull-drill

And yes, this was a joke and I do not recommend trying this at home. Ask your trusted surgeon for advice.

This whole subthread reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiIlJaSDPaA

The idiom “pour/add fuel on/to the fire” means to make something worse. I understood the headline but it caused me to raise my eyebrow. It’s almost a mixed metaphor?

https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/add+fuel+to+the+fire

https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/pour+fuel+on+the+fire

I would have used “turbocharged”, “greatly sped up”, or “significantly accelerated.”

If you’re literally adding fuel to a fire to make it burn hotter/faster, the energy density of jet fuel (basically kerosene) isn’t that much greater than gasoline or many other fuels, but I guess it sounds neat.

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/12184/what-are-...

https://neutrium.net/properties/specific-energy-and-energy-d...

If you really want to get a fire going, use liquid oxygen:

https://youtu.be/sab2Ltm1WcM

Even colloquially x on steroids would work too.

I think you’re right it is a mixed metaphor with mixed attitudes.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jet_fuel

> (slang, uncountable) Strong home-brewed alcoholic drink; moonshine.

I posit that jet fuel is considered very powerful stuff in the general lexicon (even though it's just fancy kerosene.)

> I do not think "pouring jet fuel on something", meaning to make it go faster, is a legitimate English idiom.

IIRC, it is close to a legitimate Chinese idiom ("add oil").

https://zolimacitymag.com/pop-cantonese-word-of-the-month-%E...

It does seem silly. Jet fuel is kerosene, which is also used in oil lamps. It's a lot less volatile than gasoline.

Yes, the irony here is that (depending on the amount), you can easily douse a fire with jet fuel.

The first thing that pops into my head was "Jet fuel can't melt steel brains", which may indicate that I've spent too long on the internet.

Yes, that is a weird one. At least it was language that came from the researcher and not some manic headline writer.

We replaced the title with a more representative phrase from the article.

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