Smarts: Thinking About Thinking

Dr. Tadeusz Kaweki, an evolutionary biologist at Switzerland's University of Fribourg, asked a thought provoking question. "If it's so great to be smart," he wondered, "why have most animals remained dumb?"

Since no other species seems smart enough to ask such a question, Dr. Kaweki and his human colleagues set out in search of answers (Globe & Mail, May8/08). They began by breeding a strain of fast-learning fruit flies and comparing them with ordinary fruit flies to find out which lived longer. On average, the smart fruit flies lived 15 percent shorter lives. "On the other hand," the researchers discovered, "fruit flies that had been selected instead for long life were up to 40 percent worse at learning than ordinary flies."

Dr. Kaweki could only speculate why intelligence seemed to interfere with longevity in fruit flies. Perhaps the negative effects were due to the physical strain of additional neuron connections or perhaps genes which allow learning to develop more quickly may displace other important survival attributes. But the research hinted that intelligence may not be all it claims itself to be. Clearly, this has disconcerting implications for the species that is supposed to be most generously endowed with the stuff.

Perhaps the most obvious answer to Dr. Kaweki's question is that species match themselves to the natural environmental niche where they have evolved to live. Their intelligence is linked to the circumstances that ensure their survival, so additional quantities of the stuff might be irrelevant or even disadvantageous. A mouse could be wasting time and energy speculating about Nietzsche's philosophy if its life depends on building safe nests and gathering seeds. Birds could be complicating their migration schedules if they engaged in long debates about whether or not their urge to fly was being motivated by flock angst or unfulfilled individualism.

Termites and bees seem to have developed the collective intelligence to function in complex and sophisticated ways necessary to their role in the biological order of things. By remaining within narrow limits of specialization, these species have kept themselves viable for millions of years. Some ant species have been successfully farming fungus for about 50 million years without licensing their product to subsidiary insect colonies, trading shares on the open arthropod market or proliferating into multi national corporations. Cockroaches seem to have reached the pinnacle of evolutionary development some 150 million years ago and have found no profit in improving.

If Dr. Kaweki's findings are correct, intelligence does not necessarily refine and hone a species' behaviour to greater viability. Indeed, more intelligence can catapult a species into behaviour that is unfit for the environmental circumstances in which it finds itself. If its smarts are not smart enough to activate constraints when it recognizes the trend or if the intelligence is not capable of leaping the species into a wholly new niche of sustainability in the biological schema, then it finds itself in trouble.

As a species, this is roughly where humanity finds itself these days. After hundreds of thousands of nomadic years as successful hunter-gatherers, we have scaled the ladder of our own intelligence to build a global civilization that is truly astounding in magnitude and complexity. But we are now confronting the predicament that Thomas Homer-Dixon calls "the ingenuity gap" — our challenges could be outreaching our ability to solve them. Many philosophers are now asking if our intelligence is capable of thinking its way through the predicaments we have invented for ourselves.

Fortunately, our Intelligence is self-reflective. That is, we know that we know, and we are becoming increasingly aware of the limits of our knowing. We also know the potential of our knowing, so we are capable of making conscious choices about our behaviour, of anticipating consequences and of choosing a course that is most likely to offer viability for ourselves and for the ecosystems on which we depend.

But smarts — like Smarties — come in different colours and flavours. Whose smarts do we follow?

We've tried a few varieties in the past, with mixed results. We've followed the advice of hunters, and this has kept us alive for millennia. We've faintly heard mystics and shamans, although we've generally revered but disregarded them along with the intuitive wisdom of artists. Religions and their priests seem to have provided potent insights for a while but their spells don't seem so relevant in our modern age. Most of our politicians are not inclined to be visionary, preferring to follow rather than lead. Economists have turned the world into a marketplace where everything can be bought and sold at a price — not a wise strategy when the things of greatest value cannot be priced. Industrialists are too rapacious and self-serving. So this seems to leave us to consider scientists.

In many ways, scientists have become the seers of our day, environmental visionaries who are measuring the health of our planet and interpreting it for us. Collectively, using their intelligence to gauge the effects of our behaviour and anticipate consequences, they seem to know what we are doing to the world's ecologies. We should attend to their assessments and warnings. In history's memory of us, it would be nice if we were recalled as a species that did not become too smart for its own good.