What Is Intelligent Life?

In our view, intelligence has inadvertently become a ‘human success’-shaped cookie cutter we squish onto other species.

While the outputs of intelligence may have changed over time, they continue to grab our attention because together they advertise fitness, and have been maintained across generations through adaptive social selection to ensure humans’ survival.

Intelligence does not refer to a single measurable trait or quality, but rather it indexes behaviours and capacities that have arisen at different times throughout our species’ evolutionary history.