Upward selection pressure: Assuming that seal hunting comes with a nontrivial chance of failure because it's so complex, and greater intelligence produced a higher hunting success rate, wouldn't that be an upward selection pressure?
(of course even a good hunter would find it useful to be funny, charming, or occasionally devious, so this doesn't mean that Machiavellian Intelligence isn't also a root cause)
And defining the chimp-to-human scale may be tricky. You don't need to write poetry to pass along cooking instructions, but some... (read more)
Upward selection pressure: Assuming that seal hunting comes with a nontrivial chance of failure because it's so complex, and greater intelligence produced a higher hunting success rate, wouldn't that be an upward selection pressure?
(of course even a good hunter would find it useful to be funny, charming, or occasionally devious, so this doesn't mean that Machiavellian Intelligence isn't also a root cause)
And defining the chimp-to-human scale may be tricky. You don't need to write poetry to pass along cooking instructions, but some... (read more)