"Dr. Kawecki suspects that each species evolves until it reaches an equilibrium between the costs and benefits of learning. His experiments demonstrate that flies have the genetic potential to become significantly smarter in the wild. But only under his lab conditions does evolution actually move in that direction. In nature, any improvement in learning would cost too much." NYT

__________________
"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Contrary to the popular misconception, evolution is the survival of the "fit enough". In this case, it's survival of the "smart enough"!

__________________
Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

It is common to suppose that if we can identify a change that would increase fitness, then evolution will make it happen. Cost/benefit trade-offs, although important, are not the only impediment. You also need (a) the opportunity (which is why apes, having entirely lost their 5th appendage, are unlikely now to evolve a prehensile tail) and (b) the ability to benefit sufficiently from an achievable incremental change (which is why seals beaching on predator-free islands have so far failed to evolve into land predators - they have some land locomotion already, but somewhat improving it won't be sufficient to make any material improvement to their land predation potential, they'd need a large improvement to do that).

Fitness and cost/benefit is always relative to the conditions, which includes who else is out there. Since that is always changing, to say something evolves "until" needs to be carefully interpreted. The parasite/host evolution battle seems to proceed perpetually.

So maybe flies don't learn more in the wild because they don't have the opportunity. Though probably the author has considered this possibility and discarded. Nonetheless it can be real case, at least in theory. For example India's achievement in sport is very poor in comparison to the rest of the world, though one would think the possibilities just as lucrative for one who did succeed, but on the whole its population just doesn't get the opportunity.

Another interesting analogy comes from the neural network programmes that play games like backgammon. These programmes learn how to play the game well (better than humans, in the case of backgammon) by playing it lots of times and seeing what happens, and thereby improving their situation analysis algorithm. But what happens is that they can fail to encounter the opportunity to learn certain things, unless they are forced to learn. For example, if they take an early erroneous view from learning so far that certain situations are bad, this can act as an impediment every to getting into those situations - you won't get their at random unless you cooperate. But in fact some of those situations are good. What has happened is that we have had to "tutor" these programmes by forcing them into those situations, and then they learn that they are good.

Animals with parental care probably have more opportunity to learn - their young can be forced into the learning situation that they wouldn't encounter on their own.

well, there are a lot of "local maxima" on the evolution phase space hypersurface. It takes catastrophes, like the K/T meteorite, or even the fact that the system is chaotic resulting in random sporadic mass extinctions, to knock species off their local max (or move the local max out from under them, actually, the shape of the surface changing), possibly to a deep valley where they die out, or maybe to a bigger hill where they can move upward farther.

So, a fly need not evolve more intelligence if it is at a local max in its environment. Enough catastrophes, and the likelihood of something evolving lots of intelligence increases (in the long run, and I mean really long run, because there are lots of short term (many millions of years) setbacks).

There's a hill out there with humans' names on it, and it took a few meteorites and a lot of years to bump some monkey onto it.

__________________
-----
Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

I think that the issue is not just that there are "local maxima" which trap you. But it is wrong to think that all directions of "travel" across the surface available, even though they would in principle be "uphill". I think in general most directions of "travel" are unavailable, uphill or not. So you can be "trapped" somewhere that is not even a local maximum, because the only available directions of travel are downhill.

I think it is a very transient surface. Conditions are changing all the time, at least in some dimensions, though not to the extent caused by major catastrophes.

well, the definition of a local maximum is all directions of travel are downhill

__________________
-----
Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

Well it apparently worked for us, we have the largest population of large mammals.

__________________

I've always felt that adaptability was at least as important as intelligence.
For instance, omnivores stand a better chance of surviving than either carnivores or herbivores.

An omnivorous diet played a big role in human development.

__________________
Angel of the Abyss
-------------
"I am Ripper...Tearer...Slasher...Gouger. I am the Teeth in the Darkness, the Talons in the Night. Mine is Strength...and Lust...and Power! I AM BEOWULF!"

ravenscry. Exactly. I disagree with the Dr.....Neanderthals were replaced by H.Sapiens because smarter does work in nature.

__________________
A third rate theory forbids
A second rate theory explains after the fact
A first rate theory predicts...A. Lomonosov

Possibly. However, I wonder if we were really all that much smarter? Neanderthal man in fact had a larger head then homo sap sap. They in fact were surviving quite nicely for thousands of years in Europe till we came along. Now what I do know is that the human head at birth is near the maximum for allowing the female gender to be bipedal, and birth is a risky procedure for humans. It would be very enlightening if we found a Neanderthal babies skeleton, see what size it was closer to birth. Maybe we weren't smarter then them, maybe we just out reproduced them, by having smaller skulled children.

__________________

This thread is awesome!!! Thanks for the info.

Actually it seems like another way for nature to tell us to back off from figuring stuff out too much. Similar in a way to the event horizon of a black hole.

Also I was just thinking ... if a species has the potential for addional intellegence. It would be a wonder if nowhere in the universe the smartest of the race started tweaking things in their favor.

We've exterminated lots of subgroups from within our own species, which is down to culture rather than genes, so it wasn't necessarily a genetic reason. Or it could have been an environmental change that changed the balance of advantage.