
Complex landscapes helped land animals evolve higher intelligence: study - dnetesn
https://phys.org/news/2020-06-savanna-like-landscapes-jet-fuel-brain.html
======
Timpy
Is there a level cap for fish intelligence where an individual fish won't gain
any more benefit from increased intelligence? Being the smartest fish may not
help you as much as swimming with the pack would help you.

Are humans the same way? I feel like human intelligence is just on the verge
of "knowing thyself" in a much bigger way. There are plenty of examples of
super-intelligent people that can have a global platform now thanks to
modernity, but until 100 years ago they may have suffered in their
communities. How many would-be geniuses died without procreating because their
brains were wired differently and it happened that any use for skills in which
they excelled were not available to them at the time? You can't be the next
Einstein if you died in the Steppes of Asia in 1292.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Being the smartest person in the room almost always has advantages.

Da Vinci was offered several times the opportunity to procreate (I think even
his brother's wife) just to grab some of that DNA.

Probably Ramanujan is the most famous example we can point to - whilst not
13th C steppes, rural Victorian India is not a hotbed of education, yet people
around him recognized his genius (at least relative to them) and gave him what
opportunity they could. (No idea about the offers of sex however)

Genius usually will out. For a fair society we need to worry about the rest of
us. For a technologically prosperous society we need to ensure the few
geniuses get a good education.

Luckily for us, we don't know where the geniuses will be born, so we need to
build a fair society, and then we will get the technological advances for free
- so glad that's solved.

~~~
varjag
survivorship bias

~~~
Timpy
You're right this is survivorship bias, but I think it also illustrates that
my premise is unfalsifiable. I'll try to restate it, keep in mind we are
talking about evolution:

There must have been people throughout history who where of such high
intelligence that it impeded their ability to procreate, while their
circumstances didn't allow their exceptional abilities to be realized, and
they died in obscurity. High profile, high intelligence historical figures
cannot be an example of this because their circumstances allowed their
intelligence to be realized.

In the best of circumstances, high intelligence can be exported from an
individual and impact the entire culture, region, or even species (like a
printing press). The meme can procreate without the individual procreating,
and the impact of an individual like Leonardo da Vinci can permeate without
him contributing DNA to the human experiment.

Here's my speculation: Maybe a gene that's too smart could possibly be self-
defeating, and it won't be replicated.

~~~
akiselev
Natural selection depends on environment, which changes all the time. A gene
that is advantageous today might become fatal tomorrow so asking whether a
gene is self defeating doesn't maker sense without specifying the environment.
Floods, asteroids, droughts, fires, and so on are all random events that
constantly change things up so only genes that are foundational to our
biochemistry are immune to selective pressure - largely because most mutations
in those genes are catastrophic or the genes are very redundant.

Humans have a complex social environment on top of everything else so whether
a gene is useful or not might depend on which ideology is in power, the
predominant religion of the day, or hygiene etiquette.

~~~
Timpy
You're right, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Are there environments
where genes that lend to intelligence do not thrive?

~~~
akiselev
Pol Pot's purges come to mind, where he exterminated intellectuals, the
educated, anyone wearing glasses, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if there were
pre-industrial revolution tribes/city-states that were wiped out because they
became "too smart" \- i.e. focusing so much on education that they neglect
their military.

------
lifeisstillgood
These sort of simulations, like much evolutionary biology, feel like they
ought to come with a '... in mice' warning.

We simulated 300 million years of evolution, using our own model, and proved
that evolution happened because of ...

... in simulated mice ...

~~~
eeZah7Ux
It's even worse. At least we can compare and contrast mice and humans, but
simulating evolution is incredibly arbitrary...

~~~
badcede
When I read articles like this, it seems to me that they are studying not
evolution, nor animals, but computers.

These are really software projects. It is an entire chunk of the world that
software has eaten, without it having much been recognized.

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dcolkitt
> And, no, dolphins and whales do not fall into the category of less
> intelligent sea creatures. Both are land mammals that recently
> (evolutionarily speaking) returned to water.

Maybe, but what about cephalopods? If aquatic seascapes are not conducive to
intelligence, how do we explain octopus intelligence?

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inawarminister
How does this explain Octopus and a few of the smarter never-on-land species,
though?

Still, that explains why amphibians are mostly... Less "smart" than reptiles.

~~~
johnisgood
They may not have mentioned octopuses as they live on the seabed which may
share similarities to the land they have been describing and encounter the
"Goldilocks zone of obstruction and terrain differentiation". Any thoughts?

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sedlich
Sounds like the last part of the book "Born to Run" by Christopher McDougall.
How to catch an antelope. Explained by natives. Very worth reading!

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douglaswlance
What does that mean for a space-faring civilization that can see almost
infinitely farther than on land?

~~~
inawarminister
The smartest civilisation observes all and doesn't let itself be observed by
anything else. Three-Body Problem-esque answer to the Fermi Paradox...

------
drtillberg
>> the supercomputer simulations for the new study (35 years of calculations
on a single PC)...

Was the simulation saved all these years on a floppy disk running on an old
386 PC?

Would have liked more explanation of the quote.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
I read it as 'we performed on our supercomputer (AWS?) the same number of
calculations as would have taken 35 years on a normal PC'

But yes, even I tried to rewrite that twice and still cannot get the grammar
to come out correctly.

------
otabdeveloper4
> Ever wonder how land animals like humans evolved to become smarter than
> their aquatic ancestors?

I'm pretty sure dolphins are smarter than cows.

> And, no, dolphins and whales do not fall into the category of less
> intelligent sea creatures. Both are land mammals that recently
> (evolutionarily speaking) returned to water.

Dolphins are not sea creatures now? Uh, okay.

P.S. No mention of octopodes, wonder why.

~~~
phonypc
Evolutionarily speaking, as was qualified, not really. They're more closely
related to deer, pigs, camels and the like than anything else in the sea.

~~~
throwaway_pdp09
They can't live on land ergo they are sea creatures. ISTM it's a daft claim.

~~~
phonypc
Only if you ignore context. The point is they have an evolutionary history of
land-living. Fish don't. Nobody is trying to say they secretly sprout legs and
spend most of their time on land.

~~~
throwaway_pdp09
Being evolved ultimately from fish, we have an evolutionary history of sea-
living. Therefore humans are sea creatures by your logic.

~~~
phonypc
No. The argument being made in the article is that living on land provides
stimulus for developing intelligence that living in the ocean doesn't.
Dolphins and humans have a history of land-living. "Sea creatures," in
context, do not.

Maybe it was a poor choice of words, and maybe the argument doesn't work. But
it doesn't fall apart simply because dolphins live in the sea.

~~~
throwaway_pdp09
So Intelligent seagoing mammals evolved their wit on land and kept it when
they went aquatic, is how I read what you're saying. However whales have been
around for a very long time, so I can't accept that argument. If intelligence
was of little use in the sea, it would have died out quite quickly I'd expect.
I can't see it being incidentally preserved for 45 million years
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cetaceans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cetaceans)

~~~
phonypc
Hypothetically, some level of intelligence could still be useful in the ocean
despite the ocean not providing sufficient pressure for that intelligence to
develop.

~~~
throwaway_pdp09
Does that sound likely? Can you make a stronger case for or against that
proposition?

~~~
phonypc
It's just speculation on my part, assuming the idea put forward by the study
is true.

Like if humans were to start living underwater, I don't think there would be
evolutionary pressure on us to lose our intelligence.

More speculation: maybe it's not ocean vs. land itself, but the process of
moving from one to the other. The smartest ocean-goers have the best chance at
thriving on land; the smartest land-goers have the best chance at thriving in
the ocean.

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conistonwater
I do not think "pouring jet fuel on something", meaning to make it go faster,
is a legitimate English idiom.

~~~
js2
The idiom “pour/add fuel on/to the fire” means to make something worse. I
understood the headline but it caused me to raise my eyebrow. It’s almost a
mixed metaphor?

[https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/add+fuel+to+the+fire](https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/add+fuel+to+the+fire)

[https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/pour+fuel+on+the+fire](https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/pour+fuel+on+the+fire)

I would have used “turbocharged”, “greatly sped up”, or “significantly
accelerated.”

If you’re literally adding fuel to a fire to make it burn hotter/faster, the
energy density of jet fuel (basically kerosene) isn’t that much greater than
gasoline or many other fuels, but I guess it sounds neat.

[https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/12184/what-
are-...](https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/12184/what-are-the-
differences-between-fuel-types-comparing-with-vehicles)

[https://neutrium.net/properties/specific-energy-and-
energy-d...](https://neutrium.net/properties/specific-energy-and-energy-
density-of-fuels/)

If you really want to get a fire going, use liquid oxygen:

[https://youtu.be/sab2Ltm1WcM](https://youtu.be/sab2Ltm1WcM)

~~~
catalogia
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jet_fuel](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jet_fuel)

> (slang, uncountable) Strong home-brewed alcoholic drink; moonshine.

I posit that jet fuel is considered very powerful stuff in the general lexicon
(even though it's just fancy kerosene.)

