"'Humans overrate curiosity. A monkey trait.'" (Chapter XXI, p. 549) (For full reference, see here.)
Larry Niven's kzinti make the same observation.
Personally, I regard survival not as an end in itself but as a means to increased knowledge and understanding. I value knowledge of distant galaxies for its own sake, not for any practical application, and I appreciated education as an end in itself, not as a means to a career.
Intelligence was naturally selected because it had survival value but we can now value it as such. Organs transcend their origins. Fingers and opposable thumbs that evolved to manipulate the environment can now write poetry and philosophy, play musical instruments and perform scientific experiments. Aesthetic appreciation and scientific curiosity are human traits.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I agree we should not be concerned only with survival or the means of surviving. Once such things has been achieved, we should go on to other and higher matters.
Sean
Evolution has produced full sophont intelligence only once on this planet, in over a billion years of organic evolution. (Granted, tetrapods have only been around for 500 million).
This suggests to me that intelligence of our sort is a fairly low-probability accident. Look at the number of unrelated lines that have evolved flight, or giant size, or saber teeth, or other adaptations.
Full intelligence is a fairly recent event in h. sapiens sapiens; our species is about 300,000 years old, and achieved its full brain size about then, but -behaviorally- modern(*) h. sapiens is less than 100,000 years old, and the emergence of behavioral modernity in the 100K before present 50K before present period seems to be associated with changes in the shape, rather than the volume of the brain.
(Round brains rather than long ones, essentially.)
We're far more intelligent than we need to be to deal with our ancestral hunter-gatherer environment; we were already a very widespread and successful apex predator before that.
My guess is that intelligence evolved to deal with intraspecific social competition -- dealing with each other, rather than with the nonhuman environment.
It then proved to be explosively useful in other aspects, but that was a by-product.
(*) constant symbolic behaviors, very close adaptation to particular environments, rapid changes in material culture.
Abstract curiosity is common in mammals -- I've watched my cats figure out things like how doorknobs work, or puzzle endlessly over what this"showering" thing is -- but we have it in spades. It's one of those generally useful traits; it helps with a whole lot of things.
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