To the best of my knowledge, no hermaphroditic species are social (I'll use pack formation as the threshold for social). Do you think that's a coincidence?
I think that's a function of a variety of issues. One is evolutionary lock-in. Some things are more difficult to alter than others. Changing your basic reproductive system is tough because so much can go wrong. There are very few parthenogenetic species. But they do seem to show up in clumps. There are a lot of lizards in that category and lizards generally don't form packs. But if mammals had ended up with the necessary genetics to be easily engage in parthenogenesis things could easily have looked very different, and I see no reason why versions of us wouldn't be having a very similar conversation, with one of us insisting that the flexibility given by parthenogenesis as an option is necessary to get sufficient intelligence.
I'm also curious if you think this sort of logic applies also to your claim about gametes, given that the example I gave was an unambiguously social species. Do you agree that the gamete claim is wrong?
Changing even a small number could have drastic consequences.
My argument is that those consequences are likely to be drastically negative. Remember, most mutations are deleterious!
Most mutations are probably neutral. It is probably true that most mutations which have some selection probably have a negative selection pressure. However, this remark confuses why mutations are so often negative. Most species have not only adopted to specific niches, their genes function in an intertwined mesh. So if I mutate one gene, all the genes that interact with that gene are potentially unhappy. That's not a problem when one is discussing species evolving wholesale. They are then free to include or not include what we see as universals.
Those people don't get wealthier because they make trips faster / have a longer driving season (the planet, Winter, has terribly cold winters which shut down all travel, and so being able to drive faster means being able to leave later), causing them to reproduce more than more timid drivers?
Huh? I'm not sure I follow this example. You mean driving a car? Humans have barely had a hundred years of car travel, way too little to show selection pressure. Moreover, driving is dangerous so there's an obvious tradeoff. And many people don't drive regularly at all (I for example live in a city with a decent public transit system). We also have laws which are enforced against extreme driving. And as long as there is other traffic you won't gain too much from being able to drive faster since you'll be in the traffic jams. Moreover, people do drive at drastically different speeds. Finally, and most damaging, cultural norms about how fast to drive have changed albeit slowly, and they vary a lot from country to country. Some places have speed limits as high as 160 km/hour (99 miles an hour). Around 1900, 25 miles an hour was considered to be blindingly fast for a car. It was a big deal in 1896 when parts of England has the speed limit raised to 14 miles an hour. If you had a species that had better reflexes and hand-eye coordination than humans have I could easily see 200 mph as the speed limit. Similarly, if human coordination was poorer or humans were more risk averse I could easily see us keeping the early 20th century speed limits.
Remember, just because we've hit some set of evolutionarily stable equilibria doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of others out there. We know there are a lot out there because there are a lot of other species. We don't know how many there are that support highly intelligent life, but the existence of parrots, dolphins, elephants and some of the brighter corvids strongly suggest that there's a lot of room.
And even if an alien species manages to make it to human-level intelligence without a calendar (perhaps their planet doesn't have a satellite or axial tilt), will that invalidate the claim that they'll be deeply similar to humans? Hardly. They'll still have the imprint of their machiavellian evolution all over them
Are you trying to argue that it is likely that intelligent, social species will have a lot of ability to trick each other and engage in clever schemes and have sophisticated theories of mind? If so, I agree that seems very likely. But none of the universals you gave are functions of that feature.
I see no reason why versions of us wouldn't be having a very similar conversation, with one of us insisting that the flexibility given by parthenogenesis as an option is necessary to get sufficient intelligence.
The primary reason I see is the Machiavellian Intelligence hypothesis- if human-level intelligence is reproductively successful primarily to seduce and outwit, then a species that does not need to seduce or outwit in order to get the best partners will not develop human-level intelligence.
My point in this debate is I want to see the math. The fir...
One of the most important points raised by the sequences is that not all minds are like humans. In quite a few places, people have discussed minds with slight changes from human minds, which seem altogether different. However, a lot of this discussion has been related to AI, as opposed to minds created by evolution. I'm trying to think of ways that minds which evolved, and are effective enough to start a civilization, could differ from humans'.
Three Worlds Collide would seem like an excellent starting point, but isn't actually very useful. As far as I recall, the Babyeaters might have learned their baby eating habits as a result of societal pressure. The main difference in their society seemed to be the assumption that people who disagreed with you were simply mistaken: this contrasts to humans' tendency to form rival groups, and assume everyone in the rival groups is evil. The Super-Happies had self modified, and so don't provide an example of an evolved mind.
So here are my ideas so far.