9830: Intelligence

Why did we evolve intelligence? Or for the creationist, why were we created with intelligence?

Now, from the creationists perspective there are a lot of questions that can be answered in a very ignorant manner by just saying, "because that's what God wanted, or, you can't question God's motives/ God works in mysterious ways."

Well, any logical person should ask these questions and not just leave them unanswered, whether your a creationist or evolutionist. Life would have gotten by just fine if we were single celled bacteria.

One observation I want to talk about is the fact that all lower forms of intelligence are comparable. A dog isn't that much smarter than a cat, and a cat isn't that much smarter then a rat, and so on. There would seem to be this huge gap between the intelligence of animals and man.

Why? How come there are no creatures in between the smartest apes and the dumbest man?

One of the things that I picked up from Stephen Hawking and his books is this concept of the new evolution.

From species to species, there is only so much information that can be exchanged in our dna, and this can be expressed in bits.

Once man created language, that amount of information that could be passed from one generation to the next was much, much more.

So you could say that once we passed that threshold, we soared above and beyond all other creatures by using a trick. Once we discovered writing, that passing of knowledge could now skip generations and be copied and spread around much faster.

Once again, we soared even faster above all other creatures. This is the new evolution, and it is a telescoping effect.

With this, we could appear to be much smarter then we really are. Did man need to be born with the knowledge of how to make a steam engine? No, they only had to take the knowledge from generations before and add to it. Or as Isaac Newton once said, "If I have seen further than others it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants."

But my main question is why? Why did we take that first big step? While other creatures seem perfectly fine with "ook, eek", in other words, "watch out", or "come mate with me", human beings went much farther then that. We created names for water, love, existence.

Another thing that puzzles me is the fact that we have a section of the brain dedicated to language. So, did we evolve that section of the brain and then start speaking, or did we start speaking and that in turn slowly evolve that section of the brain? (The latter sounds more logical to me, but one has to consider those odd looking fish that were developing fingers in it's fins before it ventured on to land.)

It seemed to have a plan, but how?

How could the cells in the body understand that they would need fingers on land?

"Evolution frequently produces adaptations that come to be useful in the future for a different purpose"