You may have heard a sci-fi movie reference “intelligent extraterrestrial life” or seen artificial intelligence mentioned on the news. But what does it really mean to be intelligent? What is that secret quality that allows us to think and construct with our minds? As it turns out, that secret quality is something profoundly important to society. It is the foundation of civilization, the beginning of thought and something that continues to evolve to this day.
When it comes to figuring out how intelligence and cognition evolved, the answer is neither simple nor concrete. There are many different theories about how and why we think the way we think today. One such theory is presented in the book “In the Light of Evolution: Volume IV: The Human Condition” by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The NAS presents two hypotheses based on the idea of a “cognitive niche.”
The term “biological niche” refers to the specific role of an organism in their greater ecosystem. The idea of the cognitive niche extends this concept. The cognitive niche is what allows humans to be inventive, creating things that grant advantages in hunting and foraging like tools, traps and weaponry. It also allows us to extract poisons and drugs from plants and animals and create hunting plans with other people. Put simply, the cognitive niche enables us to create a construct of reasoning within our ecosystem and work within that. With the help of this idea of the cognitive niche, each individual acts as a single unit for the collective benefit of the entire group.
Different parts of the cognitive niche are consistently tested and refined through the process of problem solving. This gives humans a significant advantage over other animals. While other species wait for reproduction to spark evolution, humanity can more efficiently switch or alter strategies and tools to better their chances of survival.
The cognitive niche is related to multiple unusual or hyper-developed traits possessed by humans that can be related to intelligence. The NAS highlights three such traits: “Technological Know-How,” “Cooperation Among Nonkin” and “Grammatical Language.”
The “Technological Know-How” trait is all about the different tools that humans create. Tools and procedures can be discovered by individuals and shared amongst groups in order to navigate situations best. Such things are evolutionarily advantageous because the ability to cook or extract toxins from foods, for example, helps minimize sickness while maximizing available nutrients.
“Cooperation Among Nonkin” refers to interactions between groups of highly intelligent animals that lead to individual or societal evolution. Humans exchange goods, information, favors and loyalty. We also act in coalitions and organizations to magnify our impact and increase our survivability. There are a variety of prerequisites to cooperation among animals, such as the ability to recognize individuals or the possession of moral standards, both of which are highly developed in humanity.
On the note of “Grammatical Language,” it, too, is something that is unique to humans. We have hundreds of thousands of words that we rearrange into sentences and use to communicate key information. The average English speaker can make 1020 distinct sentences. This allows humans to communicate in ways that are unique and specific to them, which is not possible for most other animals. Communicating information or teaching someone how to do something is an immensely beneficial skill, both for yourself and for others. It also enables us to share the tools that aid our survival, as well as cooperate effectively.
Other unusual traits, such as our large range of habitats may also be explained by the cognitive niche. While humans have undergone local evolution to adapt to their specific environment, it is largely the tools and clothing that specific groups have developed so they can live in specific conditions. For example, many desert dwelling cultures wear head scarves to protect from the sun and sand while the ancient norse‒who lived in much colder climates‒tended towards furs and such.
Some other unique traits we have include our prehensile hands which we evolved from living in trees and our bipedality. Combined they grant us an elevated degree of precision allowing us to effectively use our tools and weaponry.
Additionally, our ancestors’ opportunistic diet included high amounts of meat. Meat provided them with proteins beneficial to brain development that gave them a larger cognitive capacity to hunt and pass on the traits that helped them survive
But how did simple concepts like communication and tools turn into the understanding of larger abstract concepts? There are a variety of things we as humans fail to grasp. Something that we are really bad at understanding, for instance, is how big large numbers are.
Additionally, according to the NAS, our “morality is a mixture of intuitions of purity, authority, loyalty, conformity, and reciprocity, not the generalized notions of fairness and justice that we identify with moral reasoning,” showing how combinations of logical thinking can create the illusion of more abstract thought.
We also can engage in abstract thinking through the use of logical metaphors. For example, we often use words related to space and force that do not really make sense. The word “went,” for instance, can be used to describe a change in position but it can also be used to describe a change in state. The sentence, “A went from X to Y” can be interpreted as either A was at X and traveled to Y or it was X and now it is Y. We apply words like “went,” which are largely used in reference to position, to instances of an object or person changing their status.
Once we have a good idea of how intelligence might have evolved in humans, we can take a look at how humans developed intelligence in machines, otherwise known as artificial intelligence (AI). Most people place the “birth of AI” around the mid 1950s. However, the concept itself is much older; it actually originated in science fiction.
Many people believe “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley to be the first instance of AI,as the book is about a human-made, intelligent being.
However, AI has evolved far beyond what Shelley could have ever imagined. In our modern day, AI can organize and analyze data as well as generate images and simulate human conversation. However, AI is not actually intelligent. It is limited to using only the data it is trained on, it can not acquire its own information and it does not authentically understand the data it is engaging with.
Overall, the journey of intelligence is long and storied, and there is still much to explore. What we do know is that language and data are deeply intertwined with intelligence. The only step forward is to do with our intelligence what our ancestors did: pursue wisdom, seek innovation and share our findings in such a way that benefits humankind.
