Tag: Mindless Intelligence

What Intelligence is Not

(The photo from this post is of a squirrel monkey eating fruit in a tree branch. The monkey is tiny, with golden / silver fur, pale pink skin, and a dark skull cap pattern. The fruit is small and red, perhaps a date. Used without modification under the creative commons license – source)

Life has been steadily driving towards greater and greater intelligence, eventually leading to human beings, who are the very pinnacle of this trend. Our superior minds are what separate us from the animals. They empower us to make a world of human flourishing, and justify our dominion over the planet. These tropes about intelligence are so common in our culture, they almost sound self-evident. Yet, I’ll argue that they’re completely wrong. These ideas are enticing because they appeal to our pride and our sense of specialness, but this way of thinking is destroying our world. So, let’s break down these myths and talk about what intelligence is not.

One problem with this story is it presents intelligence as a linear thing. Life started out dumb, and it gradually got smarter and smarter. In a sense, this is true. More intelligent life is more complicated, so it takes longer to evolve. But life doesn’t evolve towards anything, it evolves in all directions, finding and filling every niche available. Monkeys are brilliant at navigating tree branches and spotting ripe fruit. Trees are brilliant at producing the right amount of fruit at the right moment to use local resources efficiently and maximize the spread of their seeds. Yeasts are brilliant at performing alchemy on that fruit, transmuting sugar into alcohol, which the monkeys love. These are all different kinds of intelligence, and none is “better” than the other because they’re all contextual and interdependent. Every instance of intelligence looks different, because it’s adapted to a unique lifestyle.

We live a very complicated lifestyle that depends on our big brains, so we tend to think that more intelligence is better, but that’s just not the case. Some of the simplest, dumbest organisms on Earth are also the most successful. Microbes, fungus, and plants make up something like 99.5% of Earth’s biomass, while animals (the “smart”ones) make up the rest. Being smart is metabolically expensive. Taking time to think can mean missing a moment of opportunity. Sometimes real intelligence is knowing when a mindless strategy works best. If anything, humans are a great example of how intelligence can backfire. We’ve used our intelligence to make civilization, which is amazing! But in doing so, we accidentally drove many species to extinction, exhausted resources we depend on, and destabilized the global climate. Our kind of big-brained intelligence is a high risk, high reward strategy.

This brings us to the idea that humans are the pinnacle of intelligence. The problem with a word like “pinnacle” is it suggests we are the ultimate form—the thing life’s been building up to, all this time. But we’re not the end of anything. We’re still evolving, and it’s unclear whether our intelligence will go up or down from here. We’re also not the only ones. There are a handful of species that have gone “all in” on the strategy of super intelligence. You know, elephants, dolphins, octopi, the usual suspects. Humans may, in fact, be the smartest of them all, but since intelligence is so contextual, it’s hard to say. Maybe dolphins are more intelligent than us, it just looks different in an ocean species with no hands?

It may seem obvious that human intelligence is something more and different from those other species. We invented the wheel, New York, wars and so on. But that really isn’t because we as individuals are so smart. This is made clear by the tragic case of “wild children,” who grow up without parents or any human community. In the few cases we’ve observed, these children were described as animalistic, violent, and cognitively impaired. They were never able to recover or integrate into human society. Our brains alone do not set us apart from animals. Our society does, and that’s a separate thing, that evolved after our big brains. We’re smarter than other animals not because of our biology, but because of the vast library of practical knowledge and resources that we share with one another.

That’s what sets us apart: other species can’t access human culture. In a sense, that’s because those species are less intelligent; to fully appreciate human society, you need language and abstract thought, which many species lack completely. Yet some species thrive in human society anyway. By being useful (like wheat), or charismatic (like dogs), or sneaky (like raccoons) other species live with us and shape our human world. That’s because nature does not set humans apart from other animals. We set ourselves apart from other life by building walls, by excluding them from our world, to the extent that we can. We decide what plants and animals are pets, food, or pests. Other species don’t need language to live in human society if we choose to accommodate them. We can coexist with nature in community, as many human societies have, and still do. Or, we can perpetuate the myth that we are special to justify excluding and exploiting nature instead.

And, ultimately, that’s the problem with this notion of intelligence: we use it to draw a line between friend and resource. If smarter is better—if our intelligence is what sets us apart from other life, and gives us the right to exploit that life however we see fit—then where do we draw the line? Should smarter people get more rights and privileges than dumber ones? Is a disabled person no better than an animal? Should we simply recycle the feeble minded from our population? This line of thinking is revolting, and it only makes sense if you believe these myths about intelligence. Similarly, if anything less than human is just a dumb resource for us to exploit, why not pave the planet? What’s wrong with processing all of that biomass, every living thing on Earth, into fuel and plastics? I think intuitively we know why: life has a right to exist, and losing all those diverse and beautiful kinds of intelligence would be tragic.

I’m excited to live in a time when our understanding of intelligence is changing so rapidly. It’s hard to define the word, just because we have so many examples that pull in different directions, and seem to contradict one another. Intelligence is many things, and we’re still fleshing out the full picture. Yet, every day we see more clearly that our old conceptions of intelligence that put human beings on a pedestal were wrong, and, more importantly, that they are at the root of so much injustice and destruction. So, while these tropes are still everywhere around us, shape the way our world works, and may still feel intuitively true, I urge you to reject them. We must move on, and embrace a more expansive view, one that doesn’t start from the premise of who to exclude.

Plants Move

(featuring an illustration by Sarina Mitchel)

Big brains are essential to our success as a species. That’s how we dominated this planet, so we tend look there to understand the secrets of intelligence. Yet, this perspective blinds us to other species’ achievements. Take plants, for instance. They don’t have brains at all, yet they make up over 82% of Earth’s biomass (source). They range in size from single celled algae to the largest organism on earth (learn about Pando here). Many of our greatest discoveries in chemistry, medicine, and material science amount to finding some plant that already solved a problem better than we could. Yet, we tend to see them as material resources rather than intelligent living beings. I suspect we underestimate plants because, from a certain perspective, they don’t do very much. They just sit there, letting food and water come to them. What’s so smart about that?

This perspective says more about human impatience than anything else. Plants can climb and tunnel and build. They search their environment for resources, relocate to prime spots, and wrestle with each other for access. They capture prey, hide from predators, and actively defend themselves from attackers. They can transform themselves dramatically, switching between totally different strategies depending on time of day, time of year, and environmental conditions. Plants are very active. It’s just on a different time scale than we’re used to. Plant movement is most obvious over hours, days, and years, though in some cases they move dramatically in just seconds.

Brains allow us to move quickly, which gives us a big advantage over plants, but I don’t think it makes us “more intelligent.” It’s better to say we found different strategies, specializing in different kinds of intelligence. Plants are slow and stationary because that’s energy efficient. It allows them to thrive in otherwise barren environments. Animals can’t do this. We all depend on plants for survival. Our extravagant, free-moving lifestyle is only possible because plants do the slow, hard work of capturing energy and nutrients from the air and soil, making concentrated fuel for our activity. Plants don’t need brains to live the way they do, and they don’t let that stop them from adopting all sorts of complex behaviors and lifestyles.

This is possible in part because plants often root themselves to the ground. That may seem like a poor choice, since it limits their options dramatically. They have to commit to one environment for their whole lives. Either that spot provides what they need, or it doesn’t and they’re doomed to die there. But there’s a major upside to this strategy: their lives are much more predictable than ours. This makes it possible for evolution to carefully plan responses to just about every threat or opportunity a plant might encounter in its lifetime. This is a different kind of intelligence than what we’re used to, one focused on exquisite design and finely crafted behavioral scripts, rather than spontaneity. Plants do respond in the moment, though, and even rooted to the ground they can be surprisingly mobile.

The most common and obvious way that plants move is through growth. Animals can’t really move until they’ve grown a body, but plants move by growing. They use their senses to track and follow the sun, water, and chemical nutrients they depend on. They feel the pull of gravity, the strain caused by the wind, and physical touch along their bodies. They change their shape by growing cells larger, faster, or in thicker layers on this side, but not that side. This allows them to reinforce themselves and stay upright, grope and crawl around obstacles to reach food, navigate wide open spaces with roots or runners, or wrap around trellises to pull themselves toward the sun.

Plants can also move by shifting water around their bodies in a process known as turgor. Cells with more water swell, while those with less shrink. By shifting water between cells in its stalk, a sunflower can rotate throughout the day to track the arc of the sun. Morning glories and lotuses use similar methods to hide and protect their delicate flowers at night, then unfurl them into extravagant displays to attract pollinators during the daytime. Although turgor is much slower than muscle contraction, it’s still fast enough to react to animals. The touch-me-not mimosa, sundew, and venus fly trap all move quickly in response to physical touch. A few species, like hairy bittercress and the squirting cucumber, are much more dramatic. They build up pressure behind a catch mechanism, then suddenly launch their seeds into the air with explosive force.

Plants are also masters of using weather and animals to help them move. Plants have evolved specialized seeds that travel great distances, allowing whole populations of plants to migrate and colonize new territory. You’ve probably encountered helicopter seeds that gracefully twirl through the air, dandelion seeds that ride the wind on floofy parasols, and burrs that hitch a ride on your pant leg. The energy for this motion doesn’t come from the plant itself, so should that even count? As an engineer, that sort of practical laziness just makes the design more impressive to me. The plant doesn’t bother capturing and reshaping energy for this, because it doesn’t have to. All it has to do is build the seed in the right shape and “let go” at the right moment.

What does all this tell us about intelligence? For one thing, life doesn’t need a brain to navigate obstacles, seek out resources, climb, glide, follow a daily routine, catch prey, or even launch projectiles. Plants are full of amazing behaviors that are completely mindless, yet elegant, successful, and highly optimized. We’ll never understand those behaviors by studying brains or Deep Learning algorithms, but they tell us a lot about ourselves. Our brains do not replace the kind of embodied intelligence we see so clearly in plants, they merely extend it. We depend very much on the same evolutionary design and “script-making” that governs the plant kingdom. Under the hood, much of what makes us intelligent comes down to the cells of our bodies, dynamically shifting chemical concentrations and patterns of growth, very much like plants do.

I hope to share several more posts about plants and fungi in the future, because there really is a lot to say. If you’re interested in going deeper on the topic of plant intelligence, I highly recommend the 1996 film Microcosmos. It explores the plants and tiny creatures in a meadow with some extraordinary macro and time-lapse photography. No other movie has given me a more vivid and profound sense of awe at how alive the world is, at every scale. Sadly, the streaming options are limited right now, but it’s worth it if you can get your hands on it.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts. What are your favorite examples of plants being amazing? Are there other kinds of “mindless intelligence” you’d like to see me write about? How do you think about the intelligence of plants and animals? How are they similar and how are they different? Let me know in the comments.