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Old 12-13-2005, 03:41 AM
Lestat Lestat is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2005
Posts: 383
Default Re: Intellectual Abundance

<font color="blue"> Selection pressures come at us from all sides. So, besides the obvious 'it was for other uses', such as language, trajectories, large social structure to track, etc, it's possible it's even more frivolous, such as 'quicker wit', or better story teller. </font>

Language, trajectories and tracking social structure were obviously very important to our evolutionary advancement. I can also see how quicker wit and story telling may have played a role. But do you think evolution has a place for frivolousness? And this is really the point of my post...

Yes, we developed our overly large brains for specific reasons and specialized survival purposes. But is the rest just frivolous fluff? Or do we continue to get smarter and integrate new knowledge and intellectual skills in our evolutionary development? We are so far past the next highest species in the food chain, it's a joke. We have long since surpassed the threat from packs of carniverous predators. We have found ways to settle on all corners of the globe. Our biggest fear is man himself. Have we become our own predator? Do we now need to develop intellecutally (build war machines), in order to survive to survive as a species? Is our species looking to segregate? Is religion and/or other belief systems our way of breaking away so that one particular group will survive to higher evolutionary ground?

What other purposes does evolution have in store for all this intelligence?
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