Week 6
While going through the Cyberfeminism index this week, I found a paper that lead me down some interesting thought processes. The paper was ‘Why are Mammals called Mammals?’ This paper is about the cultural relationship between society and science, with our view of mammals being shaped by breasts, women, and animals. While this paper was more of a feminist look at scientific classification, it made me start thinking about evolutionary connections to intelligence. This is partially because in my other course, Poli 13DR we had just read Waller’s Perpatrators of Genocide, which at one point discussed the ways evolution affects our psychology, specifically in the cases of xenophobia and the formation of in-groups and out-groups. Both of these papers made me start thinking about the ways that evolutionary instincts have translated into social tendencies, and also by extension social intelligence. There are parts of the human psyche that still seem mysterious to us all. To some, our inability to understand our own mind’s complexity is evidence and symptom of our great intelligence. However, whenever I face the human mind through the lens of evolution those mysteries seem to be more like developments of instinct into situations that no longer call for that instinct.
Our intelligence and ingenuity was a design from natural selection. The intelligent creatures that surround us were formed by the same forces. So it seems that intelligence is a natural byproduct of living long enough in the world for it to shape you for your environment. You don’t just understand the world around you inherently, you understand it as a tool for survival, that understanding shaped by the environment itself.
All of this made me consider that in our final assignment, evolution should be something strongly considered. With the ecosystem and environment provided, in what ways would a creature be forced to genetically adapt? What ‘intelligence’ would suit the creature in this space? How would it be shaped to understand its world?