Petter Watts formulated it in different manner - "all animals are under stringent selection pressure to be as stupid as they can get away with".
> Would it benefit the squirrel species survival if they were "smarter"?
Probably yes, but this benefit doesn't necessarily outweight greater metabolic cost of sustaining brain. But I was talking about efficiency. Birds achieve much higher intelligence from the same volume of brain than mammals.
> "all animals are under stringent selection pressure to be as stupid as they can get away with".
Thanks for that quote. So maybe that is what humanity is doing by offloading our intelligence to machines, making ourselves stupid?
>Birds achieve much higher intelligence from the same volume of brain than mammals.
I just have a hard time supposing what "intelligence" means since human intelligence might be much different than bird intelligence. Not higher or lower, but different for different needs.
Petter Watts formulated it in different manner - "all animals are under stringent selection pressure to be as stupid as they can get away with".
> Would it benefit the squirrel species survival if they were "smarter"?
Probably yes, but this benefit doesn't necessarily outweight greater metabolic cost of sustaining brain. But I was talking about efficiency. Birds achieve much higher intelligence from the same volume of brain than mammals.