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Which is truer: A) Species with brains rarely become smarter over time, because their cognition is already optimized with regard to their body, senses, and environment: they wouldn't clearly benefit from a smarter brain (with higher resource consumption) (continued)
B) There are inherent, near-universal evolutionary advantages in being smarter, and as such, most species with a complex brain are becoming smarter over time. Also curious whether there's any evidence that wolves or giraffes or eagles are smarter today than 10M years ago...
I believe it's mostly A, and as such, intelligence increases happen under environmental change and require co-evolution of brain, body, and social structures. Many evolutionary coincidences were required to create the conditions for the development of human intelligence
Probably B recently, because of how humans have changed the environment that the optimization of A relies on.
Of course, to reach the steady-state of (A), they have to do some getting smarter first. So probably we see most species increasing and then plateau-ing if the environment remains stable. 1/
But the environment is complex (even leaving humans out @saarw) so we expect to see both increases and decreases, in principle, according to the energy trade-off.
The Thoughts of a Spiderweb https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-thoughts-of-a-spiderweb-20170523/ …
Can't answer specifically, ancients were very smart and selection would seem to favor the more imtelligent to a point, where the fruits of their discoveries made life and survival easier for others. Humans diverge by creating tools specifically for aiding intellectual curiousity.
There could be a circumstance where inherent, universal evolutionary advantages to BEING smarter existed, but advantages to BECOMING smarter did not.
This depends on the environment, which can vary greatly. For example, surviving the death of the universe (for some future AI) would require a lot more intelligence than surviving in the savannah for 10 years for say, a giraffe, so objective A can still scale a lot.
I would look at r-Strategy and K-Strategy species to think about this and attempt to model it. K-Strategy species can't evolve fast enough to deal with changes in environment. Must alter behavior. This might select for intelligence.
Dogs have basically evolved from wolves and are without doubt much smarter. Though curious to understand how you would measure intelligence amongst animals.
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