From: Ken Clements (Ken@InnovationOnDmnd.com)
Date: Wed Oct 13 1999 - 16:29:08 MDT
Cynthia wrote:
> Ken Clements wrote:
>
> > Whatever intelligence that has been produced by evolution has come about as an
> > accidental by-product of what it *does* select. And if you want to understand
> > what it does select, just picture the Beatles surrounded by 10 thousand,
> > screaming 13 year old girls, each of whom wants to have one of those boy's baby.
>
> Ken, don't you think that most of the Beetles had a higher IQ than most of the
> screaming fans? Women might not be holding out for geniuses. But they do want men
> who are slightly smarter than themselves.
I think it is important for those who propose to change the future of human
development to understand how we got to this point. It has been observed that given a
species that has sex, and has developed in its environment to the point where
difficulty to survive is low, it is possible (perhaps inevitable) that reproductive
opportunity pressure will lead to arbitrary feature enhancement runaway situations.
In these situations evolution selects for whatever constitutes being "sexy." It is
just a self propagating pattern.
The following is from Matt Ridley's book _The Red Queen: sex and the evolution of
human nature_
>So far this book is taken only a few, sideways glances at human beings. This is
deliberate. The principles I have been trying to establish are better illustrated by
aphids, dandelions, slime molds, fruit flies, peacocks, and elephants seals then they
are by one peculiar ape. But this peculiar ape is not immune to those principles.
Human beings are a product of evolution as much as any slime mold, and the revolution
of the last two decades in the way scientists now think about evolution has immense
implications for mankind as well. To summarize the argument so far, evolution is more
about reproduction of the fittest then survival of the fittest; every creature on
earth is a product of the series of historical battles between parasites and hosts,
between genes and other genes, between members of the same species, between members of
one gender in competition for members of the other gender. Those battles include the
psychological ones, to manipulate and exploit other members of the species; they are
never won, for success in one generation only ensures that the foes of the next
generation are fitter to fight harder. Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster
towards a finish line that is merely the start of the next race.
Then there is this piece from Richard Dawkins in _Unweaving the Rainbow_
>Evolutionary co-adaptation does not necessarily have the additional explosive
property of being self-feeding. There's no reason to suppose that, in the evolution
of our spider-mimicking fly, the co-adaptation of spider shape and spider behavior was
explosive. In order to do to be so, it is necessary that the initial resemblance, say
a slight anatomical similarity to a spider, set up and increased pressure to mimic the
spider's behavior. This in turn fed and even stronger pressure to mimic the spider
shape, and so on. But, as I say, there is no reason to think it happened like this:
no reason to suppose that the pressure was self-feeding and therefore increasing as it
shuttled back and forth. As I explained in _The Blind Watch Maker_, it is possible
that the evolution of bird of paradise tales, peacock fans and other extravagant
ornaments by sexual selection is genuinely self-feeding and explosive. Here, the
principal of 'the more you have, the more you get' may really apply.
>In the case of the evolution of the human brain, I suspect we are looking for
something explosive, self-feeding, like a chain reaction of the atomic bomb or the
evolution of a bird of paradise tale, rather than the spider-mimicking fly. The
appeal of this idea is its power to explain why, among a set of African ape species
with chimpanzee-size brains, one suddenly raced ahead of the others for no very
obvious reason. It is it is as though a random event nudged the hominid brain over a
threshold, something equivalent to a 'critical mass', and then the process took off
explosively, because it was self-feeding.
---- The point is that evolution selected humans for sexy behavior, whatever that was at the particular time and place. I am sure some of what this is for people today is not the same as what is was 200 thousand years ago, although I suspect a core set of features are. Intelligence increases in so far as it is helpful to being sexy (helps you do art and poetry, put on a show, best your peers, sink your rivals, etc.). As you have pointed out, having too much intelligence tends to run at cross purposes to evolution's reproductive imperative (in the short haul), and is not selected for the big fat middle of the bell curve. Intelligence cannot be a direct selection criterion of evolution, because if it were, the organism would quickly evolve to see the hand of evolution, and do something else. That is the position where some of us now find ourselves. The intelligence and information (memes), that have evolved as a by-product of being sexy, has extended the leading edge of the curve to the point of seeing the hand of evolution, (except in Kansas) and choosing to do something else. What shall we choose? -Ken
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