/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.9440208]

why is intelligence even selected for survival when some many lifeforms do so well without it?

[Anonymous No.9440213]

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).

[Anonymous No.9440219]

>>9440208
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

[Anonymous No.9440221]

>>9440208
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.

[Anonymous No.9440222]

>>9440213
its a strategy that relies on high-costs upfront in terms of resources

[Anonymous No.9440224]

>>9440221
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?

[Anonymous No.9440231]

>>9440221
>>9440224
what about plants?

they live, but they dont think

[Anonymous No.9440232]

>>9440208
>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.

[Anonymous No.9440233]

>>9440208
>>9440224
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.

[Anonymous No.9440235]

>>9440221
>>9440224
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.

[Anonymous No.9440247]

>>9440231
>>9440224

They need it to survive because they need it to both find food and avoid becoming food, which was my main point. That's why you see things like plants or filter feeders usually only having a nerve net or completely forgoing any complex brain.

Asking why they even evolved is a super moot question like why did some things stay in the water and some things colonize land? Because something did and then everyone else did after that.

Specifically for the sponge question though it's not always the best to be a sponge. You have to live in an environment with a lot of free floating food.

[Anonymous No.9440276]

>>9440208
You got it backwards..
Beacose so many life-form survive without it, intelligence is rare.
It has advantage in the long run, but considering how energetically inefficient it was in early humans is incredible we actually got to where we are.

[Anonymous No.9440668]

>>9440276
This
Brains cost calories to run and humans take forever to develop enough to fend for themselves.

[Anonymous No.9440712]

>>9440219
You're actually really close to the truth.

In biology, we call the ability to handle a wide variety of environments, and a large resource niche by a property called "plasticity". Basically, it's any adaptation that allows for changing without relying on evolution to fit an environment. Sometimes, plasticity is a pretty simple mechanism, like the ability to shed so you can have periods of the year where you are warmer, and periods where you are colder- this is an adaptation that allows for greater survival in multiple environments. Intelligence, along the same vein, is an adaptation that allows the animal to take in data, and respond accordingly in a more temporal sense.

Think of how neurons typically work, and how we might talk about a worm moving in response to some discomfort like an extreme temperature gradient, or a physical poke. It's not like they're necessarily "thinking", but that their nerves are direct sense -> action units. Even in mammals we have plenty of those- the most classic example being the knee-jerk reflex, where sensory neuron goes straight to an interneuron going straight to the muscle, without going to the brain.

By being able to 'store' signals temporally with an intelligent brain, animals can essentially respond in much more complex ways, based on all of the senses of past and present. Not to delve too deep into epistemology, but it really does work like that with respect to how humans think, act, and know as well. Imagining how a simple intelligence could become more complex over time doesn't seem too difficult if you know how natural selection and evolution work, and from there it's simply a question of what genes and structures are involved. For those, I saw a thread up on the genes of intelligence (though haven't confirmed if it was /pol/bait yet), and there's a good thread on the effort to map neurons called the connectome up right now if anyone's interested in this kind of thing.

[Anonymous No.9440736]

>>9440712
That's cool anon. Topics like this kind of scare me and make me wonder whether free will or the self exists. It seems to me like we're just emergent phenomena of nature, similar to a wave, mountain, blade of grass, tree, or lower animal. Just a part of the universe. Obviously we are part of the universe. Lol this is the type of thing that simultaneously sounds deep but is also kind of obvious and /r/iamverysmart. But damn.

[Anonymous No.9440752]

>>9440208

>why is intelligence even selected for survival when some many lifeforms do so well without it?

Because it's a useful trait to be able to coordinate and manipulate your ecosystem. The problem is that Humans eventually managed to receive to much of it with no other species to challenge said dominance. The most basic primitive human tribes can out perform other species to near extinction if they aren't careful. While the most advance human societies can wipe out entire ecosystems with little thought.

We've long pass the maximum intelligence threshold required by us from nature (at least on earth). Even arbitrary use of fire and recording text breaks natural hierarchies in half in all regions with only disease and weather being to main danger.

At this point selection for intelligence is mostly for

[Anonymous No.9440756]

>>9440752
*At this point selection for intelligence is mostly for ornate purposes.

[Anonymous No.9440759]

>>9440736
Hey man, explore those kinds of thoughts. They can be really scary or depressing, and represents a sort of nihilism that comes from scientific knowledge of the nitty-gritty makeup of life. That doesn't mean it's bad, and often you end the journey with a profound sense of meaning- even if it's the meaning you ascribe life, rather than any inherent meaning.

Striving to know more is always a wonderful thing!

[Anonymous No.9440763]

>>9440736
different anon

look up rubber hand experiment, depersonalization disorder, and if you find that type of stuff interesting read The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger

there's this small article to get a taste:
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26091

[Anonymous No.9440796]

>>9440208
Probably because intelligence wasn't as useful for survival as other traits were. And even if it was, a big brain requires a lot of energy which might be better of used on something else.

Humans could evolve big brains after figuring out how to cook food and get way more energy than they needed

[Anonymous No.9442927]

>>9440222
however, if those costs are paid back by additional successes procreating, the mutation will live on and propagate further

[Anonymous No.9442939]

>>9440208
>Sentience________________________Cows
>[citation needed]

[Anonymous No.9442957]

>>9440233
>at that moment
key part, the lack of adaptability in highly efficient organism (in X niche) dive in extintion if those conditions change significatively and they can't adapt quickly enough, but towards OP question inteligence can (in some degree) turn the tables in that dynamic when the species are able to modify their medium actively to turn more confortable to them

[Anonymous No.9443359]

>>9440208
that's a good question. We dunno lol. Intelligence really is a pretty rare trait.