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Daniel_Burfoot comments on Open Thread, Jun. 15 - Jun. 21, 2015 - Less Wrong
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More generally, you can imagine a lot of failure modes where an alien species evolves to become intelligent, but cannot build technological civilization because it cannot achieve large scale social cooperation.
E.g. imagine a society where human brains evolved just a little bit differently and >90% of population are dyslectics. This very obviously wouldn't matter until about the time proto-writing changed into true writing, i.e. after urban development and proto-states. But then, such a civilization is trapped.
Being able to read would be a valuable advantage and after tens of thousands of years of evolution, more and more people could read.
There's actually some evidence humans have made some adaptions to be better at reading, but I can't find a source.