why is intelligence even selected for survival when some many lifeforms do so well without it?
Why is intelligence even selected for survival when some many lifeforms do so well without it?
Nicholas Parker
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Juan Young
Politics. In a social species, there is reproductive value in outsmarting your tribesmates when it comes to grabbing the shared spoils of the tribe (hunted food, mates, social position, etc).
Jace Murphy
Great question OP. I mean you're right, how would intelligent beings ever out-compete beings who simply reproduce at a faster rate, like insects or animals. Why would monkeys that are slightly smarter outcompete those with a much higher sex drive?
I would say it's simply a matter of ecological niches allowing only small quantities of larger, higher level animals so to speak. Only a few can live, and it becomes hard to even live into adulthood and maturity, so you need intelligence
Basically for instance humans need a long childhood to properly form the brain, and this requires parental nurturing, and this disallows the success of parents who don't take care of their kids and instead just have lots, so it creates a feedback loop once this begins where the animals have to continue being more and more intelligent to outcompete the other animals in their similar biological niche due to long infant life stages
Just talking out of my ass
Jordan Kelly
You need it to survive. A lot of more "intelligent" species are just very adapted for hunting, like octopuses or dolphins. It's the relationship between sensing the outside world and hunting that also just happens to create intelligence. This is a huge oversimplification but basically the answer.
Dominic Powell
its a strategy that relies on high-costs upfront in terms of resources
Christopher Collins
Why did they need it to survive though - why did they even evolve when it was easier and more heavily favored to just have tons of mini sponge babbies instead?
Hudson Adams
what about plants?
they live, but they dont think
Nathaniel Reed
>why is intelligence even selected for survival
Is it?
Out of all the millions of species on Earth, most are dumb as shit. Fuck most of them probably don't even have brains. I bet bacteria will be around a lot longer than humanity too.
Tyler Lewis
The assumption lurking under all this is that evolution drives towards a certain end; the best or easiest or most economical/efficient way to do something. This is not the case.
Evolution works with whatever variations show up, selecting for those that are advantageous at that moment. It doesn't matter if X is "the best" choice, if selecting between Y and Z are the variations to be selected between.
Adam Reyes
There is a problem when you talk about intelligence in animals from the start that they take the human intelligence as the max score and they compare their capabilities with animals. I guess as humans survival instinct is a bad ass trait, is you versus nature, but animals may differ a lot in what they can do. This is like the gender retarded stuff.