Lecture of the Week: Why are We So Smart?

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If intelligence evolved, why didn't the other homonids prove fit to
survive? Certainly, they were more intelligent than other mammals in
the same ecosystem, which did survive.

More intelligent than field mice, perhaps, but field mice reproduce at
a higher rate. More intelligent than gazelles, perhaps, but gazelles
are much faster.
and neither field mice nor gazelles are exactly "stupid".

Fossil evidence indicates that non-Homo Sapien homonids existed in the
past, which certainly suffered from the same short comings as modern
Homo Sapiens (slow walking speed and low reproductive rates) but
probably were not as intelligent. They were competing against Homo
Sapiens.

There should be more homonids,
if intelligence evolved as a survival feature. Since there aren't, it
is ridiculous to imply that homonid intelligence has anything to do
with evolution or survival.


Humans are proliferating in the modern world, in an environment (mostly
of our own creation) where thousands of other species are presently
going extinct. How can you argue that intelligence, and the collective
form of living it enables, hasn't been a boon to individual chances for
survival and reproduction?

Intelligence exists, but so does Athelete's Foot... no one is seriously
contending that Athelete's Foot made human's more fit to survive, but
it follows the same absence of logic, you're using for intelligence.

You seem to misunderstanding the TOE entirely. Athlete's foot is
fungus, with its own genome well suited for its own survival. It cares
not what its effect on humans will be.

The truth is that intelligence must be incidental to survival,
otherwise the surviving species would be more on a par with homonids
than intelligently inferior to us.


You pretend that there is only one niche in the ecosystem, and that
said niche can only be filled by a slow, upright walking, highly
intelligent mammal with an opposable thumb, which reproduces at a
maximum rate of only about one child every two years during the adult
phase of the life cycle.

Clearly that isn't true.

Dave


JTG 9/18/06