Scientists bred fruit flies for intelligence. They made bananas taste bitter, which fruit flies don’t like. They then gave the flies little markers, so the ‘smart’ ones would avoid the bitter bananas based on this learned signal, the dumb ones would not. After only 20 generations they generated ‘smart’ and ‘dumb’ fruit flies who could learn at different success rates. Then, they mixed them together and saw what happened: Idiocracy, the dumb flies out-reproduced the smart ones! Her take-away was intelligence is costly, and everything has trade-offs.

I especially like the idea that any ability comes with trade-offs and so in a sense we are all idiot-savants, good at some things, bad at others, especially with respect to really different people. I know a lot of smart people, but I’ve never met one who didn’t have blind spots. It’s good to remember that because if you think that because you have a really high IQ, are really rich, or are a good speaker, you are therefore the smartest guy in any room, you are going to make a very big mistake someday.

1 month ago  /  Notes  /  Source: falkenblog.blogspot.com