See for example and for comparison.
Gabora, L., & Russon, A. (2011). The evolution of human intelligence. In R. Sternberg & S. Kaufman (Eds.),The Cambridge handbook of intelligence (pp. 328-350). doi:10.1017/CBO9780511977244.018
Article A theory of intelligence: networked problem solving in anima...
Preprint A human's rate of thought without language
Literature about human intelligence often focuses on the evolution of the human brain. But the theory of intelligence and rate of thought articles mentioned above suggest that networking plays a more significant role. In that view, language is a means for harnessing the vast energy and neuronal resources of networked brains, permitting transmission, reception storing and reprocessing of ideas originating in one brain or one group of brains by another brain or group of brains.
What evidence supports the two alternatives? Do the alternatives both figure in the answer?
Jeff Hawkins’ admirable book A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence was published earlier this year a few days after my book An AGI Brain for a Robot. Both of us attribute intelligence to predictive processes using extensive models of the world learned continuously from the body’s sensory-motor interaction with the world. Jeff’s neuroscience viewpoint focuses on the columns of the neocortex and reference frames. My engineering approach details an Artificial General Intelligence to give a robot a human-like brain; it uses Fodorian modules and my Groups. A better understanding of intelligence is likely to come from both approaches, studying the human brain and giving robots human-like brains.
This is a great question and something I often ponder as my field of research is all about networking groups of human brains (Artificial Swarm Intelligence in humans).
On the evolutionary question, there is a terrific book, "Other Minds" by Peter Godfrey-Smith reviews the evolutionary processes that drive intelligence. While the book is not specific to human intelligence (it focuses on cephalopods) it makes a very strong argument that intelligence evolves in the presence of other intelligence. And this involves networking affects. In fact, he presents how brains formed in the first place from networking effects among very simple cellular organisms. It's a great book.
One of the confusing dichotomies in brain research is the "localisation" vs. "networking" discussion. We must remember that scientific theories are ONLY *hypotheses* that are pushed to their limits by their proposers. Yes, surely there ARE brain areas that perform specific functions but we have as yet no base model with which to classify these functions (that has stood the test of independent verification ho hummm...) And we are aware that "networking" takes place over amazingly large swathes of the brain but we don't really understand where the neighbourhoods begin and end (look at the amazing amount of networking that takes place WITHIN an eyeball before the signal punches out to the optic chiasma!!!!) And don't forget that even the adult human brain is PLASTIC, so interaction with the outside environment will modify the internal structure.
I like this question and the responses. I would like to say that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is part of the basic training that we linguists receive. Taking this idea further, is language a manifestation of cognitive complexity, or is cognitive complexity a manifestation of language?
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