[jiggawatts]

It is well established that evolution is driven not only by fitness in the trivial sense of "survival or death", but in large part by mate selection.

(Disclaimer: The rest is a personal theory with zero scientific support.)

This begs the question: selection based on what? In many bird species it is the complexity of the male's song, or the colourful beauty of his feathers. There are "dances" and courtship rituals in many animals, including even insects.

Humans almost certainly also subject to evolution caused by the evolutionary pressures of mate selection!

This is best said by Anthony Hokpins in Westworld: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjsGJOXhPGU

"I read a theory once that the human intellect was like peacock feathers. Just an extravagant display intended to attract a mate. All of art, literature, a bit of Mozart, William Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and the Empire State Building—just an elaborate mating ritual.

Maybe it doesn't matter that we have accomplished so much for the basest of reasons. But, of course, the peacock can barely fly. It lives in the dirt, pecking insects out of the muck, consoling itself with its great beauty."

Which is a good bit of drama, but... if true, what are the consequences for the evolution of the human species?

Assume for a moment, that yes, women are attracted to male intelligence, which men show off with music, art, and "great works".

The obvious immediate effect is that this causes the average intelligence of Homo Sapiens to increase over time.

But the secondary effect is more interesting: judging intelligence benefits from more intelligence! As the next generation of women inherit greater intelligence, they become better judges of male intelligence, more picky and precise. This forces male intelligence to increase ever faster to keep up with the "rising demand". Rinse and repeat.

I can't prove, but strongly suspect that this is the case.

Birds of Paradise become "more beautiful" on the scale of aeons because more beauty in the males doesn't improve the judgement of the females.

Humans become more intelligent on the scale of mere millenia because more intelligence does improve the judgement of the females.

[Terr_]

> > just an elaborate mating ritual.

You might find the book Blindsight interesting, since... Well, to avoid spoilers, I'll just say the story doesn't put our concept of intelligence on the usual top-of-creation pedestal.

[jiggawatts]

Read it twice already!

Something I noted -- trying to avoid spoilers here -- is that Rorschach is awfully similar to LLMs, but the book pre-dates ChatGPT by several years, which I feel says everything you need to know about how well the author foresaw the future.

[aldonius]

Mmm, yes, some real parallels between Blindsight's conception of consciousness and LLM chain-of-thought reasoning.

[inigyou]

also, women and men mostly have the same genes. Anything that affects one affects the other, by default.

This fact is itself subject to evolution. (In birds, it's the women who have the different chromosome.) Mammals may have evolved to share most genes between sexes because that allows either sex to benefit from traits evolved by the other one, and not solely because it's the easy way to store genes.

Did you know men have a genetic breast size?

[ordu]

> I can't prove, but strongly suspect that this is the case.

I think you can benefit from reading Franz de Waal works. He was a primatologist and he had a similar ideas. Though according to him intelligence was (is) not just a useless "peacock feather", he adds one more block in your feedback loop: hierarchy. Intelligence is used by males to play political games to raise their social status. Social status influences frequency of reproduction for males, so there is a natural (?) selection for political success which depends on good looks, physical fitness and intelligence.

It works for a lot of species but higher primates somehow got enough intelligence to make it dominate good looks and physical fitness and then the positive feedback loop led to evolution of Homo Sapience.

I especially like this theory because it explain why people lose all their pretense to be rational when it comes to politics: human mind is political first. Language, logic, rational discourse are later inventions on top of a political mind. They can work in a neutral environment but when it comes to politics Nature gets the upper hand, and the cultural intellectual sediments of rational thought are wiped instantly, and people's intelligence drops to levels of chimpanzee's: keep alliance with the strongest alpha if you can, rational discourse be damned. One needs a very strong mental discipline to resist it.

> Humans become more intelligent on the scale of mere millenia because more intelligence does improve the judgement of the females.

This idea doesn't explain how intelligence became so important for females. Your idea is like chicken-and-egg problem, you can explain how chickens and eggs let each other to exist, but not where did the first chicked (or egg) come from. And the idea relies on the assumption that female's opinion matters. It matters for some species and doesn't matter for others. It matters in some societies and doesn't matter in others.

> It is well established that evolution is driven not only by fitness in the trivial sense of "survival or death", but in large part by mate selection.

When I read this I thought you'd go about role of sexual dimorphism in evolution and Vigen Geodakyan evolutionary theory of sex[1], but no. Still you may be interested, though I want to note, I don't know if the theory is "scientific" or not. I'm not a biologist to judge, and I didn't have luck to find some kind of a scientific debate about it. Some objections to the theory, but not full-blown attempts to dismantle it. And I think the theory is not politically correct: it implies that roles of males and females in evolution are different. It is not bad per se, but you know how (most of) people think (with their political mind borrowed from chimpanzee): if roles are different in evolution, then you can argue for a society change that would mirror it and would give you some privileges and raise your social status against some others, and then you would get new kind of Nazis trying to genocide half the population of Homo Sapience.

[1] https://www.evolocus.com/textbooks/geodakian2011.pdf