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Michel A. Hofman It is obvious that by virtue of language, human beings tend to have highly organized informational states of mind, and, consequently, are excellent problem solvers. But although knowledge of reality may be a necessary condition for survival it is surely not enough: the degree of intelligence reached by a species does not determine the propensity of its reproductive success. This may be inferred from the indiscriminate elimination of millions of species through the eras, from ammonites to australopithecines. It means that though adaptability increases with the evolution of biological intelligence environmental catastrophes can always be fatal to a species. But not only external factors can threaten the existence of organisms; Homo sapiens, despite its impressive intellectual capacities, might in the end become the victim of its own mind by, paradoxically, creating problems that it is then unable to solve. Concluding remarks All organisms are constantly engaged in solving problems. Of course, most living creatures are unconscious problem solvers. Even human beings are not always conscious of the problems they are trying to solve. Being aware of these problem situations or not, living organisms must have fitting and relevant models of their specific environments in order to enhance their chances of survival. Consequently, the problem solving capacity of a species is assumed to reflect the temporal and spatial complexity of its ecological niche. The thesis presented here is that biological intelligence can be considered to be a correlate of the problem solving capacity of a species, manifesting itself in the complexity of the species’ model of reality. With the evolution of sensory systems as adaptations to specialized environments, the capacity to process large amounts of sensory information increased and, with that, the power to create more complex physical realities. The processing of large Author’s address Michel A. Hofman, Netherlands <strong>Institute</strong> for Brain Research, Meibergdreef 33, 1105 AZ Amsterdam, The Netherlands Email: m.hofman@nih.knaw.nl amounts of information originating from the various sense organs, and the construction of complex models of reality require a neural system that selects, integrates, stores and models: in other words, a system with mindlike properties that enables the organism to make sense of an otherwise chaotic world. But once we allow mind-like properties to come in, such as motivation, emotion, preference and anticipation, we must allow that it is not only the hostile environment which plays an organizing or designing role in the evolution of biological intelligence, but also the active search of an organism for a new ecological niche, a new mode of living. Since the mind, prehuman and human, takes a most active part in evolution and especially in its own evolution, hominization and the evolution of our linguistic world may have begun as a cultural adaptation to new ecological niches. The process probably started at the time of hominid divergence a few million years ago, as part of the cognitive and manipulative adaptation to what was in essence a more complex physical reality. In other words, some of the seemingly unique higher functions of the human brain, such as language and other neurosymbolic capacities, were not necessarely due to genetic selection and may have emerged epigenetically through learning and cultural experiences because of the dramatic expansion of the neocortex and its increased tendency to neural plasticity. It seems that the time is finally ripe to begin to building an evolutionary viewpoint of the mind based on comparative concepts that incorporate the intrinsic systems found in all mammalian brains. Acknowledgements I am grateful to many of my devoted friends, especially to Michael A. CORNER and the late Herms J. ROMIJN, for their valuable insights and many useful discussions. The comments of three anonymous referees were helpful in improving the manuscript. Evolution and Cognition ❘ 186 ❘ 2003, Vol. 9, No. 2
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