One model to learn them all

Does smarter imply more children survive to reproduce?

Here's my understanding/interpretation - if I get any details wrong, I hope someone will correct me!

Brains are very expensive and, for our body size, we have very large brains; evolution had to build a brain that could operate within the calorie constraints imposed by our ecological niche - presumably a hunter-gatherer niche.

If you graph adult body volume relative to gestation time across the placental mammals, there's a good correlation, but humans are an anomaly; for our body volume we should take more than 9 months. So we are kind of born prematurely - the reason? So our heads can fit through the birth-canal. Significantly bigger brains would have likely entailed altering our walking gate, thus potentially sacrificing our ecological niche (and guaranteed source of those much needed calories!). Most of this was taken from Pinker ([0]).

Bostrom ([1]) brings up another interesting point - anything smarter than us would have probably taken longer to evolve than us. So it might not be inaccurate to think of ourselves as the dumbest species that could build an interplanetary species.

My suspicion is that things much smarter than us are very possible; my reasoning is, it just seems so strange to me that the peak of feasible intelligence just so happens to correspond with what can be fed by a hunter-gatherer diet and fit through a birth-canal which fits into the constraints of an upright primate.

It seems more likely to me that we're a local optimum - we're probably close to the optimal design for something as smart as us, in our ecological niche.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Mind_Works [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dang...

I think there's a simple explanation for this.

Increased head size == greater risk of death in childbirth

Female hips have already evolved to be as large as possible while still being load-bearing.

It would be interesting to see what the wide-spread use of Caesarean sections would do to the human brain, if we weren't all going to be transhuman within a few generations anyway

As far as whether there are diminishing returns to increased intelligence within one individual, I'd say try taking two people with half of Einstein's IQ and asking them to explain General Relativity

And in the variance bias them?

>> My suspicion is that things much smarter than us are very possible; my reasoning is, it just seems so strange to me that the peak of feasible intelligence just so happens to correspond with what can be fed by a hunter-gatherer diet and fit through a birth-canal which fits into the constraints of an upright primate.

I think you're understimating the intelligence required to survive as a hunter-gatherer, individual or species, in a world that keeps wanting to kill you, where the number of things that want to make it easy for you to eat them is exactly 0 (not counting fruit, which is made to be eaten by birds, not humans) and the numer of things that want to eat you is ...very big.

If you think about it, the amount of brainpower needed to survive as a primitive human in the savannah is exactly as much as required to develop modern technology. We got were we are today because our ancestors were smart enough to not be eaten by lions etc.

Of course I'm not saying that smarter things than us aren't possible. There's an element of luck involved in evolution. Maybe we 're not the most powerful intelligence that could have evolved on Earth; but we're certainly the one that did.