Intelligence: From The Open Mind, Boosted By The Open Society

The biggest point in favor of the Open Society is that it increases intelligence. Intelligence of the individual, intelligence of society. A more intelligent society, or more intelligent individuals, will tend to survive better, in the fullness of time. This is the fundamental reason for the quick rise of intelligence in the human species (in light of what I will say later).

Intelligence is what reads in between: in-legere. Thus intelligence offers more choices, than just those lines one sees initially. Intelligence provides with more choices, using imagination to create them. The more things one can read, those many things which are provided by the Open Society and the Open Mind, the more one can read in-between, thus the more intelligent one is.

And among those newly available choices, thanks to intelligence, are some choice which are superior ones. Why, how, are they superior? By enabling us, living critters, to do more with less wasted energy… with less work.

There is a fundamental biological advantage to intelligence. However, not always, it depends upon the ecology the species reside in: consider the “perfect” species, in their local minimum energy niche, from mussels to sharks to mushrooms and octopuses… They did not change, because any change would have left the critters doing less, while requiring more energy.

In the case of humans, the niche was already maximal. Indeed humans engage in more behaviors than any other species… thanks to bipedalism in conjunction with using arms for many behaviors, from tool making, weapons, etc… So humans are capable from climbing cliffs to swimming next to the seashore to running in the desert at noon, when no other animal can move (sweating and running were part of the expanding human niche)… And humans could do everything in between: humans are all over the place, their ecological niche is maximal (right, humans could not fly, but, differently from birds, humans could invent, make and use all sorts of tools, and to the point that tool and weapon usage became co-evolutionary with humanity in the last three million years; the tool inventing niche is much more power endowing than just flying around). 

The capability, of bipedalism and arms used for a weapon platform, made it so that there was no human minimum energy ecological niche, humanity being the intrinsically open species, a natural free market, wild jungle competitor…

Evolution is an intelligence, and a creative one, it created us, and we, in turn, part of it, now help create her… For good and evil…

Patrice Ayme

Hawaiian Crow, extinct in the wild, using a tool. Hawaiian and New Caledonia crows have large mobile eyes and straight bills to use tools. Interestingly other crows have not developed this ability. Why? Related to what I said above, because of the available niches. The absence of predators in Hawaii and New Caledonia enabled crows there to evolve out of standard avian niches, and spend energy in other niches than just flying away as the first threat… and thus learn to use tools.. In the case of humans, bipedalism for at least three million years enabled humans to use tools and especially weapons: bipedalism created a large ecological niche, from the weapon capability. A simple stick in the eye is disagreeable enough a perspective to lead lionesses and hyenas to teach the young to avoid hominids. By the way, 109 Hawaiian crows survive in zoos. The fact that they are in zoos, while introduced corvids are thriving in Hawaii shows that tool usage can diminish survivability. So much for the hateful little pseudo-ecologists who hate zoos…