The Evolution of Intellect: A Brief Account

Abstract

Organisms depend for their survival on luck and on their capacity to extract predictive rules from their own personal environment to supplement whatever innate response tendencies they were endowed with. This capacity I call “intellect” which is here a technical term applicable to all organisms. To complete the evolutionary project it will be as necessary to show how human intellect evolved from that of lower animal species as to account for human bodily structure in the same terms. The first task of intellect is to extract predictive rules from the environment – this is possible, in principle, because the external world is law-governed. The organism does this first on the basis of its successful predictions and, in mammals, on the basis of unsuccessful predictions as well. The mammal has evolved the capacity to have in mind a goal object, enabling it to perceive when the object is not present in its perceptual field as well as when it is. Possession of a mental goal object vastly increases the mammal’s predictive power and provides a foundation from which the human conscious mind can evolve. Only the human organism has evolved a capacity to form second order (internal) links between patterns of activity in the central nervous system, as well as first order links between such patterns and states of the external world (possessed by all organisms). Second order links permit language, self-awareness, hypothetical reasoning and many other specifically human capacities but they all appear to require no more than quantitative increases in the complexity of interconnections in the central nervous system.