Against Algernon's Argument

This article was written in 2020.

Should we expect there to be biological interventions (drugs, supplements) that make us smarter? Yes. This goes against The Algernon Argument, which offers an a priori reason to think No. The problem with the Algernon Argument is that evolution hasn’t optimized shit in humans.

Gwern gives a pithy summary of the argument:

The lesson is that Mother Nature know best. Or alternately, TANSTAAFL: “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”.

Scott says:

(Your body is already mostly optimal, so adding more things is unlikely to have large positive effects unless there’s some really good reason)

A SSC commenter says:

Why should there be a locked switch in the brain to shift from THINK WORSE to THINK BETTER? Why not just always stay on the THINK BETTER side?

Gwern says:

The human brain can easily be suboptimal in its gross anatomical architecture but close to optimal in any factor easily tweaked by chemicals!

Harrypotter5777 says:

If your story [about increasing intelligence] involves improvements to the nervous system, there should be a reason they were not selected for in the ancestral environment (say, because they lead to a 50% increase in the caloric intake required to stay functional).

The Algernon Argument is a sort of Efficient Market argument. “You think you can beat the market [increase your intelligence] by doing X? Well, if X did work, then the market [evolution] would have already done it. So you better have a damn good reason why thousands of genius traders [millions of years of evolution] haven’t done X.”

Objection

Evolution hasn’t optimized our intelligence because evolution hasn’t optimized shit in humans. The conscientious, creative, outgoing, high-libido, family-valuing, handsome, healthy, chiseled, 140 IQ, 6’4” Chad exists in the same world as the ugly, awkward, unintelligent [etc.] person. Thus (proof by example!), the evolutionary fitness of humans is very unoptimized.

Here’s an alternative way to come to this conclusion. Consider a species at T=0 years, the time at which it begins occupying a new niche. Suppose the environment remains constant, and consider that species at T=500 and T=50,000 years. Clearly the species is more fit at T=50,000; thus they were unoptimized at T=500. And if intelligence plays a big role in that specie’s fitness, they’ll probably be more intelligent.

Another way of putting it: humans in their agricultural niche have been around for less than 10,000 years, or 500 generations. Evolution isn’t going to fully optimize a complex animal in 500 generations; thus, humans have not had enough time to be optimized by evolution.

If that’s not good enough, there’s also the fact that the human niche has changed a lot recently. Many of our modern woes (ADHD?) come from the fact that our current environment is not the exact environment that evolution selected us for. Intelligence is more important now (arguable), and minimizing calories burned is a lot less important.

Okay, and here’s a real example. Baby heads are huge relative to vaginas. Bigger baby heads means smarter babies, but there’s an intelligence/mother-death tradeoff. Indeed, this probably is real tradeoff — human mothers had an insanely high childbirth mortality rate. Now we have hospitals and c-sections and all that good stuff. If we spent 10000 years in this environment, I genuinely think we’d end up with some monster babies.

So, the damn good reason that evolution fails to [make humans smarter by doing X thing]? Sometimes evolution just doesn’t get around to it. Maybe, (hopefully?), there’s a drug out there that affects hormones so that fetal head growth continues for longer than usual. Algernon awaits acceleration.