Would human intelligence evolve if humans had access to infinite food?

Question

In a world with infinite food (each organism had access to an infinite amount of food/energy from another universe), would human intelligence develop through some evolutionary mechanism?

If resources were infinite for every organism... it wouldn't make much sense because that would lead to very utopian interactions between organisms. I mean... if an organism has infinite resources to be protected from a virus, and that virus has also infinite resources to propagate... there is no winner.

But instead of infinite resources, what would happen if only food and water were infinite? How would life (the first organisms) evolve? Would there be intelligent life (like human beings)?

I'm imagining that, even with infinite food, humans would need to cooperate to create shelters to avoid storms, to curate diseases, to avoid animals that would like to kill humans for no apparent reason etc... For instance, some animals could fight for shelters, mates, whatever... And then, there would be an explosion of biomass (dead bodies and excretion), so, with less living space, a species could start to eat/hunt/kill others species towards extinction until there is no more competitors in the world.

With infinite food, and even with other environmental factors, I'm not quite sure if humans would evolve in a scenario like that.

Answer 1

Fast reproducing organisms would have a major advantage

In biology there's an idea called r/k selection. Some organisms optimize for fast cheap reproduction, some for high quality reproduction. High quality reproduction is favored in stable environments where not much changes.

With infinite food, the environment would be extremely unstable. Fast reproducing organisms would have a massive competitive advantage as they could rapidly adapt and destroy competitors. You probably wouldn't evolve much beyond bacteria and other single cell creatures which would aggressively work together to destroy competitors with massive pillars of bacteria which rose high up into the sky.

Answer 2

Rate-Limiting Step/Why is there competition?

The question is: where does evolutionary pressure come from? It's unlikely that the kinds of pressures placed on organisms would require intelligent interactions to solve, possibly not even motility. Your organisms would most likely be bacteria, or resemble fungi.

• SPACE: Your world would need to be something like a Dyson sphere to provide near-infinite space, so competition for space would be the first logical barrier.
• ACCESS: How does this food get delivered? If it's something like a cornucopia, then access to the food will be a selector. But if it's essentially teleported to the organism, then there would be no need for autotrophs, motility or predation (except to avoid being crushed by the ever-expanding mass of dead organisms that don't decay because there are no decay organisms).
• COMPRESSION: Your organisms would be constantly being crushed under the mass of the organisms growing. There would be pressure to replicate faster so as to not be crushed, develop high compression resistance to survive inside crushing masses of organisms, or some ability to float to the top to avoid crushing.
• GAS EXCHANGE: Your organisms would have no motive to produce oxygen. So your world would not evolve an aerobic atmosphere. Food would need to be broadly defined as containing the reaction materials to break down food. But waste gasses would be constantly building up.
• ACIDITY/TOXICITY: Your world would be awash in metabolic waste products. There would be a definite advantage to organisms in being able to tolerate high pH (acid being one of the common waste end-products). There would be pressures to produce toxic waste products to eliminate competition for space.
• INCREASING GRAVITY: Over time, the gravity of your world would increase as organisms replicated and buried their ancestors in an ever-compacting mass of biology. The gas pressure from wastes would skyrocket.
• WASTE HEAT: All this metabolism from infinite energy input would make for constantly increasing temperatures. There would be no need for external heat from something like a sun.

So eventually your world would start to look like a massive super-Earth-like Venus, with extremophile-like organisms able to tolerate high temperatures, pressures, and seas of boiling biological waste products floating atop a mass of dead stuff. Not much room for intelligence.

Answer 3

Evolution of intelligence would slow down

• Evolution is in many ways about competition for resources.

• Food is Resource #1.

• The evolution of intelligence is in many ways about problem solving.

• And you just took away problem-to-solve #1.

I'm being very simplistic with those statements, but excepting the last 500 years, the most important innovations in human history revolved around food. Agriculture, irrigation, storage & preservation... People often had to figure out how to traverse mountain ranges and live in new environments because of food.

And now they don't.

There are obviously a great many problems to overcome that would otherwise lead to the evolution of intelligence. But taking away problems to solve will never, IMHO, lead to faster evolution of intelligence.

Necessity, after all, is the proverbial mother of invention.

Having said that, it might be that we look at people like Michelangelo and DaVinci, who had patrons, or folks like Isaac Newton, who was rich, and conclude that all people need is time to think and intelligence will evolve faster. But in those cases it isn't intelligence that's evolving — it's merely the pool of knowledge that's expanding. Modern thinkers have millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of civilization building behind them such that they already had an evolved intelligence. You're looking back far enough that life hadn't yet learned to think at all. And having the free time to sit around thinking isn't a benefit when you not only don't know how to do it, but evolution hadn't even given you the tools to try. If food and water are free, that's just one really important reason why the capacity to solve problems needn't evolve in the first place.

Answer 4

Very unlikely.

The important question here is why human beings developed superior intelligence. We don't have a definitive answer for that, but we do have a number of good theories. It's not our big brains, our opposable thumbs, our upright posture, or our tool-using that vaulted us to the top of the food chain. We had those things for a couple million years, in all likelihood, and for the majority of that time, we were living in the shadows, terrified of being eaten.

What is it really that produced intelligence? A lot had to do with food. Some researchers believe our original niche was that of a scavenger: Homo sapiens wandered around the savannah and waited for apex predators to finish up with their carcasses. When they were finished, we'd descend upon the picked-clean body and use our rocks and basic tools to break open the bones and extract the nutrient-dense marrow. Just like the niche of giraffes is to reach high-up leaves, the niche of early Homo sapiens was to scavenge for bone marrow. This scavenging required tool-use, and more importantly, it required cooperation. Human beings are not biologically superior to other organisms: we are socially superior. We learned how to work effectively in groups, first small, then large. As our tool use and cooperation enabled us to move from scavenging to hunting, and then to hunt larger and larger game, we collaborated in post-hunt planning sessions that very likely generated the first languages. (Hunting is actually not a good time for language--better to gesture silently--but planning and celebrating post-hunt is perfect.) Languages are indispensable for cooperation and abstract thinking.

Even more important to cognition was the domestication of fire. Not inherently because of fire's utility as a tool, but mainly because of its tool as a time-saver. Chimps spend 5 hours a day chewing raw food. Imagine if you had to spend that long, or longer. Instead, you can wolf down cooked meals in a matter of minutes. Cooked food not only allowed for increased productive time during the day (less chewing = more free time), it also allowed for the shortening of the intestinal tract (cooked food = efficient nutrient absorption = shorter intestinal tract). This was critical in the development of the brain. Why? Because digestion and cognition are both extremely energy-intensive. Allocate less energy to digestion, and you've got so much more to put toward cognition.

There are other considerations in the evolution of intelligence, but these seem most relevant to your question. With infinite food, what pressures would exist pushing early hominids toward cooperation, tool-use, and fire domestication? In addition to figuring out the logistics of where this infinite food is coming from, you'll probably be interested in determining whether it needs to be (or can be) cooked.

(If you're interested in the evolution of human beings, I highly recommend Y. N. Harari's Sapiens, from which most of the details in this answer are sourced.)

Answer 5

Intelligence can still evolve

I once read that the increase of intelligence for humans came from a time of prosperity. We had some intelligence and when there was food in spades we had time to grow this incredibly power hungry organ to impressive sizes. If we didn't have prosperity we probably wouldn't prioritise such energy earers. These kinds of findings are often in motion, but I would argue we are still in a time of prosperity.

Of course not the whole world is in full on prosperity, but a large chunk of it has food. A snaller chunk of that has so much that obesity is a huge risk factor. At the same time we see that our intelligence keeps rising. We need to adjust the IQ range every so often (100 is 'average') and our understanding keros growing. I read article years ago that teens today have a different brain make up. They think and do more fluidly to adapt to a world that changes faster and faster. Interestingly we don't seem to need increased intelligence. We are already prospering, so why keep increasing an energy hungry organ to enormous sizes?

Natural selection. It can be as simple as that. We see enough vestigial organs and appendages in the wild. The increased brain size is no different. We like intelligence. Intelligent people often earn more, make better life desicions and live better. That makes for more and better offspring.

With infinite food intelligence will be more favourable as people want a bigger house and a better car, or a better conversation.

Of course people can change their preferences over time, or change cultures so that intelligence is a purely sexual orientation that doesn't give an advantage. But even then sexual preferences can stay a long time. I would bet in intelligence to keep increasing.

Answer 6

An Infinite Non-Vacuum Must Expand or Collapse

The state of matter you are describing may have existed somewhere near the the Big Bang. If the Big Bang contained a significantly finite amount of matter, then the universe would have instantly imploded into a black hole; however, the leading theory is that so much of the universe was in gravitational equilibrium (with infinite or near infinite mass in every direction) that the universe was able to expand despite its high density.

If life could have evolved in this contiguous medium, then it could have simply expanded in every direction as far as it wanted too... however, this state of exitance can not exist forever. A universe in this state must expand or collapse. Even if it was in perfect equilibrium, the moving around of lifeforms inside of it could upset the equilibrium to begin this expansion or collapse.

A collapse will surely end all life, but if your universe decided to expand, then human life can evolve. As the universe expands, matter will begin to collapse into planets and stars and large voids will form between them. Your life that existed since the beginning of time will seed countless worlds where it will for the 1st time begin to evolve under the constraints of scarcity. Give it a few billion years, and eventually you will have humans.

But could intelligence evolve in the early universe before matter all drifts apart?

Life will spread out like an explosion in all directions chasing the infinite food while leaving an ever expanding wasteland of consumed food, and slower lifeforms behind. These slower life forms will not have infinite resources, instead they will either starve or evolve new features that let them live in the wasteland; so, they will begin journeying back into the hostile inner parts of the sphere of life where competition for resources will be a very real thing. This could lead life down an evolutionary path towards complex life and intelligence... so no, the outer life forms where food is infinite will not become intelligent, but they could give rise to intelligent life inside of the sphere of waste they left behind.

Answer 7

You're up against a couple of things. You might notice that most of the semi-intelligent animals on our planet are predators. The running joke is "how smart do you have to be to sneak up on a blade of grass?" This doesn't explain elephants, but their size creates its own disadvantage.

It may be that the evolutionary pressure in this case would be predation, but that wouldn't actually result in humans, who are biologically an apex predator.

The other problem would be overpopulation. With no limit to food, the population would expand exponentially. Theoretically the predators would also expand exponentially. You'd eventually run into space issues. (Read this: How 1960s Mouse Utopias Led to Grim Predictions for Future of Humanity.)

Basically, the creatures would start killing each other for the next most scarce resource, whether it's space or mating choices. If they produced intelligence, they would wipe out whatever was feeding on them, making matters worse.

Isaac Asimov calculated that, if we could move people anywhere with a snap of our fingers, then turn anything into food with another snap, and we were capable of surviving anywhere (like in vacuum), then in 5000 years, the entire universe (UNIVERSE, not just galaxy) would consist of nothing except people. No stars, no black holes, no planets, just people.

Would it produce intelligent life? Maybe. Would they be human? No.

Answer 8

If it was only "effectively unlimited" and somehow only human-like species could take advantage of it, sure

While infinite food from the dawn of life would almost certainly never require evolution beyond single-celled organisms (as other answers have noted), if you're positing a more limited scenario, in which evolution proceeded as on Earth until around 10M years ago (around when we split off from our nearest living relatives, the chimps and bonobos), with the sole difference being that ape-suitable food was in unusual abundance (enough that there was no need to come up with strategies to acquire it, merely wandering at random would always find "enough"), intelligence might take longer to evolve, but it could still occur. The reason being that seeking food is only one of the things that intelligence helps with. Others include:

1. Dealing with environmental changes that occur on timescales too short for evolution to handle (e.g. a climate pattern that swings from hot to cold and back on a timescale of a few hundred or a thousand years; the available foods may change based on climate, and surviving in a constantly changing climate with limited adaptations for both heat and cold requires some mental agility)
2. If food is not unlimited for other species, intelligence (and bipedalism, a prerequisite for freeing the hands for tool use) can be selected for as a means of spotting, avoiding and working together to defend against predators.
3. Intelligence can be used in attracting mates, producing more elaborate courtship displays. While this may seem pointless, the mere fact of possessing intelligence is a proxy for health (if you're repeatedly beset by parasites, you'll grow up unhealthy and with lower intelligence and make a less suitable partner for producing and raising offspring)
4. Eventually the result of some combination of these evolutionary pressures (especially ones that lead to bipedalism + basic intelligence) leads to tool use and control of fire, and once that happens, intelligence becomes more and more important. As language develops, it becomes easier to pass along detailed information, not just "How do you make and use a tool?", but "Here's how your seven-times great-grandfather survived the last mini-Ice Age".

Again, this involves a world with merely "vast" food resources (ideally ones that are poisonous or otherwise unavailable to non-apes for whatever reason); if food for any living creature is available in infinite quantities, you'd never have gotten apes in the first place.

Answer 9

It's already happened

What you are describing is essentially the condition we had in early-earth where the sun gave free food to all the things that wanted it. After a while they reproduced so that you couldn't reach the sun's free energy any more and had to either evolve to eat things that got the free food or evolve to find a different way to reach the sun (Leave the ocean).

Life WILL eventually block all access to your magic free food by simple reproduciton and the same thing will happen (Unless you continually expand the surface area of the food access). Your senario really is exactally what happened on earth.

On a more evolved scale, some existing species that can over-produce so much that they block their own access to food have created (Evolved?) behaviors to kill off large parts of their population--A group migrating in one direction until they hit a cliff or the ocean... also overcrowding in many more advanced species leads to fatal in-fighting.

Disease is another control mechanism that comes with overcrowding, but I can't say that really has a purpose--but perhaps it is part of successful evolution.

I'd guess that any species without any population control will go extinct after a few rounds of overpopulation/mass starvation because they will eventually become unlucky at the "Low population" point where they could easily be permanently destroyed.

Answer 10

Yes

I once read that one of the major drivers behind human intelligence was mate selection.

So the argument went: modern humans are wayyy smarter than is needed to address the challenges of hunting and gathering. So, why did our evolutionary forbears evolve to get smarter still, after environmental pressures were much lessened?

The sexes have different incentives in mate selection, because reproduction affects human males and human females differently (specifically, because women carry the young and men... do nothing). In general, men have an incentive to trick as many women as possible into having sex with them, even if it's just one time, while women have an incentive to be more selective because they'll need help at least during pregnancy (and ideally after). This creates a kind of intellectual "arms race," which feeds only on itself and does not depend at all upon the environment.

I think I read this in a popular science book about genetics called The Red Queen Game, but that was like 20 years ago and my memory is foggy. (The title is a reference to a scene in Alice in Wonderland involving the Red Queen character.)