So The Red Queen ends up basically as one long essay, with Ridley advancing his hypothesis that human intelligence -- the primary factor that makes us us -- is mostly a result of sexual selection: Humans are smart today because our ancestors thought people with big brains were charming and sexy. Early hominids chose to mate disproportionately with especially smart hominids wielding a lot of evolutionary pressure to make the species smarter.
He starts out his conclusive chapter by disqualifying other theories about the roots of human intelligence:
'Man the toolmaker' - Humans needed to be smart so as to invent all these wonderful tools.
Response - This theory is poor because humans brains started growing quickly about 3M years ago while human tools exploded in complexity only about 200k years ago; 2M years ago, for instance, our tools were not more complicated than those of australopithecus.
'Man the hunter' - Humans, unlike their ancestors and other apes, eat a lot of meat; they needed bigger brains to develop better hunting strategies and memories.
Response - No go, because hunting doesn't actually require much intelligence. Lions use keen hunting strategies, some birds can remember where resources are better than us, and other apes can do pretty impressive gathering stuff.
Stephen Jay Gould's accidental hypothesis - Humans grew intelligent as a by-product of becoming 'baby apes'; humans exhibit signs of 'neoteny', which means that we have what biologically looks like an extremely extended childhood compared to apes, and we develop very slowly. Evidence: lack of hair, teeth grow in late, 'gestation' outside the womb, small jaw, head grows for long time, skinny limbs, etc. The upshot of all this is that our brain coincidentally becomes huge -- it is what Gould calls a 'spandrel' -- and can then be used for all of these useful things that human brains are good for, like language. [Unfortunately, Ridley doesn't recap whether Gould explains a mechanism for the development of neoteny -- does he think neoteny arrived through sexual selection, or some natural adaptive mechanism?]
Response - This ignores the well-established theory put forward by Chomsky that there are fundamental linguistic features inherent in all humans; language is clearly not an accident in humans because there are complicated genetic elements involved with it.
Machiavellian hypothesis - Humans use their big brains to better manipulate other people to their own advantages.
Response - Baboons, like some other animals, manipulate their associates. If human received such a Machiavellian advantage from big brains, wouldn't baboons have also developed bigger, more devious brains?
Thinkness response:
The funny thing about Ridley's theory is that I think he knows what's mostly wrong with it, but he greatly minimizes the negative evidence, at points trying to sweep away some of it by losing it in little parenthetical comments:
'True, we learn a lot more than bats and cuckoos do. We learn mathematics and vocabulary of tens of thousands of words and what people's characters are like. But this is because we have instincts to learn these things (with the possible exception of mathematics), not because we have fewer instincts than bats or cuckoos.'
'The only way, [Miller] suggests, that sufficient evolutionary pressure could suddenly and capriciously be sustained in any species to enlarge an organ far beyond its normal size is sexual selection. "Just as the peahen is satisfied with nothing less than a visually brilliant display of peacock plumage, I postulate that hominid males and females became satisfied with nothign less than psychologically brilliant, fascinating, articulate, entertaining companions." Miller's use of the peacock is deliberate. Wherever else in the animal kingdom we find greatly exaggerated and enlarged ornaments, we have been able to explain them by the runaway, sexy-son, Fisher effect of intense sexual selection (or the equally powerful Good-genes effect, as described in chapter 5).'
This second parenthetical note is quite revealing. Here he says that early humans might have thought big brains were sexy because they were actually advantageous in surviving. Chapter 5 revolves around the big dispute between those who think sexual selection is driven by survival-enhancing traits, and those who think it is driven by random 'despotic fashions' that take off because they do -- animals play into the fashion because they want their offspring to be fashionable and reproductively successful, thereby strengthening the fashion. He ends the chapter with a pretty reasonable synthesis of the two views, essentially concluding that fashion backed up by survival advantages is a stronger, longer-lived effect.
So after making this allowance that perhaps human intelligence is evolutionarily advantageous Ridley decides not to go further into it. He skirts the issue of importance of culture to humans by saying that yes, we learn more than other animals, but we also have more instincts [to learn more], so it's a wash. Hogwash! Yes, we have more instincts to learn more than other animals, but we learn orders of magnitude more than they do. Fundamentally, it's clear that instincts to learn are quite different than instincts to act -- humans are strongly programmed, true: programmed, fundamentally, to pick up information and use it in their lives.
While it is doubtless true that instinct is largely responsible for the fact that people have culture, it is inescapable that a great part of human success is the power of what we learn. The miraculous thing about it, which he inaccurately deemphasizes, is that we learn a lot of things at a high level of abstraction. This gives us both a great facility to go in depth into learning -- our Machiavellian skills far surpass the baboon's -- and maybe more importantly, the potential to learn an endless amount of different things.
He points out that various animals can do many of the individual things that people can do. But only humans have the potential to do an enormous amount of different mental tasks, because we can think abstractly about various situations. Prehistoric people figured out how to ice fish in the Arctic, gather tubers in the savanna, pick fruit in the forest, etc. Our language structure is largely natural, but along with the power to fill that instinct with knowledge comes the power to wield abstract thought in any direction. I could go on like this forever, poorly explaining the value of abstract thought, but I'll stop here until I figure out how to do it better.
You can ping this entry by using http://www.mindtangle.net/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/580 .
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I agree that he knows he is incorrect; it also frightens him that the female mind is so complicated. Men like him want simple theories of human dynamics, yet as scientists embrace more complicated theories like relativity and chaos. Why should the female mind and inclinations toward sexuality be any less complicated than scientific theories? I do believe that unfortunately males have difficulty with this concept because sexuality is more primitive for them even for the higher ordered males. For the record I am a very heterosexual female; because men like to make complicated women lesbians- I'll clarify only for theoretical purposes.
I agree that he knows he is incorrect; it also frightens him that the female mind is so complicated. Men like him want simple theories of human dynamics, yet as scientists embrace more complicated theories like relativity and chaos. Why should the female mind and inclinations toward sexuality be any less complicated than scientific theories? I do believe that unfortunately males have difficulty with this concept because sexuality is more primitive for them even for the higher ordered males. For the record I am a very heterosexual female; because men like to make complicated women lesbians- I'll clarify only for theoretical purposes.
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