Critically consider evolutionary explanations for human intelligence
Intelligence is a hard word to define. Eysenck defined intelligence as ‘the all-round mental abilities or thinking skills either of human or of lower species.’ These include problem solving, reasoning, predicting events, memory and language. Another definition of intelligence is ‘the ability to adapt, survive and thrive in response to changing environmental demands. Taking both these definitions of intelligence, we can deduce that human intelligence must be a development from the lower species, and the greater the ability to problem solve, reason, predict events, remember and use language the more evolved the intelligence.
Evolutionary explanations for intelligence fall into two categories – the ecological explanation and the social explanation. The ecological explanation looks at and measures intelligence in terms of ability to find and obtain food, using tools and hunting. Animals with more advanced cognitive maps (i.e. those with better memories for where food can be found or is stored) will do better and be more likely to survive than those animals with less advanced cognitive maps, and therefore the lesser cognitive maps will be selected out. Humans have large brains for their bodies, and this must be of some evolutionary advantage. It has been argued that these large brains are to house extremely complicated cognitive maps. However this cannot be the case, as animals with smaller brains have just as complicated cognitive maps, and some animals with larger brains have less complicated ones. Byrne (1995) stated that there is no correlation between neocortex ratio and the complexity of the environment or larger the area for foraging.
