Intellectual Abundance

[purnell]

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We are so far past the next highest species in the food chain, it's a joke.

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Sorry to digress from the original topic, but this has been bugging me for a while. What do you mean by the "highest species in the food chain"? Or, put another way, what's eating you right now?

[pzhon]

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intelligence is highly correlated with "fitness".

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Well, this kind of throws my whole theorum of full figured blonde girls out the window. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img] (sorry, I couldn't resist).

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An intelligent person who finds you "fit" is more likely to successfully convince you that you have found a full-figured blonde girl, even if the person is actually middle-aged, portly, and balding.

[baumer]

Humanity is the universe trying to understand itself.

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C'mon! We could get by on just a little over half as much intelligence that the average gibbon possesses.

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I doubt it. The world could not support the population without the aid of human intelligence. Diseases, hunger, etc. would simply kill us off and we would dwindle down to a few hundred million people if that. Seems like we need all the intelligence we can get.

That said, I grant you that the average person never faces intellectual challenges that affect our species' survival. However, some of us do, and the genes for this person have to come from somewhere. So the genes are spread throughout the population, from which certain individuals are born who do take on these issues. In short, we need a large mass of genes to produce the few of us who do take on these issues.

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What evolutionary purpose is served by our being intelligent enough to send one of our own to the moon?

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If humanity does not learn to colonize other worlds, it will certainly perish. Maybe not tomorrow, but in the context of billions of years its inevitable. Even if we attain a balance of resources, what about things like astroids, gamma outbursts, the fact that the Earth's oceans will eventually evaporate away, etc.

[Kurn, son of Mogh]

What do we gain by having the intelligence to invent and partake in games like chess, or to calculate interplanetary distances, gravitional forces, to understand quantum mechanics, etc.,etc.? Why such an excess in potency of our main survival skill? Does anyone have any guesses?

In "The Age of Spritual Machines:, Kurzweil suggests that by the middle of this century we will have attained the ability to control the direction of our own evolution.

"and the evening and the morning was the eighth day" [img]/images/graemlins/cool.gif[/img]

[siegfriedandroy]

nice post lestat

[Darryl_P]

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

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I think it's just a big experiment, the outcome of which is not known yet. Dinosaurs represented the experiment of whether size and strength were the most important. Their eventual plight showed that the answer was "no". Now the grand jury in the sky, be it God, Mother Nature or whatever, is deliberating on whether extreme intelligence will be shown to be the ulitimate asset. So far it seems like it might be, but there are some areas of doubt.

We seem to be lacking overall purpose. Mere survival is trivially easy to accomplish while higher-level goals cannot be agreed upon. We have some duking out amongst ourselves to do before we can embark on the important mission of what's best for the human race.

Probably a major event or two that will serve to control the growth of (or maybe even reduce) the population of humans will be the necessary first step. The next step will depend on how the first step pans out.

[baumer]

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In "The Age of Spritual Machines:, Kurzweil suggests that by the middle of this century we will have attained the ability to control the direction of our own evolution.

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By "our own evolution", do you mean humanity's cumulative evolution? Or evolution on an individual basis?

The telescoping nature of technological development is squeezing more and more advancement into smaller and smaller periods of time.
Soon we will be able to pick and choose these advancements to meet certain goals, much like a tech-tree for Real-Time strategy games, or even like researching things in X-COM.

Hell, we're already doing that, but our vision into the future is not all that clear.

[Kurn, son of Mogh]

If you read the book you'd know that he believes that by the end of this century cybernetic enhancements to humans will be commonplace, enabling for example the ability to learn a language by a direct software download to the brain. Also, nano-technology will create the ability for humans to direct genetic change within themselves. This genetic change can be passed on so it's obviously macro in the evolutionary sense. Once we learn to manipulate our own genetic code, we can become whatever we must become to survive.

[imported_luckyme]

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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?

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If somewhere in our evolutionary history we started 'noticing' ( at the gene level, not intellectually) that smarter people left more offspring, then sexual selection will do the peacocks tail trick and start selecting for evidence of intelligence rather than the direct benefits of that intelligence.

That leads to an advantage to people that exhibit intelligence in a easily noticed way. Some (but only some) of the attraction of younger women to successful-seeming older men may be attributed to this factor.
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we developed our overly large brains for specific reasons and specialized survival purposes.

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

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I hope that's all just rhetorical. Future purpose is one thing that evolution does not factor in. How could it. Even current 'purpose' is a unhelpful way of looking at current features. Features aren't evolved 'for'.