Predation as Payment for Criticism
A predator's success depends on exploiting specific flaws in prey - poor awareness, slow reactions, weak social coordination. Unlike resource competition or disease, which select based on physiological robustness, predation creates focused pressure on intelligence, pressure which favors the development of consciousness. A cheetah doesn't catch just any gazelle, but the one that fails to notice and react effectively. Prey get better at evading, predators get better at predicting, each side has to model the other's thoughts more accurately - an arms race that eventually rewards both sides for explicitly modeling the other's perspective, the basis for cognitive empathy. If you're glad you're conscious, no need to thank a predator - somebody else already did - by being eaten.
For a species evolving over time, predators are performing a service: identifying specific failures of capacity. The payment for this service is the nutrition from the prey's body, while the cost to the prey is their life and fewer offspring. This harsh exchange enables something remarkable - the development of sophisticated defensive capabilities without any explicit agreement or negotiation between species. The gazelle doesn't need to understand that it's participating in continuous process improvement via selective criticism, nor agree to pay for the information.
Before someone can explicitly negotiate for decision-relevant criticism, it needs to already be smart enough to generate the idea of making informed decisions, and of criticism, understand the information value of criticism, and choose to offer to pay for it by some means other than being devoured by the critic. Predation creates pressure to develop these capabilities without requiring their preexistence. This differs markedly from domestication, where selective pressures often reduce agency - breeding for docility rather than capacity.
3 Comments
Doesn't this imply the smartest nonhuman animals should be predators? Neither chimps nor corvids/parrots are.
Are you contending that predation is just, because being killed and eaten creates a selection pressure for intelligence on your species?
> The gazelle doesn't need to understand that it's participating in continuous process improvement via selective criticism, nor agree to pay for the information.
What do you mean the gazelle doesn't need to pay? It *doesn't* pay; that's true. But your phrasing implies that it *would* pay—that this arrangement is analogous to the deal that would take place if the cheetah and the gazelle could negotiate.
That seems absurd. If there were an intelligent entity that was sincerely looking out for the interests of a specific gazelle, and sincerely negotiating on that gazelle's behalf, this would not be a profitable deal, to say the least.
> Unlike resource competition or disease, which select based on physiological robustness, predation creates focused pressure on intelligence, pressure which favors the development of consciousness.
Further, I believe this claim is literally false and false in its connotations.
Claude tells me that cheetahs disproportionately target juveniles ("54% of cheetahs' Thomson's gazelle kills were subadult" - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2028.1968.tb00906.x).
Aside from age, cheetahs mostly select on other "catchability factors": peripheral position, distance from neighbors, vegetation cover, low vigilance, and small group size.
You could argue that low vigilance individuals or those that are on the periphery of the group are likely stupider, but that's a stretch. I would expect both of those to generally be subject to substantial day-to-day variation, and neither to especially correlate with genetic intelligence. And overall, I think it is incorrect that the cheetahs are selecting on intelligence as opposed to physiological robustness, given that their main selection criteria is youth.
Furthermore, alertness and neuroticism are not the same as consciousness or intelligence. The majority of the most intelligent animals are themselves predators, not prey animals, and my understand is that the leading theory of the development of intelligence in humans and other species (corvids, cetaceans) is that main selection pressure driving the development of intelligence was complex politics and theory-of-mind games with conspecific, not threat of predation.
So aside from the fact that getting eaten in exchange for providing selection pressure for intelligence would not be a good trade for any individual prey animal, I think this story is basically not true.