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This is a segment from The Breakdown newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe. “It could explain why we can go out for seafood, but seafood can’t go out for us.”  — Malcolm MacIver on our evolved ability to make plans Neuroscientist Malcolm MacIver’s study of electric fish explains a lot about how all fish think — and all humans, too.  The electrical currents employed by these distant cousins of ours to understand their surroundings allow MacIver to measure how far into the future fish are able to plan. Not very, as it turns out. Electric fish can’t see more than a few centimeters in the murky waters they swim in, so their brains have evolved to think no more than a few milliseconds into the future. That gives them just enough time for an instinctual response when prey, predator or obstacle gets close enough to matter, but nothing else. In that kind of environment, deliberation is a luxury, not a survival advantage, so fish have evolved a reflexive kind of brain, optimized for speed and devoid of planning. Evolution didn’t bother with the more complex cognition that planning requires because the aquatic environment of fish didn’t reward it. Fish that climbed up on land, however, eventually evolved the ability to see the Moon, the Sun and beyond. Over millions of years, land-based fish were naturally selected for better eyesight because it’s easier and more useful to see through air than it is through water.  It wasn’t just their eyesight that improved, though — it was their ability to think, too. MacIver argues that the expanded vision available on land created a selective advantage for planning and abstract cognition.  In other words, thinking ahead is useful on land in a way that it’s not in water — so the fish that climbed…

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Filed under: News - @ July 7, 2025 10:21 pm