[fnordfnordfnord]

>but there was never any deliberation about it on the beavers part.

How do you know that?

>One can easily think of a situation where a beaver might actually do better to not build a dam - but a beaver will try to build one anyway. It's just what he does.

A beaver is not an NPC in a video game. It has actual intelligence. Maybe not much, but more than can be modeled in such a trivial way. And humans for our part are quite often found behaving irrationally and against our better interests.

>Do humans eat to keep from starving?

We eat because we're hungry, we farm to keep from starving. Why did we launch a man to visit the moon? Is the fact that the beavers haven't sent their own delegation to the moon evidence of their inferiority? Maybe they just prefer non-interventionist foreign policy.

It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much-the wheel, New York, wars and so on whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons. (23.1)