“They used to teach us that evolution of intelligent being wasn’t possible,” she said. “Societies protect their weaker members. Civilizations tend to make wheel chairs and spectacles and hearing aids as soon as they have the tools for them. When a society makes war, the men generally have to pass a fitness test before they’re allowed to risk their lives. I suppose it helps win the war.” She smiled. “But it leaves precious little room for the survival of the fittest.”
[…]
“You were saying about evolution?”
“It — it ought to be pretty well closed off for an intelligent species,” she said. “Species evolve to meet the environment. An intelligent species changes the environment to suit itself. As soon as a species becomes intelligent, it should stop evolving.”
He adds:
It makes you think (or rather, the opposite). The original sin of intelligence — falling back in blind homeostatic antipathy against its own conditions of emergence — isn’t so hard to see.
Niven, Pournelle, and Land simply do not understand evolution. Civilization merely constructs a new environment with new selective pressures, and new genomes evolve. Evolution never stops. Also, it has no direction. Adaptation is always to the present situation.
Go read Harry Harpending (RIP) and Gregory Cochrane’s The 10,000 Year Explosion, Basic Books, 2009.
Man for man, the neolithic farmers were physically inferior to the paleolithic hunter-gatherers, but they outnumbered the HG and displaced them everywhere.
They understood it just fine — the characters in it didn’t. The rest of the book makes your point.
Man for man, the neolithic farmers were physically inferior to the paleolithic hunter-gatherers, but they outnumbered the HG and displaced them everywhere.
If we’re talking about a tribe that’s inferior in many ways adapting to particular circumstances and displacing a tribe that’s in many ways superior, Fred Reed told that story best.