Intelligence: The Search for its Origins and the Story of its Struggles with the Myths it Inspires

About the Book

Two Professors from Boston, Walter B. Cannon, a physiologist at the Harvard Medical School, and Norbert Wiener, a mathematician at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, were pioneers in the intellectual breakthrough that opened the door to a naturalistic explanation of purposeful life and intelligence. Cannon’s book The Wisdom of the Body published in 1932 and Weiner’s work in Cybernetics introduced the concepts of organization and control into the biological and social sciences.

Cybernetics and Information Theory became new engineering disciplines. Computer programs were created that could duplicate many feats of human intelligence and the possibility of intelligent machines was explored. Alan Turing found it appropriate to devise a test that could be used to distinguish between the reactions of a man and those of a machine. The mathematician John von Neuman wrote a book entitled The Computer and the Brain. W. Ross Ashby published a book entitled Design for a Brain. In a little book entitled Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology Valentino Braitenberg described a world of goal-directed mechanical devices that could develop the skills of optimistic prediction. Douglas Hofstadter wrote a Pulitzer prize winning book that carried the subtitle: A Metaphorical Fugue on Minds and Machines in the Spirit of Lewis Carroll.

For the first time scientists became aware of the possibility that life and intelligence might have evolved directly and naturally from the complex interactions of the forces of nature. For creationists this was the ultimate heresy but for twentieth century scientists, steeped in the rationalism of the eighteenth century, it was not a religious issue. It was merely another possibility in their search for the laws and designs in a world of natural laws.

The biologists turned to the practical task of looking for the origins of intelligence in primitive creatures. The stimulus-response models of animal behavior gave them a tool for examining the reactions of biological organisms and for developing “black box” models of their decisions. Their studies of the adaptive behavior of animals and of their nervous systems identified mental memory as the key to the development of intelligence. Although the details of the psychological mechanisms required for the creation of mental memories are still largely unknown, the biologists of the twentieth century developed a plausible story for the evolution of animal intelligence. It is, however, a story that changed dramatically when one social species developed symbolic languages. From that point on, the story of the evolution of intelligence became a story of the cultural evolution of the human species.

The biological story of evolution has only one theme: survival. The emergence of intelligence, however, gave some of the survivors the freedom to enjoy activities that were not essential for their survival. It opened up a new world of imagination and dreams: a new world that was rewarding but dangerous. Primitive man in his hunger for security and certainty gave his leaders the rights and responsibilities of “gods.” But his leaders weren’t gods. As mortals, they lacked omniscience and were often guided by self-serving and malicious motives. In the authoritarian civilizations that evolved these “ruler-gods” became a force for both good and evil. As surrogates for natural selection, they became the dictators of cultural and intellectual matters and often held the life and death of their followers in their hands.

Mythology, magic and religious beliefs are found in all primitive cultures and, until they are replaced by better ideas, they are our guides to the unknown. They are, in Bertrand Russell’s words, “comforting fairy tales” that explain the unknown and that add interest and purpose to the lives of the members of the societ

About the Author

Thom Pain Jr. is the son of the imaginary scholar created by Will Eno for the stage play Thom Pain (based on nothing) who shares the dreams of Thomas Paine the great rationalist of the eighteenth century and author of American Crisis, Common Sense and Age of Reason. The prophets in Thom’s bible are historians, scientists and philosophers. He identifies the discoveries of systems and information theory early in the twentieth century as the last stage in the emancipation of science from theology and examines the implications of that distinction for the concepts of faith and truth. The story he tells is the natural history of intelligence as well as the justification for his faith in intelligence.