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Comment by cornholio | Hacker News Reader

This is clearly not true: once thinking emerges in a species, it can be applied for an infinite number of situations that can't be codified into instincts because they are unique. Each battle site is unique, it has a certain topology, each battle involves a particular snapshot of men with certain equipment, gear, training and morale etc. The commander who can reason generally about battles will win on average against the commander that can simply "feel" the right moment to attack, if that intuition is just evolutionary inheritance from a long line of warriors who survived very different battles in their time.

So the advantage even against members of your own species is substantial and quickly leads to reinforcing and spreading of the thinking gene.

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That is if your thinking gene is optimized enough. Thinking is expensive energy wise so the cost of thinking is balanced by the amount of food that thinking allows you to gather. With the randomness of nature a highly intelligent subspecies could go extinct while a 'dumber' subspecies could survive a food shortage event if the power requirements are too high to think.

It probably depends a lot on the ecological niche. For example, for a herbivore species, the marginal benefit from the high energy thinking mutation is low, it took millions of years of thinking in humans before we could reach the levels where agriculture was possible, and it was invented by people with a similar biological intelligence to modern humans.

Whereas for a social hunter species, there are ample strategic and game theoretical benefits from even primitive thinking, and the dividend is enormous, since all of a sudden, with proper planing and coordination, you can hunt much larger animals than yourself, which can sustain the community for a very long time and at high energy levels which further enable selection for thinking.

It's only after such large pray is depleted and there is no space for migration, because you are surrounded by other packs of competitive thinkers, that the need to control plant growth becomes imperative.

Evolution is a single line, and if you touch it, you are out. But unless the environment becomes harsher (and the line moves), there is nothing making passing organisms more "efficient". You can clearly observe it with flightless birds on small islands.

And there is nothing as clear as human thinking (and all the behaviors this allows, like culture, social structures, colonies, etc) being many many orders of magnitude worthwhile compared to its "extra resource consumption". We are not some stationary organism living at the middle of a desert, and we have taken over Earth in seconds, compared to evolutionary timelines.

> nothing making passing organisms more "efficient". You can clearly observe it with flightless birds on small islands.

I'm not sure I follow this argument. Flightless birds happen on small island when those habitats are free of significant predators, for example after some extinction event or due to volcanic origin. Birds can still reach the islands, at least for some geological period, and evolutionary pressure favors some of them to grow in mass, bone density etc. to better control the available land food sources such as seeds, grasses, insects and other small critters.

Flight is not a useful trait in this environment and is expensive to maintain; a flightless bird will always win a fight against a flying bird for the same land source of food, since flight requires elongated and brittle bones, a low mass of muscles optimized for endurance etc. So flight is selected out of the land feeding niche very much for "efficiency" reasons.

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