I don't think it has much to do with evolution.

Training your brain and education is what it's all about. Of course not everyone will be able to do it in to the same degree but it's still a trainable skill, there are tons of methods out there to practice it.

I guess it can kind of be viewed as a hobby? More constructive than getting drunk for example...

A case like Daniel Tammet is hard to study since what he experience is very rare, synesthesia. He manages to use it to his advantage, he also has Aspergers syndrome, both which arent well studied yet.

Intelligence is the ultimate evolutionary tool, and it's most dangerous 'for obvious reasons'..
As for the apes.. We know we share a common ancestry with them by studying their dna and the fossilized remains of creatures that share many similarities with modern man and the great apes. The evidence is undeniable, no matter how much you may dislike it.

Originally posted by dontneedaname
....well somebody...tell me the evolutionary advantage of counting Pi to thousands of digits....

I'm not sure if you're serious or a troll. But really, you can't think of any advantages that being able to memorize things (not necessarily the digits of Pi!) brings to the table?

Originally posted by dontneedaname
"Modern Science" is the equivalent of the "Catholic Church of Galileo's time."

Did the Catholic Church of Galileo's time seek answers to questions via observations and repeatable experiments and revise its theories when they didn't agree with the results? To this day Catholic Church for example encourages people to pray. Why is this? Experiments have shown that prayers don't have any affect on reality. Science on the other hand is forever changing. When results don't agree with theories, theories are revised. It's called progress, and everything humans ever achieved is because of it. You think you'd have electricity or abundance of food if it wasn't for science?

The thing is, I actually agree with the OP, but the facts used are in no way relevant to the argument. As already pointed out, being able to remember things has a clear evolutionary advantage. If we replace the words 'digits of pi' with 'ears of corn' we can see why.

If you are going to argue against evolution then you will need to be a lot more sophisticated than that. I'm not going to do that because I do believe in evolution, but I also believe that there MAY be a direction to it. To say so is a 'faux pas' within Western mainstream thinking, but this is largely born out of a reflexive position to remove any hint or religion from the equation. This is understandable to a degree, but I think we should at least be able to consider the possibility of a direction, and also think that part the reason why it is so frowned upon is political. Basically, reductionist materialism is a necessary part of the propaganda that supports capitalism, consumerism and Western values generally.

Sometimes, there is not an evolutionary advantage to specific traits, but other traits associated with them.

Counting pi to thousands of digits, was not the result of a random mutation, and kept by natural selection. Instead, the way our brains work(designed for survival), that just happens to have that ability to count pi, did arise out of natural selection. Memory, Short Term, Long Term, association tendancies, abstract processing, all the stuff that leads to this are indeed evolutionary advantages.

Just like, there's no evolutionary advantage to plants for being green. However, chlorophyll is green, and there's an obvious advantage to having chlorophyll.

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Hypothetically, if there were a creator, I'm sure he didn't decide to make it so that some of us could do that on purpose. It'd still be the same case of him building a good system, with that ability to happen just a side result.

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Even if, there were no "Evolutionary Advantage" to this, despite the fact that there are. That wouldn't support creation. Something with no reason to evolve, would also have no reason to be created that way. So, it'd hurt the argument for a creator just as much, if not more, by showing something that wouldn't of been created that way. At least evolution has the defense of being imperfect and a variable of randomness, a creator would have no reason. Any reason a creator would see fit that we can't see, would also amount to an Evolutionary Advantage we can't see either.

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A real example of something that's not an Advantage. Would be like the blind spot in the center of all our eyes. No Intelligent Designer one would create like that. However, a Blind(Pun) Watchmaker may make mistakes along those lines.