Alright, I’m goofing off at an important lecture to write this, so you bastards better appreciate this! If I end up flunking out of grad school because I’m writing about PU on the internet, I’ll be pretty pissed off.

I’m just kidding, I love you guys and I love not working when I know I should be.

First of all, go out and read Matt Ridley’s book The Red Queen, it really goes into a lot of depth about how human intelligence evolved. But for those of you who are lazy like me, here’s the Cole’s Notes version.

Why did human intelligence evolve? Think about it, it doesn’t really make sense at first. Human beings are these amazing creatures, capable of designing rocket ships and skyscrapers, computer programs and operas. Hell, human beings even wrote Battlestar Galactica, how awesome is that?

But until 3,000 years ago – heck, until less than 500 years ago in most of the world, human beings didn’t use their brains for any of that fancy stuff. While human beings were evolving these big brains capable of sending a man to the moon, we were hunting antelope with flint-tipped spears.

So why?

Why did we evolve huge brains when we didn’t seem to need them? We were using the same model of brain that Napoleon used to conquer Europe, the same intellect that developed nuclear weapons, and we were hunting animals with an IQ of 8, using sharp sticks.

Seems like a bit of overkill. Kind of like killing flies with a hand grenade.

In evolution, whenever you have a trait or an organ, you have to think, “What was that good for? Why did they evolve that? What challenge was that meant to overcome?”. And on it’s face, it doesn’t look like there were any challenges that early humans faced that required an IQ of 100 to overcome.

And when you look at it, the only challenge that human beings faced that would have required an IQ of 100 to overcome was…. other humans.

We evolved these big brains to understand other people in our tribes, to know when we’re being lied to, to know when people are messing with us or plotting against us. THAT is what brains are for, and it is those kinds of calculations that our minds are optimized for.

Thankfully, the brain is a flexible enough organ that we can re-train it, through years and years of schooling, to think in the logical way that is useful in a technological society. We spend YEARS drilling young children to read, calculate, understand science etc. But in the end, we’re not even very good at it. When it comes to social things: recognizing a face, a lie, a story that doesn’t add up, telling a joke, computers can’t even come close to the skill of a three year old. But on the other hand, with most forms of logical thought, computers leave us in the dust.

In the end, our ability to understand math and science and logic is really only an unintended consequence of a brain that is designed to understand other people. And the good news is, your ability to understand other people – that innate ability every person has, that has been drilled out of you through years of schooling in rational thought – is still there.

And you can exercise it…..

(More to come)

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