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NancyLebovitz comments on Humans are not automatically strategic - Less Wrong
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Selection pressure might be even weaker a lot of the time than a 3% fitness advantage having a 6% chance of becoming universal in the gene pool, or at least it's more complicated-- a lot of changes don't offer a stable advantage over long periods.
I think natural selection and human intelligence at this point can't really be compared for strength. Each is doing things that the other can't-- afaik, we don't know how to deliberately create organisms which can outcompete their wild conspecifics. (Or is it just that there's no reason to try and/or we have too much sense to do the experiments?)
And we certainly don't know how to deliberately design a creature which could thrive in the wild, though some animals which have been selectively bred for human purposes do well as ferals.
This point may be a nitpick since it doesn't address how far human intelligence can go.
Another example of attribution error: Why would Gimli think that Galadriel is beautiful?
Eliezer made a very interesting claim-- that current hardware is sufficient for AI. Details?
If I'm not mistaken, all those races were created, so they could reasonably have very similar standards of beauty, and the elves might have been created to match that.
[From Wikipedia:}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_%28Middle-earth%29)
On the other hand, I suppose it's possible that if humans find Elves that much more beautiful than humans, maybe Dwarves would be affected the same way, though it seems less likely for them.
Also, perhaps dwarves don't have their beauty-sense linked to their mating selection. They appreciate elves as beautiful but something else as sexy.
Yeah, as JamesAndrix alludes to (warning: extreme geekery), the Dwarves were created by Aulë (one of the Valar (Gods)) because he was impatient for the Firstborn Children of Iluvatar (i.e., the Elves) to awaken. So you might call the Dwarves Aulë's attempt at creating the Elves; at least, he knew what the Elves would look like (from the Great Song), so it's pretty plausible that he impressed in the Dwarves an aesthetic sense which would rank Elves very highly.
Yes this is definitively correct. Also, it's a world with magic rings and dragons people.
There are different kinds of plausibility. There's plausibility for fiction, and there's plausibility for culture. Both pull in the same direction for LOTR to have Absolute Beauty, which by some odd coincidence, is a good match for what most of its readers think is beautiful.
What might break your suspension of disbelief? The usual BEM behavior would probably mean that the Watcher at the Gate preferencially grabbing Galadriel if she were available would seem entirely reasonable, but what about Treebeard? Shelob?
Particularly when referring to the movie versions, you could consider this simply a storytelling device, similar to all the characters speaking English even in movies set in non-English speaking countries (or planets). It's not that the Absolute Beauty of Middle-Earth is necessarily a good match for our beauty standards, it's that it makes it easier for us to relate to the characters and experience what they're feeling.