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Comment by card_zero | Hacker News Reader

That's an interesting question. In principle intelligence could evolve as a fitness indicator. That is, a species of herbivorous apes could select mates for ability in music, art, and story-telling, and then you get a gentle tribe of orangutan-like creatures with human-like culture. However, unless they specifically settle on non-killing as the fitness indicator, I don't see why they'd be consistent about it. Even an orangutan may eat a slow loris from time to time. It's more morality's business than evolution's.

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Assuming a high dimensional multi-variate search space I guess that leads to the question what the role of killing is in calculating fitness is right?

In my head the more humans / beings have known about their world the better the have survived so it makes sense intelligence would be a fitness indicator that speeds up the search algorithm. But there's no intuitive answer to why killing as many people as possible would be a fitness indicator like population wasn't a factor until recently so it's not like resource scarcity was the issue

Resource scarcity has always been the issue. Even ignoring water (still an issue), foraging and agriculture are both incredibly hard ways to supply food.

even if resources were highly limited it seems intuitive that the evolution algorithm would prioritize acquiring knowledge for efficient resource gathering over killing long term wouldn't it?

Let's say cave person a figured out how to dig a well cave person b not so much. cave person b kills cave person a to get the well and uses it for x years then dies because they didn't acquire the knowledge to dig another one. so cave person c will be like "protec well digger hooman". same for foraging let's say cave person a killed cave person b who was extremely good at remembering where trees are in a given area sure cave person a got a meal for today but is gonna die out unless they develop the skills cave person a had

sorry I'm a homeless dropout maybe I'm missing something super obvious I'm still not seeing the how killing leads to an optimum solution. Maybe a local maxima for sure but not the most optimal solution in the search space and as civilized as humans have become killing still persists I've seen some brutal stuff by some insanely rich folk (at least to me) that had absolutely nothing to do with resources so maybe that's coloring my viewpoint but idk even for inter species stuff some species have been hunted to extinction which is like a dairy farmer killing everything instead of planning for multiple generations it doesn't make any sense

Sure, it's not optimal long-term planning. Evolution doesn't plan ahead at all, its only super power in that regard is being very slow and gradual. If species A gets better and better at eating the abundant species B, and this continues for a million years and species A specializes and evolves to be unable to eat anything else, and the population of A increases to a point where B's population suddenly plummets, they could both go extinct. But usually A doesn't get that effective at killing B (before the crisis), and what happens is a repeating population cycle, the old boom and bust.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_cycle

Weirdly, Olaus Magnus (Big Olaf) was involved in this one as well, the same person who did the map in the article.

>it seems intuitive that the evolution algorithm would prioritize acquiring knowledge for efficient resource gathering over killing long term wouldn't it?

By what mechanism do you suppose evolution would implement long-term planning?

I was thinking (but forgot to say) that hunting is usually said to be what drove the evolution of intelligence. Humans needed tools, plans, and at least the ability to yell words if not grammar, in order to kill large tasty animals, that's the usual idea for how it happened, more commonly mentioned than intelligence as a fitness indicator (aka pure showing off).

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