Re: "It's uncertain whether intelligence has any long term
From: Tim Tyler (tim_at_tt1lock.org)
Date: 07/21/04
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Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2004 15:35:21 +0000 (UTC)
Huck Turner <huckturner@hotmail.com> wrote or quoted:
> Tim Tyler <tim@tt1lock.org> wrote in message news:<cdfcem$hel$1@darwin.ediacara.org>...
> > Huck Turner <huckturner@hotmail.com> wrote or quoted:
> > > William Morse <wdmorse@twcny.rr.com> wrote in message news:<cd96hb$1il3$1@darwin.ediacara.org>...
> > > > huckturner@hotmail.com (Huck Turner) wrote in
> > > > > [...] And in terms of genetic propagation, the more educated
> > > > > you are, the fewer children you are likely to have (something that
> > > > > Darwin himself noticed).
> > > >
> > > > The correct statement is "the fewer children you are likely to raise", at
> > > > least until we have done considerably more research on who are the real
> > > > genetic fathers of children. For women, obviously, this objection does
> > > > not hold.
> > >
> > > I'm not really sure what your point is. Conceiving and raising
> > > children are different matters and it's the former that is relevant
> > > here because Hawking was presumably making a comment about the
> > > heritable aspect of intelligence. If you are a more educated man or
> > > woman, you are likely to have fewer progeny and later in life. This IS
> > > correct and is independent of whether your statement is also correct.
> >
> > Tracking down the number of offspring men have is notoriously difficult.
> >
> > Also - while these are times of relative prosperity, and many of those
> > born survive - conventionally, having lots of children is a sort of
> > defense against their high mortality. Having kids is not enough to
> > increase your chances of becoming an ancestor - the kids themselves
> > have to be viable, and themselves reproduce.
>
> Yes, I'm assuming a correlation between the number of immediate
> ancestors and a longer term genetic contribution - a reasonably safe
> presupposition I would have thought.
In a constant environment, yes. However, I was talking about the
idea that having lots of kids is a defense against hostile environments.
Who will have more long-term genetic success - the east european prince
who has three kids and gives them the best education money can buy - or
an indian peasant, who has ten kids, loses two at birth, has two more die
in childhood accidents, and then dies of a medical problem that
would have been easily treated by modern medicine, leaving the rest
poverty stricken?
I hope you will agree that it is not at all obvious.
> > As far as I am aware there's no evidence that education and/or brains
> > is a handicap - evolutionarily speaking.
> >
> > IMO, the best evidence we have about the adaptive value of intelligence
> > in humans is the steady and fairly continuous increase in skull size
> > over the last 5 million years.
> >
> > We may not know about the long-term fate of the trait - but one thing
> > we can say with some confidence is that bigger-brained humans have
> > systematically out-reproduced their smaller-brained cousins for
> > practically all of the last 5 million years.
>
> Big differences in intelligence are probably an advantage, yes. But
> I'm talking about relatively small differences in levels of
> intelligence within the human population.
>
> It is quite conceivable that there is an optimal level of intelligence
> above which the costs of improvements outweigh the gains. This would
> stop humans evolving towards infinite intelligence levels.
Brain size is certainly under strong selection pressure to decrease
in most organisms - since brain tissue is metabolically expensive to
maintain and support.
However - as the growth of the internet demonstrates - large information
processing networks are definitely in demand and on the rise.
In the short term, human brain size is likely to be subject to divergent
selection - with some individuals winding up with significantly smaller
brains, and other ones with much larger brains. The result will happen
as a result of increasing phenotypic plasticity - and perhaps through the
use of genetic modifications.
However in the long term it does seem likely that technological
information-processing networks are likely to grow faster than
the human brain can manage. Despite our multi-billion year head
start, engineered intelligences seem destined to surpass human
ones in about every way you can imagine in a relatively short
space of time.
That seems bound to create a significant selection pressure
for sucking the human brain out of its natural home between
our ears - and onto exogenous substrates.
In order to compete effectively at the high end, means of creating
physically large biological brains would be needed.
The cesarian section operation has lifted the main develpmental limit on
the size of the human skull at birth - it's now free to explode upwards.
However, scaling the human body upwards rapidly in order to support
large brains might present a few challenges. In the short term, it might
be easiest to build large biological brains by liberating brain tissue
from the human skull completely - providing an artificial body for it -
and maintaing it in a "growth" mode of development for an extended
period.
"Brains in vats" - in other words - though presumably the "vat" would
normally be attached to some sort of large mobile device with an
appropriate set of manipulators.
I'm not sure that plans along these lines will be successfully realised.
More likely machine intelligence will rocket upwards, the human brain
won't change that much in the interim, and fairly soon "wet" brains
and biological bodies will be outflanked in practically every area by
their machine cousins - who will then be in a good position to take
most of the available jobs.
-- __________ |im |yler http://timtyler.org/ tim@tt1lock.org Remove lock to reply.
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