Posted by
Jon on Tuesday, May 06, 2008 3:55:24 PM
There's an
interesting article in the New York Times (HT
Instapundit) on intelligence. In essence, it says that intelligence is not an adaptive trait, all the time. Only some environments encourage the adaption of intelligence. That makes sense. Bertrand Russels said, "So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence. ", which is, of course, true because the Bible prefers to praise wisdom. And, in looking this up, I came across this from Arthur C. Clarke, "It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value." So, this isn't really news.
What I found odd was this quote from the article:
The benefits of learning must have been enormous for evolution to have overcome those costs, Dr. Kawecki argues. For many animals, learning mainly offers a benefit in finding food or a mate. But humans also live in complex societies where learning has benefits, as well.
“If you’re using your intelligence to outsmart your group, then there’s an arms race,” Dr. Kawecki said. “So there’s no absolute optimal level. You just have to be smarter than the others.”
First of all, my IQ is fairly high and I can speak to the fact that intelligence is basically no benefit to natural selection within the species. It's alienating and actually slows down social development except in cities, where the company of compatible people is still a constant, active pursuit. But, the point is that Dr. Kawecki makes the mistake of viewing other species from an external vantage point and his own from an internal vantage point.
Humans consume in what computer science calls a "greedy algorithm". By consuming all resources available to us as individuals, but doing so in the company of other humans, we are actually forced to prioritize our consumption in accordance with others. That's what the monetary system is: a way to communicate individual priorities across the wider society. That's why capitalism works in human societies; by competing internally, we make highly efficient choices for the global allocation of resources. As I mention in a
previous post, most animals, like wolves, don't do that.
This is why I believe that humans are actually a hive species, albeit a complex hive, but not with the negative connotations that normally come with the word "hive" (there's more to this hypothesis; this is only part). On the one hand, the Right often accuses the Left that Socialism turns everyone into faceless drones with no individuality, like a hive. On the other, the Left often accuses the same thing of the Right, for the same reason. The problem is that hives are highly individualistic. In ant colonies, one is the queen (and she isn't in command), some are drones, and some are workers. Some workers will explore the surrounding territory and find new food, laying trails for other workers to follow, and others simply following the trail to collect the food and return it to the colony. The larger point is that
there is no central authority, not even the queen. It is the result of what is called
manifest behavior, or
emergent behavior.
The Once and Future King to the contrary, the queen does not telepathically control anyone. This means that the appearance that the ants are force-fit into their roles is incorrect; the ants find their personal role based on what they are; they are not shaped physically by their place in society. This gives the appearance that they were custom made for the role because
the role that they made for themselves fits them perfectly.
This is the same illusion that plagues the Left when looking at corporations. They assume that it is a sterile place because everyone has their role in the company. But, the role is defined by the people that have filled it, not the other way around. Some are accountants, some engineers, etc. And one of the reasons that Socialism doesn't work is that it does the opposite; it force-fits a person into a predefined role. So, the Right is wrong that Socialism is like a hive; it's like the negative and false vision of a hive. And the Left is wrong that Capitalism is bad; it's like the true vision of a hive, which is pretty good.
So, human societies, as a whole, benefit, not from everyone competing to be the most intelligent against other humans without an "absolute optimal level", but rather from the existence of abnormally intelligent humans benefiting the "hive" as a whole (the analog, I should mention, isn't a city or even a state; it's a trading block).