The lack of a believable definition for intelligence renders the question moot, of course, but I was fascinated by this suggestion that biological evolution has at least some elements of intelligence:
… natural selection incorporates new information from the environment to favour the best-adapted organisms. Richard Watson at the University of Southampton, UK, decided to look at the mechanisms involved to try to work out what is going on. In evolutionary terms, information about the past is carried in genes inherited by the offspring of fit individuals. But a relatively recent insight is that genes don’t code “for” particular traits. They are team players, and their activity is regulated by other genes to create a network of connections. Natural selection favours those connections that work best. This, Watson realised, is just like how a brain learns. Brains consist of networks of neurons whose structure is shaped by learning because the more a connection is used, the stronger it becomes. Sure enough, when Watson and his colleagues built a computer model that took account of the networked nature of genes, they found it could evolve to learn and remember solutions to problems with just a simulacrum of natural selection to reinforce the best attempts.
Brains don’t just learn specific solutions to particular problems: they also generalise to solve problems they have never encountered. They do this by recognising similarities between new challenges and past ones, and then combining the building blocks of previous solutions to come up with novel ones. This is called inductive learning. Can gene networks do induction too?
Watson and his colleagues argue that they can. The key, they say, is that energy is required to connect genes, because proteins must be produced to achieve this. So, for efficiency, evolution favours networks with fewer connections, which are loosely linked with other subnetworks. These building blocks can be recombined in different ways to generate novel solutions to the problems that challenge life. Thus, evolution’s simple processes form an inductive-learning machine that draws lessons from past successes to improve future performance. [“Evolution is evolving: 13 ways we must rethink the theory of nature,” various authors, NewScientist (26 September 2020, paywall)]
It’s a rather glorious cross-link that’s never occurred to me before. I’m not sure I’d call it intelligence in and of itself, since I don’t see any self-awareness, but it’s certainly a part of intelligence. I’ll be interested to see what the experts have to say about this, and what new terminology is developed to describe what appears to be a homologue to biological intelligence.
