Nearly everyone thinks that it’s your brain, and how it varies from the brains of others, that defines your intelligence as an individual. The terms ‘brainy’ and ‘intelligent’ are used almost interchangeably. If you really want to know about intelligence then you need to know about the brain. You may come across questions like ‘How does the brain give rise to intelligence?’ or ‘Where does intelligence reside in the brain?’. It is generally believed that knowing more about the brain will tell us more about intelligence, and much else, including human nature itself.

Aldous Huxley was not alone in pointing to ‘the most incredible miracles happening all around us … a cell in nine months multiplies its weight thousands and thousands of times and is a child’. Indeed, development strikes everyone as a wonderful, but mysterious, transformative process in which an insignificant speck of matter becomes a coherent, functional being. It all seems so automatic as to look like magic.

Intelligent systems have been a most crucial part of evolution. They furnished adaptability in complex, changing environments. As evolved in humans, our socio-cultural intelligence fostered the construction of shared worlds far beyond the inputs of our individual senses. That has allowed us to adapt the world to ourselves, rather than vice versa, as in all other species.

The dominant concept of intelligence is based on IQ, which is based, in turn, on the concept of the gene. Indeed IQ testing is very largely rooted in that concept. So, if I am trying to change the concept of intelligence in this book (which I am) it’s obvious that we must first tackle the concept of the gene.

The ideology surrounding intelligence has been two-fold. First, it has aimed to convince us that the social order is a consequence of immutable biology – that inequalities and injustices are natural and cannot be eliminated. Second, where problems cannot be ignored, it tells us to look for solutions at the level of the individual rather than the level of society. Undoubtedly, the story has been phenomenally successful. Nearly everyone, across the political spectrum and around the world, accepts it to some extent. A 2020 paper from the Foundation for European Progressive Studies supports that view. It reports a European survey of attitudes of the most affluent individuals to social inequalities. Although hard work and having a supportive family background are mentioned, educational aptitude and being ‘academically bright’ or intelligent are cited as the primary factors.

When people consider intelligence, they will first tend to think of IQ, and scores that distinguish people, one from another. They will also tend to think of those scores as describing something as much part of individuals’ make-up as faces and fingerprints. Today, a psychologist who uses IQ tests and attempts to prove score differences are caused by genetic differences will be described as an ‘expert’ on intelligence. That indicates how influential IQ testing has become, and how much it has become part of society’s general conceptual furniture.

Whether they believe in IQ or not, most people sense that individual differences in intelligence are substantial and at least partly ‘genetic’. The nature–nurture debate about the origins of such differences goes back a long way; at least as far as the philosopher-scientists of Ancient Greece. And most people have probably adopted common-sense views about it for just as long. It is evident today in popular cliches: our genetic blueprints set levels of potential, while nurture determines how much of it is reached; individual differences result from both genes and environments; genes and environments interact to determine individual differences; and so on.

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is a delightfully sophisticated account of evolution. But the core ideas are not that difficult to understand. Variations in traits in individuals arise by chance, due to what we now think of as mutations in genes. Some of those trait variations are functionally better adapted to part of the environment than others. Individuals so advantaged will tend to survive and leave more offspring. Accordingly, the advantage, and the frequency of the genes causing it, will increase from generation to generation. Conversely, genes causing less advantageous or harmful variations will decrease in frequency. That is natural selection.

So far I have tried to show how intelligence evolved at different levels according to the complexity of the environments faced. We have just seen how the breakthrough to cognitive intelligence emerged from the chatter between neurons in large networks. In this chapter, I show how human evolution involved another, even more stunning, breakthrough in a way not fully appreciated but fully consistent with biological principles. As with intelligent systems generally, it emerged from social interaction at a number of levels, not lucky genetic accidents.