Chaos and cause

Intelligence is not central to the success of most life on Earth. Consider the grasses: they’ve flourished across incredibly diverse global environments, without planning or debating a single step. Planarian worms regrow any part of their body and are functionally immortal, a trick we can manage only in science fiction. And a microscopic virus effe... See more

The things we call intelligence have transformed us from small, slow, physically weak apes to the solar system’s most lethal apex predators. However, when we ask whether other animals are intelligent, we’re not usually asking what capacities or kinds of bodies were advantageous in their evolutionary past. We’re really asking whether they do things ... See more

Instead of a measurable, quantifiable thing that exists independently out in the world, we suggest that intelligence is a label, pinned by humanity onto a bag stuffed with a jumble of independent traits that helped our ancestors thrive.