Contents - Konrad Lorenz Institute

Michel A. Hofman
Of Brains and Minds
A Neurobiological Treatise on the Nature of Intelligence
Brain, Mind
and Reality
Organisms are faced during
their lives with an immense
variety of problems,
ranging from
purely physical ones,
such as changes in climate
or geomorphic disturbances,
to organismspecific
problems related
to food supply, predation,
homeostasis, reproduction,
etc. In order to enhance
their chances of
survival, organisms have
to find adequate solutions
for the problems
with which they are confronted,
for any of them
could easily be fatal.
Problem solving, in other
words, is an essential dynamic
survival mechanism, evolved to cope with
disturbances in the ecological equilibrium. It can
therefore be looked upon as an adaptive capacity
enabling organisms to adjust themselves to one another
and to their physical environment.
The kind of problems with which organisms are
confronted, however, and their relative significance,
varies from one species to another, according
to the ecological niche or adaptive zone that it occupies.
These specific environmental challenges form
the selection pressures that have given rise to the
evolution of species-specific neural mechanisms
and action patterns. In fact all organisms are problem
solvers, and the problem solving capacity of a
Abstract
All organisms are faced during their lives with an immense
variety of environmental challenges and organism
specific problems, for which they have to find
adequate solutions, in order to survive. In the present
essay, biological intelligence is considered to be a correlate
of the problem solving capacity of an organism,
manifesting itself in the amount of neural information
that is used in perceiving and interpreting the external
(and internal) world. Consequently, biological
intelligence can be conceived as to reflect the temporal
and spatial complexity of the species niche. In accordance
with this view, the hypothesis is put forward
that in higher organisms the complexity of the neural
(micro)circuitry of the cerebral cortex is the neural correlate
of the brain's coherence and predictive power,
and, thus, a measure of biological intelligence.
Key words
Biological intelligence, information processing, consciousness,
problem solving, cognition, cerebral cortex,
evolutionary epistemology.
Evolution and Cognition ❘ 178 ❘ 2003, Vol. 9, No. 2
species reflects the temporal
and spatial complexity
of its environment.
Consequently, the
ability to solve problems
will manifest itself in all
those situations in which
subjects are required to
respond adequately to
novel objects and changing
circumstances, as well
as in situations in which
successful adaptation involves
the detection of an
appropriate response to
regularities in the external
world or the formation
of rules and hypotheses
(POPPER 1982;
HODOS/CAMPBELL 1990;
MACPHAIL 1993; SHETTLE-
WORTH 1998). Environmental
adaptation, therefore,
can be considered to
be the primary function
of problem solving in that it serves as a preeminent
mechanism for survival.
The organism’s adaptability, however, is but one
aspect of fitness. Free-moving organisms, for example,
can actively explore their environment, and
thus generate new selection forces that can modify
the structures involved. MAYR (1982, p612) even argues
that ‘many if not most acquisitions of new
structures in the course of evolution can be ascribed
to selection forces by newly acquired behaviors’.
This suggests that in highly complex organisms,
such as mammals, behavior rather than environmental
change may be the major driving force for
evolution at the organismal level. However, this