Is Intelligence Necessarily an End Result of Evolution?

Great Debates
21

This isn’t really true - while most smarter animals are mammels, birds can show some pretty impressive abilities, and even octopuses may have some intelligence. Nothing on the order of humans, of course, but it’s seems that intelligence (or at least the rudiments of it) probably evolved a couple of times.

I don’t see any reason why human level intelligence would be inevitable. It may offer a lot of advantages (high adaptability, accurate environmental modeling), but it comes with some trade offs (large energy chomping brain, long childhood).

22

Yes, but it doesn’t really matter as far as the point he’s making goes. A pack or herd or nation isn’t a hive, but they still do give enormous advantages over any lone creature.

23

No I don’t. Show me any species that has intervened and nurtured their sick and their weak and their mutant members into a reproductive stage in their lives. The social herds, caribou, bison, buffalo, zebra, wildebeast etc. all slough off their sick and weak to the predators.

24

Elephants.

25

Sabertooth tigers appear to have cared for their sick. They’ve found the bones of a sabertooth crippled by broken bones, which were partially healed; it couldn’t have hunted, which means it was being fed.

26

Octopi/dolphins/whales/wolves/raccoons any of these animals are considered smart enough to have a distinct advantage in their relative areas. the question is does that advantage continue to be the reason they survive? with humans you had whatever branch of monkeys we broke off of that were already smart but we were even smarter, then BOOM in a very short period of time we appear with giant brains and there is nothing that can compete with that. someone up thread mentioned that the dinosaurs would have wiped us out…I very seriously doubt that. big angry critters that could easily kill several humans at once arent exactly something the human race hasnt dealt with before. and I would bet a T-Rex makes a hell of a lot of cheese burgers.

27

Intelligence only helps us sidestep disaster (disease, asteroid, whatever) if two conditions occur:

  1. We develop civilisation and technology tot he point where we kick arse over everything
  2. We don’t kick our own arses with nuclear fire or environmental collapse

Chimps are intelligent, but I don’t think they could ever develop civilisation as they are. Humans existed a long time before we developed agriculture, the core to developing civilisation. Agriculture existed for a long time before the industrial revolution, probably the cornerstone of our ability to sidestep disaster.

And while we may think intelligence is the best thing for survival, nature disagrees. Intelligence only seems to arise when simple, basic instincts wont cut it. Consider the disadvantages - high energy costs, long time between birth and maturity, psychological issues (do bees get depression?), the extra weight from the brain, there are probably others. The only advantage is flexibility.

28

You’re right. I thought of that later after I wrote my post. I don’t think the biomass of social mammals is anywhere near as big a % as it is in insects.

However Pinker does say this in his book that the smartest animals tend to be social (parrots, bees, dolphins, elephants, wolves, sea lions and primates).

So I think that it is likely that social organisms will evolve due to the benefits of living in groups because groups can improve hunting, predator detection, predator defense, food gathering, creativity and mating chances. And once groups develop intelligence will likely evolve.

However there is a difference between intelligence and technology. For one thing an intelligent species may not be able to make technology either mentally or physically. And even if it can, it may not. Humans haven’t changed much in 200,000 years but we have only been using meaningful technology for about 300 years. So we have only been using and making technology for less than 1% of our history as a species.

29

Like the species Howardus Roarkus, for example.

30

It’s like that Emo Phillips joke: I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.

31

My first reaction was actually to change the question,

Is Intelligence Necessarily an End Result of Evolution?
To
Is our intelligence necessarily an end of our evolution?

I think that by possessing our level of intelligence we will not be able to actually evolve any further. We create and devise new technology faster than it is possible for evolution to help us any more, it takes evolution hundreds or thousands of years to make any real change and as we keep altering the goal posts it could not possibly keep up with us.

However to the OP i think you would have to consider the different levels of intelligence, enough to survive and enough to thrive for example. If a major worldwide disaster occurred how many of the teeming millions could survive without all of the mod cons we are used to? The simple fact is the majority of us would not be able to hunt food and maintain and grow food, or have the ability to learn how to quickly enough for most of us to survive and thrive. So we would be knocked down the evolutionary ranks quite quickly, whereas a simple field mouse would begin to thrive in days.

One of the problems with our intelligence is that to be great at something you have to learn specifics of that task and do not learn the things you do not need to know in today’s society. Whereas every animal learns everything it needs to survive.

I would therefore think that the matter of intelligence only applies to what the species needs to survive, so every species is just as intelligence as it needs to be in the current enviroment it finds itself in. The early humans therefore had to adapt to the hunting ability of dangerous animals, by merely making themselves not the easiest thing to eat. Which made us stay inside more often, which promoted finding ways to occupy time, which promoted thought.

As a bored caveman deciding to go for a walk at night would be a dead caveman, smarter ones at filling the time were more likely to survive thus we began the long separation from the animals in types of intelligence used.

and that’s my WAG IMHO

32

Evolution is inherently undirected and therefore has no end results. No idea about inevitability, how could you test that? However, intelligence (of the human type) combined with tool manipulation, and complex societies appears to be a, if not the, ‘killer app’. The first species to get all three becomes darn hard to dislodge from the top of the food chain and exerts truly enormous influence on the other animals. We are unmatched in terms of changing the environment to produce food and living area, controlling diseases and parasites, and using natural resources and other organisms for our own purposes.

The real test would be to see if we can survive a mass extinction and possibly avert the worst effects of such event on the rest of the biosphere. In my opinion, yes to the first and probably no to the second, since most are long, drawn out processes (by our reckoning, they are usually quite fast in geologic time), but none of us will live long enough to know.

33

It’s not necessarily an end result, but it is a likely one. Various evolutionary adaptations have arisen independently, often with very similar structures. So there’s plenty of evidence that extremely useful adaptations are likely to reoccur in any biological system. But although intelligence is useful, and some other species probably have an intelligence bordering on our level (cetaceans, certain squids, simians), the two adaptations that really made us dominant were language and tool making. So far we’re a little more unique in those respects, so it’s not clear whether or not they are as likely to evolve as intelligence alone.

34

Given the incredibly small amount of fossils from the Dinosaur eras(given the length of time that they existed )how do we not know that at least one branch became intelligent as we know it?

35

Not too much to add here, but for one humble reminder: we have a VERY small sample size here.

People talk about the length of time it took for life to evolve on Earth, how long it takes to evolve intelligence, etc., without remembering that’s how long it took on Earth.

On another planet, with different environmental factors, and different amounts of luck, who is to say that life couldn’t have evolved faster, or intelligence shown up sooner? Without having any other examples to study, it’s just as likely that these things would happen sooner, or with more prevalence, in other environments.

For example, as many posters have mentioned, being an evolutionary success does not require intelligence. But once a species is intelligent enough to manipulate its environment to its own advantage, then by definition that species will have a major, if not insurmountable, advantage over other species.

That said, a little bit of intelligence helps. A lot of intelligence may not-- the “destroy ourselves” problem at work. Again, without a larger sample size, we can’t assume the latter is an insurmountable challenge-- maybe other species on other planets develop intelligence, and for a variety of reasons they survive (luck, different social dynamics/tolerance for conflict/religious or moral beliefs, etc.).

Bottom line: we just don’t know how rare advanced intelligence really is, what the probabilities/conditions required are for it to show up. We do know, however, that it’s one hell of an advantage, and perhaps ultimately the only advantage that counts (as evolutionarily successful as the dinosaurs were, they couldn’t stop that asteroid, could they?).

36

There is not ‘End Result of Evolution’ so…no. Evolution doesn’t have a plan or a goal after all. And looking at most other successful species intelligence is not necessary at all and in fact is generally not even desirable, depending on the species reproduction strategy. It varies from species to species of course, and to a species like our own and our line it helped…but consider something like a shark or many of the most successful species of dinosaur.

-XT

37

At least one paleobiologist seems to think that intelligence is inevitable. Cambridge professor Simon Conway Morris gave a lecture in support of the proposition back in January:

He aparently emphasizes examples of convergent evolution to support his point. The full text of the lecture is not provided, but I suppose his argument would be that given an available evolutionary niche for an intelligent creature, an intelligent creature will evolve to fill that niche, in the same way that the icthyosaur and the dolphin followed a similar evolutionary path to fill a similar niche.

I suppose my critique of that would be to ask why an intelligent creature didn’t evolve (as far was we can tell) during the Triassic? Or the Jurassic? Or the Cretaceous? (Do we know that with certainty, by the way? How much fossil evidence would a briefly flourishing civilization leave? Our own civilization has lasted only a few thousand years. The blink of an eye in the fossil record. If we wiped ourselves out tomorrow, how much evidence would we leave behind, as a percentage of the overall fossil record, 20 million years from now?)

Interestingly, Dr. Morris does not seem to think his position argues for the likelihood of finding extraterrestrial intelligence:

38

It seems that while evolution has no "goal’ and is undirected, it does have a sort of trajectory - over time, there is an increase in the size and complexity of organisims. Thus, given enough time, it becomes more and more probable that something with humanlike intelligence will evolve.

39

Quite a bit, we’ve made a lot of large alterations to the landscape and shuffled materials around in highly unnatural ways. It wouldn’t be fossil evidence, but it would be there.

Now, a more primitive civilization or species, that would be another matter. They wouldn’t be reworking the landscape on our scale, and they might well be geographically limited in extent too. To use an old idea, if a primitive prehuman species developed in the basin of the Mediterranean while it was dry, finding anything left after so much time, in such a limited and inaccessible area would be chancy.

40

As some others above hinted, I don’t actually see intelligence as a very good survival trait. I would be very surprised if we were still around 50,000 years from now. Looked on the geologic scale I think “human technology” would be viewed as a major near-instantanious extinction event and humanity will be a failed species having only lasted a few hundred thousand years.