Can Animals Think Article By Eugene Linden Answer
The bones thought informing the plot of Eugene Linden'southward paleontological thriller Deep Past (2019) is neatly summarized in this snatch of dialogue: "X thousand years ago humans were just every bit intelligent every bit we are today, but our fabric culture was nearly non-real. Evolution produced human being intelligence in the blink of an eye; our material culture has developed in a nanosecond, geologically speaking. […] And then I'm thinking that if evolution produced intelligence in us, it might have done and then before, perhaps several times. Over tens of millions of years, a lot of things tin come and go and get out no trace" (84). (Adam Frank writes a fascinating article about precisely this topic for The Atlantic, merely he makes the the unjustifiable assumption that "intelligent" life prior to u.s. would accept been industrial – despite the fact that Man sapiens has been around for ~300,000 years and only merely got hooked on industrial modes of extraction and production very, very recently.)
Let'southward quickly gloss over the most relevant plot elements.
The protagonist, Claire Knowland, is an anthropologist specializing in animate being communication. She goes to work on a dig in Kazakhstan, searching for clues to the origins of horse domestication. Instead, she discovers paleontological evidence of a species of relatively advanced, technologically adept proboscideans (trunked mammals), dating back to 5.5 Mya. The evidence comes in the form of an array of petrified bones – which is to say, traces that point the intentional burial of the assortment, i.east., funerary practices, too as grave goods and even what looks similar a technological device, or totem, crafted in the shape of an archaic food object. By the terminate of the novel, the working hypothesis is that these proboscideans had become isolated during the Messinian salinity crisis in what is now the Kazakh Steppe, where they evolved cognitive abilities assuasive them to cultivate subsistence agriculture (in guild to survive the extreme desertification of their locale, at to the lowest degree temporarily), develop technologies, and then forth.
Throughout the novel, Linden (who has written extensively on creature intelligence since the 1970s, also as a quite interesting monograph about the disruptive effects of climate alter on civilizations) plays effectually with two big ideas.
The beginning is the thought that climactic or ecology instability might select for intelligence, which extrapolates from what sometimes gets chosen the cerebral buffer hypothesis. The cognitive buffer hypothesis posits that larger brains are correlated with an enhanced ability to navigate novel situations, which, in plow, increases the probability of survival in changing environments. Neuroscientist Reuven Dukas and biologist John M. Ratcliffe note that the cerebral buffer hypothesis is "the nearly general caption for the benefits of the evolution and evolution of large brains, proposing that a major advantage of a large brain is to produce behavioral responses that protect the beast from the vagaries of the environment." They add together, "The buffer office of the encephalon has the potential to generate 'autocatalytic' and positive-feedback processes that, although still not well understood, could advance brain evolution." (The cognitive buffer hypothesis isn't universally accepted, and you can read more about information technology here.) Here's the only newspaper Linden cites directly in the novel: Richard Potts, "Evolution and Ecology Change in Early Homo Prehistory," Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (2012): 151-67. For a quicker, more popular engagement, see Bill Andrews writing for Detect Magazine: "Did Ancient Climatic change Affect Human Development?" (2018).
Linden writes (via Claire): "'I call back about intelligence in evolutionary terms – what it does rather than what it is. […] I tend to think at that place are various kinds of intelligence – social intelligence or emotional intelligence, to name a couple – merely I'm assuming that most people focus on quantitative intelligence, the power to symbolically construct a model of the globe then manipulate that model through rules and laws in order to exist able to predict or influence events. […] When you lot think about it, the power to build those models reduces the risk to actually trying out different strategies or what take yous in the world. Instead of trial and fault – which can be fatal in the real world – you can exam or discard a lot of more than dissimilar approaches to a problem if you're doing information technology in the safe confines of a symbolic earth, than you ever might in the real globe" (108-09).
This leads directly to the second large idea or implication that Linden explores and peradventure even suggests – namely, that intelligence as nosotros know it is always a form of animate being intelligence. This can be read as a strong claim: all intelligence tin can be only animal intelligence, which is to say, only animals (in one course or another) can be intelligent. Or it can be read as a weak claim: all intelligence has been only animal intelligence, at least so far, or and then far as we know… (Here, perhaps, one might imagine feral and furtive AI, lurking in the depths of their own prehistory, hiding within camouflaged caves of encryption, painting model stick figures of the dangerous bipedal animals prowling around chaotic meatspace, just beyond the flickering, staticky illumination cast by digital fires.)
In either case, despite the fact that both versions of the claim fundamentally unsettle one of the basic assumptions of modern civilization – namely, that Homo sapiens is constitutively different than everything else in the universe, one style or some other (e.g., due to divine ensoulment, rationality, or technical control) – information technology seems like a claim like this necessarily attends and follows from the Darwinian revolution as such. On this view, intelligence, however else we might like to define it, is an adaptive strategy animals use to navigate their environments. There isn't annihilation terribly peculiar virtually it, in principle. Accordingly, if you find the idea that intelligence may take evolved before exotic or too farfetched, and then you lot may not yet accept come to terms with Darwin.
And if you lot call up Darwin's wild, wait until you hear about everything that comes next.
Source: https://www.michaeluhall.com/2020/10/20/intelligence-is-always-animal-intelligence-on-eugene-lindens-deep-past-2019/
Posted by: stevensonablents.blogspot.com
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