Jacob Kimmel

You can't just be a freeloader.

You need to get calories, go out in the jungle, get some berries.

I entirely agree with that particular thesis.

You know, I think in biology in general, when you're trying to engineer a given property, be it being healthier longer, be it making something more intelligent, and this is true even at the micro level of trying to engineer a system to manufacture a protein at high efficiency, you always have to start by asking yourself, did evolution spend a lot of time optimizing this?

If yes, my job is going to be insanely hard.

If no, potentially there are some low-hanging fruit.

And so I think this is a good argument for why potentially intelligence wasn't strongly selected for.

And I think actually the lifespan argument plays back into intelligence to a degree.

You start to ask, okay, if I have intelligence that's able to compound over time and I can develop, you know, for instance, in some hypothetical universe, my fluid intelligence lasts much longer in my lifespan.

Right.

If the number of people who are reaching something like 65 is very small in a population, you're not necessarily going to select for alleles that lead to fluid intelligence preservation late into life.

This is actually part of my own pet hypothesis around some of the interesting phenomenology in when discoveries are made throughout lifespans.

So there are some famous results where, for instance, I'm going to get the exact age a little bit wrong, but in mathematics, most great discoveries happen roughly before 30.

Why should that be true?

That doesn't make sense.

You can sort of put down a bunch of societal reasons for it.

Oh, maybe you sort of become staid in your ways.

Your teachers have caused you to restrict your thinking by that point.

But really, that's true across centuries.

That's true across many different unique cultures around the world.