Comment by vatsachak
"Animals experience pressure for a lot more "general" intelligence because of the highly multi-task and even actively adversarial multi-agent self-play environments they are min-max optimized within, where failing at any task means death. In a deep optimization pressure sense, LLM can't handle lots of different spiky tasks out of the box (e.g. count the number of 'r' in strawberry) because failing to do a task does not mean death."
Point to me a task that a human should be able to perform and I will point to you a human who cannot perform that task, yet has kids.
Survival is not a goal, it is a constraint. Evolution evolves good abstractions because it is not chasing a goal, but rather it creates several million goals with each species going after it's own.