An exceedingly long time ago, I went to Sussex University for an interview to read physiology and was offered a conditional place. I subsequently lost interest in a career in the sciences and instead became a lawyer. I remember, however, that one of the interviewers was John Maynard Smith, a rather famous (and scruffy) biologist. He was known for his development of the field of mathematical evolutionary biology and his work has just featured in an article in Philosophy Now written by someone called James Miles.

Its subject is the limits of intelligence. Miles tells us that Professor Smith had analysed the various stages of biological advancement over the last 4 billion years and concluded that there were 8 key turning points, starting with the move from an RNA world to DNA.

This was followed by the transition from prokaryotic cells to the more efficient eukaryotic cells, and then the transition from asexual to sexual reproduction, so allowing greater variation. His seventh major evolutionary transition was the genetic change that allowed some species to live cooperatively in large colonies.

High intelligence coupled with the use of language was Maynard Smith’s eighth and last evolutionary transition.

The article though tells us that our average human intelligence is as good as it gets. According to Miles, we’re not going to get another leap in intelligence and no alien will ever do better than us. He says that the limit on our intelligence is because we are no longer wholly or mainly dependent on family groups. “Groups of one hundred family members [have] become non-family groups of thousands or hundreds of thousands. Family survival units have become states and nations”... “this means that in our culture there’s now no longer anything for natural selection to operate on – which means there is no natural selection pressure to get smarter.”

But of course there is something for natural selection to operate on - at the all-important level of the individual. The genes of the individual best able to attract a mate and make provision for the resulting offspring will be more likely to be transmitted.

Intelligence is a trait we have in varying degrees and which contributes to desirability: a person of higher intelligence is more likely to be successful in an increasingly complex world and so more attractive to a potential mate. Although he claims that Darwin’s reasoning supports his conclusion, Darwin says the exact opposite in his ‘Descent of Man’, 2nd edition, Chapter V “Intellectual Facilities” - pages 195 – 199 and 209 - 210 (see below). Darwin is clearly of the view that intellect is and always has been an important heritable and selectable trait, just like physical strength was until relatively recently.

Just as important for our success as a species however, is that, in the view of another famous biologist, Stephen Jay Gould, although we do fight amongst ourselves, we are ‘a remarkably genial species’ as compared to our nearest relatives - chimpanzees and other primates. The primatologist Frans de Waal, tells us that chimpanzees, although living in groups and co-operating to a certain extent, live in “a world without compassion”.

Our ‘geniality’, much more developed than that of our primate ancestors, has lead to the possibility of a social order which enables us to share thoughts and discoveries.

A recent article in the New Scientist highlighted the fact that even 50,000 years ago our ancestors were making tiny arrowheads which would have enabled the much safer hunting strategy of killing animals at a distance. This weaponry, found in France, seems to have arisen through humans sharing information via a vast social network – arrowheads of precisely the same design have been found in Lebanon. The widespread adoption of such tool-making techniques made us more efficient.

And, although by no means consistent over time, it is something we see on an ever-increasing scale today. Inventions even in the once isolated and secretive Japan now very quickly hit the market in Europe and are incorporated into our way of life.

As for the origin of our unexpectedly compassionate nature, I would suggest that it comes from a number of different sources. The first is the meme of belief in a form of morality, which, however misconceived, limits our perceived right to kill others or steal from them.

And then there is the meme of our belief in freewill which enables praise to work as a reward for actions beneficial to others and blame to work as a disincentive where we do things judged by society to be wrong.

Our human social order has also promoted another factor – we have had the intelligence to see that cooperation, rather than antagonism, is likely to get us more of what we want and need. I would think that this, although starting with group hunting activities, would have gained more traction when we started to till the soil and lived in larger communities.

Yet another meme has grown over the millennia: it is belief in an increasingly sophisticated legal system as the better means of settling differences rather than engaging in blood feuds and a criminal law which seeks to penalise the worst excesses of antisocial action. That this is deeply ingrained in us is shown by the fact that our fear of crime and our assessment of the amount of crime going on is out of all proportion to reality.

I don’t think chimpanzees look at life in quite the same way.

There is then the underlying question of what we mean by intelligence. Yes, it is a capacity to reason, but it necessarily includes an ability to see links between things. If we were to take a computer-based analogy to this, then we would be looking at having access at super-fast speed to vast amounts of data, data which had very extensive labelling of the items concerned so that we could connect things together both rationally and creatively.

But then, it all depends what we actually want to achieve with our rationality, our intelligence. And this is governed ultimately by our emotions – including those psychological flaws which affect our ability to arrive at sensible conclusions, such as the conflict between fast and slow decision-making and being loss-averse - more emotionally affected by a loss than by an equivalent gain.

Whilst not accepting that intelligence has reached its upper limit, or even that there is one, I do though wonder how things will progress.

There is a growing divide between those technically aware and the rest of us. We have Silicon Valley where the nerds tend to congregate - not only male nerds, but also female nerds. As a consequence, I would assume that there is a certain degree of interbreeding going on between them. If, as I assume, they are brighter than the average, then will we see the average intelligence of their progeny gradually increase? Will they ultimately form an outlying group of superior beings? Alternatively, how long will it take for their particular qualities to be made redundant by the software they are writing?

Then there is the question of the rate of reproduction amongst that group. We know that Elon Musk, who we must assume to be intelligent - despite his obvious lack of judgement in certain matters - has gone forth and multiplied, but I don’t know if that is normal for the inhabitants of Silicon Valley.

But what about the people who aren’t very bright? We know that half the population lies below the median IQ level of 100. And we also know that there are quite a lot of people above that level who don’t seem to be able to use their brains very effectively.

It has been interesting to see a significant increase in belief in such things as astrology and card-reading as belief in the standard religions has diminished. This indicates that the underlying and damaging credulousness is still there.

And in competition with such superstition, we now have even more extreme religion. We have just been told that construction between Coleshill and the M6 of the ‘Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer’ will finally start in 2025, each brick in the wall referring to an answered prayer. The definition of ‘answered prayer’ however is very wide, including prayers having an instant reply, one arriving some years later or even never - as in the case of a prayer to which the answer is ‘No’.

So then every prayer a winner and obviously no understanding that correlation is not causation.

27 October 2024

Paul Buckingham