The Evolutionary Biology of Intelligence: Afterthoughts

Abstract

Our Institute was organized to provide a two-week course of advanced study designed to cover a field as best we could within its time limits. My job was to recruit the main lecturers and a few of the participants. Other participants were self-selected according to their interests. Although it was not designed to be a conference, the Institute worked in many ways like a conference or symposium. This will be evident from these published proceedings. Rather than present the material to be covered as if it could be described by a syllabus about which there is broad agreement, I recognized that the subject matter is still in flux. It was important to present sometimes conflicting points of view and to encourage rather than avoid controversy. The title of the Institute was “The Evolutionary Biology of Intelligence,” but a more modest title was chosen for this publication, acknowledging that there is as yet too little evolutionary biology of intelligence that is of the same grandeur as other areas of evolutionary analysis. There are intersections between the fields, however, as indicated in our revised title, and this Institute has been able to cover many of them.