I think that ants are the elephant in the room that you were looking for, they seem to have exceedingly small brains yet do live in quite large communities all over the world.
The frugivore argument gets more interesting when you consider how it came to be that fruit is colour coded in the first place. Why do fruits advertise that they are ripe to eat by changing colour?
Well, if you are a tree with plans for global domination than producing a few nuts for squirrels isn't going to cut it. What you really need are primates to carry your seed far and wide, to get it properly planted with some 'manure'.
So, given the world was once fully monochrome, how did it happen that, as the trees evolved colour coded fruit the primates evolved colour eyesight?
I blame the Blind Watchmaker. There is no god so therefore colour coded fruit could not have been specially created just for the primates.
I think that it helps to have vegetarian sympathies to reject the social brain hypothesis. The idea that bigger brains are needed just to spot what fruit to eat doesn't cut it if your food is beige coloured. Imaginably we needed those bigger brains to go on the hunt and to round up woolly mammoths with spears and stuff.
"I think that ants are the elephant in the room that you were looking for, they seem to have exceedingly small brains yet do live in quite large communities all over the world."
I don't think this is a valid point. From the point of view of the genes, is not an ant colony one big organism?
The frugivore argument gets more interesting when you consider how it came to be that fruit is colour coded in the first place. Why do fruits advertise that they are ripe to eat by changing colour?
Well, if you are a tree with plans for global domination than producing a few nuts for squirrels isn't going to cut it. What you really need are primates to carry your seed far and wide, to get it properly planted with some 'manure'.
So, given the world was once fully monochrome, how did it happen that, as the trees evolved colour coded fruit the primates evolved colour eyesight?
I blame the Blind Watchmaker. There is no god so therefore colour coded fruit could not have been specially created just for the primates.
I think that it helps to have vegetarian sympathies to reject the social brain hypothesis. The idea that bigger brains are needed just to spot what fruit to eat doesn't cut it if your food is beige coloured. Imaginably we needed those bigger brains to go on the hunt and to round up woolly mammoths with spears and stuff.