Pedro Lilienfeld

For many years, on and off, I have pondered about what I think is an unresolved question which I will pose in what follows. Considering the normally slow pace of Darwinian evolution we must assume that Homo sapiens, say 100,000 years ago, had fully evolved into what he/she is today, both physically and mentally. If time travel were possible, we could have taken a new-born human baby from that remote past time, brought it to the present and bring it up in the midst of a typical family, this human time-transplant should be indistinguishable from the average contemporaneous person. This human being should be able to become, for example, a notable physicist and even be able to garner a Nobel prize, or achieve a chess championship.

Given the above scenario, the corollary is that some of the Homo sapiens coming out of the African savannah had all the requisite intellectual armamentarium to be a Newton, an Einstein or a Kasparov. Based on that conclusion, here is my quandary: Why was that highly advanced mental capability required for the survival of our remote hunter/gatherer predecessors? Or, Why did evolution result in such an apparent intellectual overkill? After all, other primates have survived and evolved during that period without such superior capability.

In this context, it is of interest to cite AI’s “reasoning”:

“Our remote hunter-gatherer predecessors required advanced mental capabilities primarily because they survived by navigating complex social dynamics and unpredictable environments, rather than relying on physical strength”. In addition, the following breakdown of factors is listed:

“Social Complexity and Cooperation:

• Tracking relationships: Managing complex tribal hierarchies.
• Detecting cheaters: Identifying individuals who took resources without contributing.
• Fostering alliances: Forming strategic partnerships for group protection.
• Developing language: Sharing intricate information about threats and resources.

Environmental Adaptation:

• Mapping territory: Remembering vast landscapes, water sources, and seasonal pathways.
• Predicting nature: Understanding animal migration patterns and plant life cycles.
• Tool innovation: Designing, crafting, and refining complex hunting weapons.
• Risk assessment: Weighing the dangers of a hunt against nutritional rewards.

Cognitive Flexibility:

• Mental simulation: Planning hunts safely before execution.
• Rapid problem-solving: Adapting instantly to sudden climate shifts.
• Information transmission: Passing survival knowledge down across generations.”

Assuming the preceding AI arguments indeed summarize the relevant consensus about this question, I will address them in what follows.

My principal and general objection to the rationale adduced by AI is that almost none of the reasons presented for the need of advanced mental acuity of stone-age mankind can be uniquely attributed to our species. Many other animals have relied — and continue to do so — on those factors listed by AI. The exceptions to such common requirements, unique to our species, would be: language development, tool innovation and information transmission. In my view, however, none of these requirements would have been needed the enormously superior mental capacity evinced by Homo sapiens a hundred millennia ago. Language, for example, was an emergent capability whose present complexity would not have been required that long ago.

I would suggest that most aspects under the rubric of environmental adaptation, social cooperation, and cognitive flexibility listed above would have been and are survival requisites of other mammal species that live in groups such as great apes, wolves, and even orcas. None of these species even approach the level of intellectual abstraction that was reached by Homo long ago and yet have survived and thrived throughout the millennia.

To further make my point, I would submit that if Homo sapiens had not been endowed with its extraordinary level of intelligence, and be limited, for example, to that of chimpanzees, our species would still have likely survived for those thousand centuries.

In my mind, this conundrum leads to the possible conclusion that highly advanced intelligence, of the level that our species has attained, is not a life’s evolutionary inevitability, a proposition that I reached in my essay on extraterrestrial intelligence entitled “Where Are They? Are We Alone? when comparing the divergent evolutionary path followed by mammals in Africa and South America.