Further, the term “ability” is meant to focus the analysis to the realm of purported animal intelligence – attempting to understand the capacities afforded by the brains of our ancestors. Firstly, I use “behavioral ability” instead of “behavior” because the scope is not intended to review the entire behavioral repertoire of our ancestors. The scope of this paper will attempt to focus on the phylogenetic history of what I will call “behavioral abilities.” I define a “behavioral ability” as an intellectual or cognitive faculty that animals are capable of invoking. As such, the hypotheses in this paper should not be used to make comparisons between Homo sapiens and other extant species. Further, extant animals today independently evolved abilities that have never been present in the human lineage (such as the electroreception of certain fish and echolocation of bats). Alas, as we will see, the evidence is quite strong that episodic memory also evolved independently numerous times – amongst cephalopods, birds, as well as in mammals. Lens-based eyes evolved independently multiple times ( Ogura, 2004). Flying evolved independently multiple times ( Ben-Hamo et al., 2016). Convergent evolution is not the exception, but the rule. For example, the hypothesis that episodic memory emerged in early mammals is not the same as a hypothesis that only mammals exhibit episodic memory. Proposing a hypothesis regarding the emergence of abilities along the evolutionary lineage from early bilaterians to humans is not the same thing as proposing a hypothesis regarding a unique ability of humans relative to other extant animals alive today. This requires an essential caveat to the hypotheses presented here. The scope of this paper is intentionally anthropocentric – it seeks to chronicle the phylogenetic history of behavioral abilities in the human lineage from early bilaterians and extant Homo sapiens. Thirdly, it develops hypotheses regarding the subset of behaviors that are frequently considered as “intelligent.” I will briefly review each of these three refinements to clarify the scope of the analysis herein. Secondly, it develops hypotheses only on the human lineage from early bilaterians to extant homo sapiens.
Firstly, it develops hypotheses only on phylogenetic history. Given the breadth of this topic, the scope of this paper is narrowed in three ways. To aid this tracking of the phylogenetic refinement of behavior, this paper presents 13 hypotheses regarding the specific behavioral abilities that emerged at key milestones during the 600-million-year phylogenetic history from early bilaterians to extant humans. A challenge to interpreting human behavioral, intellectual, and cognitive faculties through the lens of phylogenetic refinement is in identifying the faculties present in our ancestors, as these were the building blocks upon which the process of phylogenetic refinement operated. This general idea of progressive complexification of behavior from simpler roots has been elegantly articulated in Paul Cisek’s theory of “phylogenetic refinement,” whereby an extant animal’s behavioral repertoire is interpreted as a consequence of evolutionary refinement from more basic phylogenetic building blocks ( Cisek, 2019). But all these varied faculties, which emerge from the complex human brain, are likely to have evolved from simpler prototypes in the inevitably simpler brains of our ancestors. We can build cognitive maps, infer intentions of others, remember specific historical events, communicate with each other using language, learn motor skills through observation, and more.
Humans have an incredibly diverse suite of intellectual faculties.
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