A Genius for Stupidity, from Ralph Vince
It takes a lack of intelligence to leap to higher intelligence. I've written about this and demonstrated it mathematically. The decisions early humans made were not well-founded by criterion we examine decision-making with today, although we make dozens of decisions, innately, every day along those same lines — it's how we are wired. Our poor decision-making has been our genius — the monkey who plays roulette and wins a banana.
Had it not been for this, we would still be cowering agoraphobically in the shadows of a primeval world.
Similarly, and this is not addressed in drakes equation, higher intelligence, at least the kind required to have formed on earth, requires, initially, a poor (or, when viewed in another light, brilliant) sense of decision making which is not evident in the conventional methods we employ in modern decision making.