The writer of the following piece may have suppressed some "facts" in order to make his thesis seem stronger.
Two examples: It seems obvious he should have addressed the fact that because of the technologies developed by human intelligence many more babies than in the past now survive birth and their early years . Similar products of intelligence have now made the average life span far longer than it was in the past. I can think of few better "adapting" advantages for a species than increasing survival rate, and extending lifetimes. I doubt the writer can cite one "dumb" species that has done this -- especially in the short a time hman intelligence has been at work. One might say increasing human litter-sizes would have been good for the species, but, through intelligence, we have recognized the dangers of overcrowding and have devised ways to prevent it -- concurrently with our devising ways to ways to make "crowding" less dangerous. But maybe the writer didn't suppress such observations. He may have just lacked the intelligence to see them. Editorial Notebook The Cost of Smarts By VERLYN KLINKENBORG Published: May 7, 2008 Research on animal intelligence always makes me wonder just how smart humans are. Consider the fruit-fly experiments described in Carl Zimmer's piece in the Science Times on Tuesday. Fruit flies who were taught to be smarter than the average fruit fly tended to live shorter lives. This suggests that dimmer bulbs burn longer, that there is an advantage in not being too terrifically bright.Intelligence, it turns out, is a high-priced option. It takes more upkeep, burns more fuel and is slow off the starting line because it depends on learning - a gradual process - instead of instinct. Plenty of other species are able to learn, and one of the things they've apparently learned is when to stop. Is there an adaptive value to limited intelligence? That's the question behind this new research. I like it. Instead of casting a wistful glance backward at all the species we've left in the dust I.Q.-wise, it implicitly asks what the real costs of our own intelligence might be. This is on the mind of every animal I've ever met. Every chicken that looks at you sideways - which is how they all look at you - is really saying what Thoreau said less succinctly: you are endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself. Thoreau himself would not dispute that he was hoping to recover the chicken's point of view. He went to Walden Pond b to remember well his ignorance.b Research on animal intelligence also makes me wonder what experiments animals would perform on humans if they had the chance. Every cat with an owner, for instance, is running a small-scale study in operant conditioning. I believe that if animals ran the labs, they would test us to determine the limits of our patience, our faithfulness, our memory for terrain. They would try to decide what intelligence in humans is really for, not merely how much of it there is. Above all, they would hope to study a fundamental question: Are humans actually aware of the world they live in? So far the results are inconclusive. VERLYN KLINKENBORG ************** Wondering what's for Dinner Tonight? Get new twists on family favorites at AOL Food. (http://food.aol.com/dinner-tonight?NCID=aolfod00030000000001)
