janw@inmet.UUCP (08/21/87)
[lonetto@phri.UUCP ] >But then I look at many modern humans watching Dynasty, at a to- >tal loss for how to cope, idealizing Ollie North (and even >BELIEVING him), poisoning the water and atmosphere, arguing that >"there's plenty of room for more people" (though aparently there >isn't enough room for the rest of the species on this planet) ...and even making political correctness of opinions the criterion of intelligence... now *that* is really dumb; but see below. >and it seems that the larger part of the >question is indeed "why not smarter?" Perhaps it is because *conformity* is a survival characteristic inside a group. Selecting for it also increases the group's cohe- sion and to this extent makes it stronger. On the other hand, conformity destroys intelligence, causing the group to choose suboptimal strategies against nature and against other groups. Therefore, in intergroup competition, a certain balance between these two characteristics, discipline and intelligence, is selected. This might explain both "why smart" and "why not smarter". Biological and social evolution may well have gone hand in hand, nature selecting between competing groups with certain genetic and cultural characteristics; social factors selecting indivi- duals inside a group. Thus, there would be a two-level selection system, a group being selected for its internal selection methods. The mechanism may not even depend strongly on how much intelligence, or any of its preconditions, is genetically determined. Assuming that biological parents bring the child up, the genetic types and the role models are selected together. Jan Wasilewsky
gallagher@husc4.HARVARD.EDU (paul gallagher) (08/24/87)
A book, perhaps a little out of date, on this subject is R. Lande's Evolution of the Brain and Intelligence (1973). But before one starts making up adaptive stories to explain the origin of any biological feature, it is important to know precisely what are the traits that you are examining and to consider the possibility that a given trait is merely the correlated consequence of selection directed elsewhere. For example, it might be a mistake to regard the human chin as a unitary trait requiring adaptive explanation; it could be regarded instead as a byproduct of the interaction of the alveolar and mandibular growth fields, which would lead to a very different interpretation of its origins (see Stephen J. Gould's Ontogeny and Phylogeny, pp. 381-382). Also, it is important not to confuse cultural adaptation (with heritability imposed by learning) and physiological adaptation (the phenotypic plasticity that permits organisms to change during the course of their development) with the sort of adaptation that arises from the action of selection upon genetic variation. It is also important not to confuse the current utility of a trait with the reasons for its origin. And it is important to remember that even if an adaptive scenario is plausible, it should not be accepted as true without *evidence*. One elegant interpretation of the origin of human intelligence involves neoteny: we are permanently juvenile apes. See Stephen J. Gould's Allometry in primates, with emphasis on scaling and the evolution of the brain. In Approaches to primate paleobiology. Contrib. Primatol. 5, 244-292. Also, see Gould's Ontogeny and Phylogeny. PG