[BRIEF NOTE] Is intelligence inevitable?

[rfmcdonald]

This io9 report has a lot of interesting implications on the evolution of intelligence.

The first thing to note is that intelligence among the cephalopods--a class, or subpopulation, of the mollusk phylum--is itself very surprising. Most of the other animal species known to possess a high level of intelligence belong to the chordate phylum, birds and various mammals (primates, cetaceans, elephants, and so on). Cephalopods diverged evolutionarily from chordates at such an early point that their earliest common ancestors are hypothetical reconstructions dating back hundreds of millions of years. Despite this ancient separation, cephalopods seem to have developed a level of intelligence comparable to that of many better-known species known for their intelligence. Shared close ancestry with species known to be intelligent, in other words, isn't required for intelligence.

Now, it looks like, among mollusks at least, even the complex nervous systems that are prerequisites for intelligence don't date back any length of time. They just keep appearing.

Kevin Kocot and his team examined the genetic sequences of the eight main branches of the mollusk phylum. They hoped to determine which branches are most closely related to which others, and in doing so provide a clearer history of the specifics of mollusk evolution. Until now, it was assumed that the two mollusk groups with the most highly organized central nervous systems, the cephalopods (octopus, cuttlefish, squid) and the gastropods (snails and slugs), are the most closely related.

Now it appears that that's actually almost the exact opposite of the truth. According to Kocot's analysis, the gastropods are most closely related to bivalves (clams, mussels, oysters, and scallops), which have far more rudimentary nervous systems and not much of a brain. Even more shockingly, cephalopods - the most intelligent of all the mollusk groups - comes from one of the earliest branches, meaning their evolutionary development predates that of snails, clams, and the rest.

There's no way that cephalopods and gastropods could have evolved together apart from all the other mollusks, which means that their similarly advanced nervous systems must have developed independently. That goes against a lot of longstanding assumptions about the evolution of sophisticated structures, as Kocot's colleague, University of Florida researcher Leonid Moroz, explains:

"Traditionally, most neuroscientists and biologists think complex structures usually evolve only once. We found that the evolution of the complex brain does not happen in a linear progression. Parallel evolution can achieve similar levels of complexity in different groups. I calculated it happened at least four times."

A lot of evolutionary theory has been guided by something akin to Occam's Razor - it's simpler to assume that something as complex as the brain only evolved once in a given group, and that all brainy members of that group come from a single common ancestor. Mollusks appear to be pointing us towards a very different story of evolution, one governed by parallel developments and the repeated emergence of brains in wildly divergent groups. Evolution doesn't have any set goals, but it does appear that it has certain ideas and structures it just keeps coming back to.

I don't want to channel Teilhard de Chardin unnecessarily, but might it be the case that, so long as the environment permits, life inevitably involves in the direction of greater intelligence? If complex nervous systems just keep evolving again and again among very different species in very different environments (and even among not very different peces in fairly similar environments), I have to wonder. Be in wonder, too.