Anne Buchanan has a nice post at The Mermaid’s Tale reviewing two recent stories about intelligence. She summarizes an important point about intelligence, evolution and the brain:
But let’s step away from the politics for the moment, and think about what our particular view of evolution might have to offer here. Specifically, the idea that seems fairly obvious, that evolution has been consistently good at producing adaptability. Over and over and over again, so much so that it seems to us to be a fundamental principle of life, organisms have been imbued with the ability to detect, evaluate, and adapt to changing circumstances. So, to us, it’s no surprise that our brains, too, can respond to changing circumstances, can respond to environmental challenges by, say, building new neuronal synapses. It would be more surprising if it couldn’t. And changes in the brain can involve non-cognitive as well as cognitive intelligence — that is, it need not involve consciousness as it often does in humans and presumably other animals.
Intelligence is difficult to define outside of its relationship to a specific outcome. As such, it is also an incredibly complex phenotype. Complex phenotypes are very unlikely to manifest themselves in a fixed manner.
