Basal cognition: what is intelligence? (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, June 19, 2024, 12:24 (81 days ago) @ David Turell

QUOTE:"Intelligence does not refer to a single measurable trait or quality, but rather it indexes behaviours and capacities that have arisen at different times throughout our species’ evolutionary history...No surprise, then, that the traits recognisable to us as intelligence co-occur almost exclusively in modern humans.”
And later: “It is primarily a synonym for humanness.”

dhw: I’m aghast at the sheer arrogance of these statements, and at the assumptions that underlie the whole article. You are quite right to say that intelligence is difficult to define. “Behaviours and capacities” are what provide evidence, and if you start out with “traits”, you need to establish what those traits are. In your excellent book The Atheist Delusion, you quote James A. Shapiro, a champion of cellular intelligence, who pinpoints some of those traits: “Living cells and organisms are cognitive (sentient) entities that act and interact purposefully to ensure survival, growth and proliferation. They possess sensory, communication, information-processing and decision-making capabilities.”

dhw: Do you or do you not accept that these are traits denoting intelligence? And do you or do you not accept that non-human life forms demonstrate these traits?

DAVID: You are so aghast, because there are others unlike you who do not share your love of intelligence in lower forms. I am one of them. Beware of anthropomorphizing others' mental capacities. What looks intelligent can be the result of intelligent design providing intelligent responses to needs or changing environment.

This is not anthropomorphizing. The above attributes would have been present long before we came on the scene, as far back as organisms such as bacteria. Even you, in your more enlightened moments, put the odds at 50/50, which means it is perfectly possible for organisms that behave intelligently actually to be intelligent. Please tell us what attributes you would regard as indicative of autonomous intelligence.

Ant intelligence:

DAVID: Ants are amazing survivors all over the world. The entry today on intelligence would say they have evolved instincts for survival.

dhw: And anyone who knows anything about ants would say that their ability to communicate, solve problems, build complex structures, assign different roles within their societies, devise strategies to overcome obstacles and defeat predators etc. demonstrates intelligence.

DAVID: OR, intelligently designed instincts.

Once a problem has been solved, or a system or strategy works, then it will be passed on and repeated indefinitely and instinctively. I agree completely that all of these will originally have been intelligently designed. I just can’t understand why you think your God must have preprogrammed all of them 3.8 billion years ago, or must have been constantly training his crystal ball on every organism that ever lived and giving them all new instructions, or popping in to perform operations. The very fact that this process covers the whole of evolution (99.9% of which had no connection with your God’s one and only purpose) makes far more sense if – still in the context of theism – we assume that the intelligent design was done by the organisms themselves, and your God only provided the original ability to design. This would also explain why the 99.9% appeared and disappeared: their intelligence was not sufficient to overcome new requirements when conditions changed.Only 0.1% had enough (see Raup, who apparently calls them the lucky ones).