Evolution of Intelligence More Complex Than Once Thought

palegray.net writes "According to a new article published in Scientific American, the nature of and evolutionary development of animal intelligence is significantly more complicated than many have assumed. In opposition to the widely held view that intelligence is largely linear in nature, in many cases intelligent traits have developed along independent paths. From the article: 'Over the past 30 years, however, research in comparative neuroanatomy clearly has shown that complex brains — and sophisticated cognition — have evolved from simpler brains multiple times independently in separate lineages ...'"

Comments

Re:You kid, but...

[slim]

. as if following some pre-determined path to a completed, human state.

Or, as if there are a limited number of adequate solutions to the problem 'control a bunch of muscles in order to survive in a three dimensional environment in which other organisms are trying to do the same thing'.

It seems like what we're seeing is that *if* a species randomly goes down the brain route, it'll either die out, or develop a brain very like other brains. Note that many organisms survive very nicely with no brain at all. Where's their "pre-determined path to a completed human state"?

What's the difference?

[jambox]

So the upshot here is that the intelligence of any given creature is not a function of it's size or age (in evolutionary terms) but is very tightly geared towards the problems it likely faces in it's natural environment.

For example, even a spider can do quite tricky maths in order to work out how to spin a web between arbitrary fixed points, yet is completely flummoxed by even the simplest general knowledge quiz.

So what I want to know is, what was it about human beings that caused us to develop the capacity to drive cars, build computers and walk on the moon?

Re:What's the difference?

[GrahamCox]

I guess what I meant was there isn't any maths going on that we would recognise as having anything to do with finding the intercept between two curves. There sure is a lot of visual processing going on that is breathtaking in its capability, but however that works it's unrelated to the usual method of solving intercepts!

One observation I made many years ago led me to realise that we mostly underestimate what even small brains routinely do. I was watching a hovering seagull while waiting at some traffic lights. It was scanning the road surface below for a few seconds, then swooped down and picked up the tiniest speck of food from the tarmac. This was on a busy city street with lots of litter and other debris on the road, such as small stones and gravel, cigarette butts, etc. The tarmac itself presented a "noisy" image background and yet the gull picked out that speck as being worth expending its energy on from a height of 30 or so feet while maintaining balance in flight in a gusty high wind with a lot of moving traffic around. The image processing required to do that boggles my mind! So much for bird-brains.

It's not such a leap to suppose that intelligence, whatever it is, is far more common than we assume. What counts as intelligent for a dog, cat or even a bright bird like a Magpie is probably not something we'd really recognise. Every creature's intelligence is uniquely its own.