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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

The nugget is the beginning of the fourth graph.


The Cost of Smarts

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: May 7, 2008
Research on animal intelligence always makes me wonder just how smart  
humans are. Consider the fruit-fly experiments described in Carl  
Zimmer’s piece in the Science Times on Tuesday. Fruit flies who were  
taught to be smarter than the average fruit fly tended to live shorter  
lives. This suggests that dimmer bulbs burn longer, that there is an  
advantage in not being too terrifically bright.

Intelligence, it turns out, is a high-priced option. It takes more  
upkeep, burns more fuel and is slow off the starting line because it  
depends on learning — a gradual process — instead of instinct. Plenty  
of other species are able to learn, and one of the things they’ve  
apparently learned is when to stop.

Is there an adaptive value to limited intelligence? That’s the  
question behind this new research. I like it. Instead of casting a  
wistful glance backward at all the species we’ve left in the dust I.Q.- 
wise, it implicitly asks what the real costs of our own intelligence  
might be. This is on the mind of every animal I’ve ever met.

Every chicken that looks at you sideways — which is how they all look  
at you — is really saying what Thoreau said less succinctly: you are  
endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more  
complicated than the problem itself. Thoreau himself would not dispute  
that he was hoping to recover the chicken’s point of view. He went to  
Walden Pond “to remember well his ignorance.”

Research on animal intelligence also makes me wonder what experiments  
animals would perform on humans if they had the chance. Every cat with  
an owner, for instance, is running a small-scale study in operant  
conditioning. I believe that if animals ran the labs, they would test  
us to determine the limits of our patience, our faithfulness, our  
memory for terrain. They would try to decide what intelligence in  
humans is really for, not merely how much of it there is. Above all,  
they would hope to study a fundamental question: Are humans actually  
aware of the world they live in? So far the results are inconclusive.



http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/07/opinion/07wed4.html?em&ex=1210392000&en=a3eef041ed81fb45&ei=5087%0A