Basically, evolution has only one goal, which is survival. All other aspects are simply human interpretations. Even that goal may be interpreted, as evolution may more deselect bad things than select good things. In this sense intelligence could just be a by-product, which does not decrease the chances of survival. However, I would argue that intelligence is extremely important for survival. On the other hand, there are many bacteria having survived hundreds of millions of years, and we would not attribute a lot of intelligence to them...

I feel there is something more than survival in evolution. Even if we argue survival is best answer, why organisms needed to survive in first place? Well we can give numerous explanations to why we need to survive- fame, luxury, enjoyment, family etc. But what about the single cell organism? What motivates it to survive? Will it matter to them if a whole species of single cell organism perish?

I feel evolution happens for more fundamental reasons than survival and intelligence is a way in achieving it.

Sometimes I have the feeling that THIS kind of evolution failed somehow....sometimes....by someone. (excluded from this are people writing here ;) )

As usual, discussions like these tend to get philosophical rapidly..;-) The offspring are survival, because without offspring a species will not survive., And yes, organisms do not need to survive, it just happens that these survive, which survive. In this sense evolution is tautologic. The problem is that we always say "evolution wants this or that". Evolution wants nothing, it just happens.

As Helmut point out, evolution does not have a goal. In fact, Darwin's seminal book "The origin of species by means of natural selection" (1859) was put into the Roman Index. The reason is that Darwin's book - theory is one the few theories that are non-teleological in the history of mankind. Living beings do not go anywhere, they just enhance as they can survival. Those species that get to satisfy the demands and conditions of natural selection are the fittest. And yet, the fittest does not can the best - certainly not from a moral point of view, f.i.

We can broaden up a bit the discussion about evolution mentioning that natural selection is not the unique mean that explains evolution. Darwin himself says that in the Introduction to his book. Several other explanations have been provided that do not alter the non-teleological character of evolution.

My answer would be that intelligence doesn't exist in physical/biological reality. Intelligence seems to be a mental model, a human conception, to represent a wide range of linked adaptive behaviours and traits. Each trait or behaviour, and their combination together in particular individuals, allowed for the genes for the trait to be passed on successfully, and to become widely spread among our ancestral populations.

For an old debate: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00054984

I believe true intelligence came from the ability to use tools, learn and hypothesis test. Even a gold fish has a similar ability to hypothesis test with enough training (learning) The bringer of food is the trigger and the behaviour is to swim to the area where food is to be expected, ultimately allowing the goldfish that does this behaviour to eat more and better quality food. Yes this is one trigger for a single behavioural outcome, but now if you extrapolate (many many species on) this to homo sapiens with respect to scientific thinking and hypothesis testing being key to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

The hunter-gatherer of yesteryear would have employed a similar hunting strategy to bushmen of today. They do not undergo an active full energy hunt. They began chasing an animal; the animal would then run away, often out of sight. scientific thinking is needed here to pickup environmental triggers and cues to extrapolate upon where they could expect the animal to have run to. They then jog at a reasonable pace to catch up with the animal and where they expected it to be and continue the process of the animal seeing them and running away and them formulating a hypothesis and testing it. Ultimately tiring the animal out (as well as the animal over-heating), to the point of collapse at which point the hunters catch up and kill their prey. If they were successful this would mean more food and ultimately the ability to sustain a larger group of individuals. One also needs to understand these hunts would need to be coordinated, and communication is very necessary, as well as the obvious ability to run bipedally to increase the area of view for the hunter to pick up more cues, as well as having bipedal jogging being more energy efficient.

Like Jonathan Moore said, it is an amalgamation of many behaviours that have led to intelligence. At what point you call it intelligence is debatable. For me the ability to act upon a cue for a perceived outcome would be intelligence, even in the case of a goldfish. When it comes to the term intelligent life perhaps a more strict concept should be accepted where hypothesis testing takes place where at least 3 to 5 cues or triggers are able to be processed resulting in a number of behaviours to fulfill a single goal. This also coupled with the ability to communicate and leading to the ability to teach and learn the "techniques" in absence of the original cues. This would then be true intelligence.

@Artur sorry, I don't see the inconsistency in what I said. I said I think intelligence does not exist in physical/biological reality, but only exists as an idea in the minds of humans. We have created a mental model of the world, including a convenient entity called 'intelligence', which fits our available data, but I think we may have overfitted.

I guess this brings about a reframing of the question - why did the idea of intelligence evolve?

My answer would be that the idea of intelligence survived among the meme pool of ideas because it has a strong ability to be propagated. This may be because people 'like' the idea of intelligence because they can apply it to themselves and it gives them a sense of superiority over other organisms. The intelligence meme also gives people a rationale for killing and eating other organisms which they regard as less intelligent.

I think that there are some kind of intelligences. They evolve according to the human needs by learning or by experiences.

The inteligence is reaction to the need for interaction with the environment, which is moderated by the evolution. It is questionable if intelligence is solely an attribute of organisms equipped with neuronal system. Also bacteria able to react swiftly to the supstrate change and thus able to utilize more than one source of energy are inteligent. However their knowledge is not stored in neuronal circuits of oscillating ionic currents but directly into their DNA. We humans can also do that. So what is the difference? If the question about intelligence is really not semantic but rather unspecific, I would redesign to: "How did the inteligence in organisms with neuronal system evolve?", or "How/why did the neuronal system evolve?".

Complexity of a neuronal system is equivalent to the interaction complexity between the organism in question and its environment. It is reasonable that social organisms beside the information about how to act and react on individual level also need the set of information for the social level. Contrary to that individualists don't need knowledge related to social interactions. Individualists only need the way to synchronize their activities when they reproduct and that is all about their sociaty related features. The intelligence requirements raise exponentially when the mating requires interaction, when organism is K-strategist instead of r-strategist and when the society has hierarchy like structure (social mammals) unlike simple bunch of organisms (bacterial colony). Especially the hierarchical nature of society stimulates development of abstract thinking, because it is fairly mathematical. Individualistic predators tend to develop sensory capacities. Social non-predators tend to develop abstraction (would you call this intelligence?). Social predators (like orcas e.g.) are nasty 'beasts' capable of many things. I simplified the division to stress the factors, which are combined and rather continuously scaled between none and full impact.

Examples:

1) human for social competence: most complex social structure amongst the species on Earth

2) my favourite Mantis shrimp (Gonodactylus smithii) for visual sensoric superiority: lives exclusively predatory

Dear All,

Intelligence evolved because of the need for teleological strategies for survival in view of interactions with environment. Its manifestations are at various levels.

Regards

Rajat

@Allen There is a difference between an opinion and a scientific argument. You can have all opinions you may have, but to claim that "evolution is unproven" without giving the slightest evidence for that statement is not a scientific approach. The same holds for the statement that there is no intelligence without God. This is at best a hypothesis, which needs verification. For this we would need a definiton of intelligence (which may be very difficult), and a definition of God (which is even more difficult, because after 2000 years of philosophical debates there is no proof for the existence of God).

On a side note, I am always puzzled by the radical objection of (Christian) religion to evolution. A slightly less naive perception of the act of creation could easily integrate evolution in religion. One would just have to view God as the creator of the concept of evolution, then, God creates everything by evolution, which im my view is fully consistent with the Bible, as it does not say how God created something...

@Artur: Sorry for participating too late. I have updated the question with the definition of intelligence.

(I think we are out of topic into debatable arguments. We are not here to prove anyone right or wrong as these have no absolute basis instead we should contribute to finding out the mystery.)

The main thing that hunts me is why we needed to survive (which is considered the basis of evolution). What is the motivation behind the survival? Does it follow the principles as stated in the question? If not what? Kindly answer on this direction

@Denny: I agree with you on the point you stated "if intelligence is solely an attribute of organisms equipped with neuronal system". Is nature too intelligent?

@ Artur: I see the intelligence as an ability to solve problems regardless of time frame and wouldn't mix it with self awareness. The "emotional intelligence", "mathematical intelligence", "social intelligence" and so on, are imho merely personality properties based on anthropocentric definition of intelligence. I would define intelligence as ability of a network to process data, an ability that can be quantified. A neuronal system is obviously network. But what is perhaps less obvious that the relationships within a species are also network connections. So for the family of web building spiders the reproductive selection was a factor in dependence of their metabolical needs and their environment but during acquirenment phase of the web building ability. Probably because the less effective web builders were less succeseful in getting offspring. Et voilà, there is a new spider family. So the connection btw. a female and a big builder was offspring promotional, where a small builder was furnished with less promoting connection, connection as a graph in mathematics. Consequently, the intelligence is property of multi-level mutli-directional graph, where interspecific layer (=species, DNA over reproductive selection) is the lowest one, intraspecifc layer (=individual, neuronal system if exists) is the middle one and the social layer is the top one (if exists).

My answer your question is:

yes, the cobweb is intelligent for his building abilities on the lower level only. But I have no means to quantify it to tell how intelligent he is.

Let me explain a case:

We have seen bees building bee hives in hexagonal form which is the best possible structure for maximum store honey. I believe we can consider this act as intelligence as it most efficient way of doing it (from the definition of intelligence from previous posts). If so, I have two questions for this:

1) This is just a coincidence that the intelligent way satisfies the minimum space principle stated in question?

2) Did the bees know already that the structure would take minimum space to store maximum honey? Or did it evolve to know this?

@Artur: The explanation of the definition of intelligence (which I believe) is :

Any action from the set of possible actions to a situation/problem which either

*has minimum energy or

*takes a least action (work) or

*consumes minimum space

boils down to be the intelligent way (best way) of solving that problem. If it is so then we can define intelligence as the way defined in the question. Assuming my hypothesis is true, then we have a quantitative definition of intelligence. So as we have a quantitative definition, we can build artificial intelligence. Hope my explanation is no more abstract to you. Any queries or comment about this is welcomed.

Dear Sai,

Intelligence need not confine itself to the three aspects that you are associating it with. Take for example, formula one racing and cricket matches under floodlights do not qualify to be called intelligent activities but they are indulged in by some of the most intelligent people having great expertise in those fields. One can cite many other examples like this. Look at how many pages Shakespeare wrote down to convey a simple massage in and through a play ! Surely not intelligent activity according to your AI definition !!

Regards

Rajat

@ Sai: I see it also that way, but would add after "consumes minimum space": where either the solution found can be sustained or the solution optimization is sustained as long as the need exists, respectively.

Vahid,

the universe is not interested in the question "why did the intelligence evolve?"... It has no interest at all ...

Artur,

I agree with you. Intelligence and intelligent behavior of bacteria, a group or swarm and individual (animals or human as a kind of animal) are very different things. We should narrow intelligence to an individual and its abilities and not to bacteria, insects or plants etc.

I think intelligence is an ability to act economical with energy, information, time and space. These are physical basics and therefore universal in the universe. If an evolutionary process is started it is inevitable that intelligent live will occur.

I really agree with Artur

Not every answer must be of high quality or strengthen the response of the author. However, I would prefer arguments against an anonymous (cowardly) devaluation.

As I have stated earlier Sai's definition is extremely restrictive and as such does not in any way comprehensively cover the phenomenon of intelligence or its ramifications. But there is as such no reason to say that bacteria etc. do not have intelligence. It may not be of the higher level as in humans but they do have intelligence.

@Vahid : As stated earlier, the definition is what i believe and which may be totally wrong.

@Artur: Maybe being an undergrad, its hard for me to accept the theories (as you know kids never go with obvious :p ) which are obvious for rest of all. But certainly the discussion like this will help in fulfilling my dream of giving an implementable physical existence to intelligence.

Artur,

I liked your very clear -cut responses in this thread. Things should have been settled much earlier than it has dragged on. Sai is a student and needs to be encouraged to think independently and at the same time needs also to be cautioned by people like you to think in a coherent and cogent manner.

Thanks and Regards

Rajat

Thank you everyone for your comments. If I ever come up with anything, will let you know. Thank you Rajat for understanding

I take this definition from wikepedia and I translate it as follow using google traduction :

Intelligence comes from the Latin intellegentia (ability to understand), derived from the Latin word intellegere which means "understand", and whose prefix inter (between), and mild group (choose pick) or ligare (link) suggest essentially the ability to link previously separate elements.

Intelligence is all the mental faculties to understand things and facts, to discover the relationships between them and lead to conceptual and rational knowledge (as opposed to the feeling and intuition). It collects in the ability to understand and adapt easily to new situations. Intelligence can thus be conceived as adaptability.

My point of view on intelligence evolution is related to the adaptability evolution of the human to a given situation. Obviously, today, the needs of human are very different comparing to the needs of human there are some centuries. Thus, the ability to responds to their needs involve the intelligence evolution in the objective to find some solutions to respond at their needs.

Just found this discussion - which seems to be about the term "intelligence" and henceforth on the agreements as to the word's meaning. If we use only the agreed definitions which are currently unsatisfactory (see some of the above). Then we can only make progress if we resolve the word's meaning (ie get agreement). One of the substantial facts about intelligence is that it appears to have evolved ie its a property to be found in varying degrees in an number of species but highly significant in one. Although the "one" is not entirely sure as to what it is, even though it was able to recognised it.