The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [163]
So the force with which the question was suddenly put in 1975 by two zoologists working independently had an enormous impact. Richard Alexander of the University of Michigan was one. In the tradition of the Red Queen, he expressed scepticism about whether what Charles Darwin had called ‘the hostile forces of nature’ were a sufficiently challenging adversary for an intelligent mind. The point is that the challenges presented by stone tools or tubers are mostly predictable ones. Generation after generation of chipping a tool off a block of stone, or knowing where to look for tubers, calls for the same level of skill each time. With experience each gets easier. It is rather like learning to ride a bicycle. Once you know how to do it, it comes naturally. Indeed, it becomes ‘unconscious’, as if conscious effort were simply not needed every time. Likewise, Homo erectus did not need consciousness to know that you should stalk zebras upwind every time lest they scent you, or that tubers grow beneath certain trees. It came as naturally to him as riding a bike does to us. Imagine playing chess against a computer that has only one opening gambit. It might be a good opening gambit, but once you know how to beat it, you can play the same response yourself, game after game. Of course, the whole point of chess is that your opponent can select one of many different ways to respond to each move you make.
It was logic like this that led Alexander to propose that the key feature of the human environment that rewarded intelligence was the presence of other human beings. Generation after generation, if your lineage is getting more intelligent, so is theirs. However fast you run, you stay in the same place relative to them. Man became ecologically dominant by virtue of his technical skills and that made mankind the only enemy of mankind (apart from his parasites). ‘Only humans themselves could provide the necessary challenge to explain their own evolution,’ wrote Alexander.29
True enough, but Scottish midges and African elephants are ‘ecologically dominant’ in the sense that they outnumber or outrank all potential enemies yet neither has seen the need to develop the ability to understand the theory of relativity. In any case, where is the evidence that Lucy was ecologically dominant? By all accounts, her species was an insignificant part of the fauna of the dry, wooded savannah where she lived.30
Independently, Nicholas Humphrey, a young Cambridge zoologist, had come to a similar conclusion to Alexander. Humphrey began an essay on the topic with the story of how Henry Ford once asked his representatives to find out which parts of the Model T never went wrong. They came back with the answer that the kingpin had never gone wrong; so Ford ordered it made to an inferior specification to save money. ‘Nature,’ wrote Humphrey, ‘is surely at least as careful an economist as Henry Ford.’31
Therefore intelligence must have a purpose; it cannot be an expensive luxury. Defining intelligence as the ability to ‘modify behaviour on the basis of valid inference from evidence’, Humphrey argued that the use of intelligence for practical invention was an easily demolished straw man. ‘Paradoxically, subsistence technology, rather than requiring intelligence, may actually become a substitute for it.’ The gorilla,