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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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This assumes that IQ is correlated with energy expenditure of the brain, which is not obvious. Especially when we can easily observe that in times where energy is not of concern, high IQ is negatively correlated with fertility.

You extrapolate this correlation between IQ and brain calory expenditure from the fact that human brains are comparatively more energy intensive. But the difference in intelligence between an ape and a human is orders of magnitude larger than between the smartest and dumbest human currently alive. It is entirely plausible that our increased cost is mostly from qualitative difference that sets us apart from animals, not by the microoptimizations that distinguish humans from each other.

But even this relationship between intelligence and metabolic cost of the brain is not as straightforward as is popularly assumed, some animals which are much dumber than us devote a similar percentage of their total energy expenditure to their brains. Excerpt from the article:

Even the tiny quarter-pound pygmy marmoset, the world’s smallest monkey, devotes as much of its body energy to the brain as we do. Photo by Max Pixel.

For many other animals, it holds true though. That said, I can think of an alternative explanation why we devote so much energy to our brain: Maybe this isn't a tradeoff between intelligence and strength, instead the reason is that enough intelligence makes muscles partially redundant, allowing weak humans to outcompete strong humans at a certain IQ level. At this point it's not about feasibility of acquiring the necessary resources, just intra-species competition.

Of course this would raise the question why humans are the only animal on earth that became this intelligent, since the expensive brain-capabilities theory wouldn't explain it anymore. Maybe the path towards human-level cognition is not straight up the fitness curve and requires some unsusual environment to make it that way, like the Fischerian Runaway you mentioned. I have trouble to imagine other costs that higher intelligence would impose besides energy, maybe it takes longer for animals to mature, but this seems far fetched. Maybe intelligence isn't that useful, especially if you don't have the appendages to use tools. It didn't seem to help humanity very much until we discovered some key technologies a few hundred thousands years later until it really started to pay off.