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I can only think people believe this because they've internalized some kind of balanced RPG stat rolling system and think the actual world works like that. In RPGs for balance reasons you often have things like strength trading off for agility/dexterity/speed. This makes sense in games you want to be fair because it allows for specialization. But in reality strength comes from well built muscles and speed comes from well built muscles and dexterity comes from well built muscles and agility comes from well build muscles. Life does not care even a little bit about fairness, the balancing mechanism is that the weak are culled and their gene lines end. There is no evidence that intelligence is trading off of anything else, at least not since food became so abundant that providing too much power to a brain could be calorically unsustainable. Smart people may handicap themselves through behavior for some culture reason but it's not an inherent quality of being smart and I can think of few survival situations where intelligence is anything but a boon.
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