By accident, my wife and I stumbled onto the convention of calling essentially every living being a genius. It started as a joke about our cat, because obviously—in our human-supremacist culture—superlative traits like genius can only be applied to humans! Soon enough, this practice migrated to squirrels, newts, baby birds, ants—and even plants, fungi, and microbes. I no longer think of it as a joke.

I’ve utilized this framing in other posts by noting that every one of these beings knows how to do things we haven’t the foggiest clue how to do ourselves—or how, in detail, they manage it. I’ll get to the nuanced nature of the word “know” in a bit. But for now we can at least admit that the world is overflowing with phenomena we haven’t even registered, let alone understood. Typically, we just scratch the surface at best.

What I’ll do here is explore the relative genius of Life as compared to the normal use of the term, in the way of cognitive prowess. Let the games begin!

Other Ways of Knowing

When I say that an amoeba knows how to find food (or design a subway system), that a tree knows when to send out buds, that a newt knows when to burrow and when to head to the pond, or a bear knows when to enter hibernation, some (e.g., human supremacists) object that such actions do not involve real knowing. Only we—or grudgingly some of the “higher” mammals—can do that, importantly. In this view, animals simply act on instinct, and plants can’t even be ascribed that quality, having no neurons. Somehow, we’re imagined to be largely free of instinctual, wired reactions: driven by a cerebrum, by god! The cerebellum or brain stem don’t even count, even if built around neurons.

To bring it closer to home, your body knows how to thermally regulate even if your brain possesses zero intellectual understanding of thermal conductivity, convection coefficients, radiative transfer, or evaporative cooling. As a case in point, babies do just fine in the thermal regulation arena. Your body knows when and how to shiver. It knows how to stop blood flow and heal a wound. It knows how to fight a virus. It knows how to digest almost any food you put in your mouth. None of these magnificent feats require cognitive awareness or explicit (cerebral) knowledge. In fact, intellectual mysteries remain on all such topics, while approximately 8 billion human individuals are effectively ignorant on all these fronts. Our meat-brains (and “external brains” in the form of writing) are still—and forever will be—playing catch-up.

Consider that when an organism executes some action (budding, hibernating, chasing prey, etc.), not a single other entity in the universe commanded it to do so. The response involves processes within the organism—attentive to external cues, of course, and guided by millions of years of heritage and past experiences/interactions. If the organism does not in some capacity know how and when to carry out an action, how can we explain its effective and systematic enactment of the deeds necessary for survival? Is some external puppet-master in charge of its every move?

Reflexively, this “way of knowing” will be passed off by many as “merely genetic,” as if robbing the phenomenon of any mystery or splendor. Besides the fact that genius and genetic share a common origin (“to beget”), perhaps it’s even more magical when a too-tiny-to-see clump of double-helix nucleic acid can pull off such a collection of feats! It’s a robust type of “knowing” to which our brains have a difficult time relating. We marvel at animal babies who instantly can run and evade predators—involving zero learning in the conventional sense.

That DNA contains sufficient instruction to build and successfully operate complex organisms is truly beyond our cognitive capacity to fully appreciate. Making matters unimaginably more intractable is that these various mechanisms all work in concert without unwittingly defeating each other. They work among themselves and in relation to the rest of the Community of Life, cleverly utilizing the environment provisioned by physics and the universe. Genius is too weak a term, really. It’s practically insulting to cram such magnificence into paltry human terms.

What’s in the Best Brains?

Let’s try a thought experiment. Loosely modeled on the severely flawed Alone TV series, let’s remedy the two most egregious artificial limitations imposed by the show and allow a group of cooperative people to live in an unbounded wilderness. But here’s the twist. We recruit the top IQ geniuses of the world, careful to avoid anyone who has lived exposure to primitive skills. These are urban intellectuals who haven’t gone camping, never pooped in a hole, never pulled a beet out of the ground, and maybe never even struck a match. They haven’t made any deliberate study of ancestral skills. They’re theoretical physicists, molecular biologists, linguists, philosophers, mathematicians, legal scholars, and that sort. Note that it’s becoming increasingly easy to find humans who have never been exposed to natural settings—just screens and concrete. We’ll pop this erudite bunch into the woods and see how they do, working as a team—without access to any written material or the internet, of course.

Instantly, this may seem egregiously unfair: these poor sods are likely doomed to fail. But hear me out: this is part of the point. I’m trying to differentiate raw intelligence from cultural acquisition of skills—which admittedly one can only take so far.

On the premise that their efforts flop, we see that raw cranial capacity is not up to the task, even among searingly-bright individuals. We also get support for this in how long it took anatomically-modern humans (thus: similar or even superior mental horsepower) to invent new technologies prior to the age of agriculture and writing. Necessity isn’t the mother of invention: material/energy affluence is.

Probing Further

But let’s back up a bit before writing off our nerd herd. We could imagine the successful start of a fire. We could imagine some productive foraging. We could imagine trapping or spearing an animal. Such things can’t be ruled out.

Ah—but here’s the rub: how dependent are these putative successes on dimly-preserved cultural knowledge? The very realization that a fire might be useful can’t be classified as a novel innovation by our stranded brainiacs. It’s simply well-appreciated that fire offers numerous advantages of warmth, cooking, and safety. Likewise, how are they likely to acquire fire? Someone will probably suggest rubbing sticks together in some fashion to create a friction fire. But that’s old cultural knowledge as well, isn’t it? If you, personally, were aware of this technique, can you honestly claim to have invented the concept independently by musing on it? The chance that one of these geniuses would come up with the idea having never heard of any such technique is very remote. Even if they do have the bright idea, of course, success is not so easy without the implantation of cultural knowledge.

As a personal aside, I recently learned several ancestral techniques. It’s not automatic. I relied very heavily on others’ expertise. Not to brag, but I’m on the more technically-competent end of the spectrum, having built many devices relying on mastery of many domains of engineering. I seriously doubt I could have worked my way to a fire without help—even given the substantial head start of knowing that rapidly rotating sticks are involved (cheating: not my intrinsic brain power at work). Even then, appropriate/compatible materials, technique, and crafted configurations come into play—easily frustrating unguided efforts to the point of failure and resignation. Baseless braggadocio isn’t enough to make an actual fire.

Similar objections accompany other feats. Culture pre-loads us with notions of what sorts of things we can eat. Killing an animal with a pointy stick also heavily utilizes cultural knowledge of spears, arrows, and the like.

The real test might be hypothetical genius-level people somehow raised in isolation of cultural knowledge, but trained in math, abstraction, critical thinking, etc. I’m trying to get at sharp, well-developed brains as pure innovation machines deprived of the crutch of copying previous efforts. In practice, such test subjects are unavailable.

Too Much Credit

The basic notion here is that we give brains far too much credit in terms of their raw cognitive capabilities. Despite having brains perhaps 10% larger than our own, our Pleistocene ancestors took hundreds of thousands of years to slowly accumulate modest innovations—not in a few generations or in the lifetime of one genius (by the usual definition). Over that time, the number of Homo sapiens that have lived far outnumbers the present population—or even more so the smaller population at the time of Einstein. The past didn’t lack brains that our culture would label “genius.”

Without the ratchet feature of cultural knowledge—whose preservation was tremendously accelerated by the very recent advent of writing—we’re really not all that impressive next to other animals. Even though accumulated technology is millions of times more sophisticated than animal tools, we don’t find a million-fold increase in raw cognitive capability over a monkey or a squirrel (or a squirrel monkey) in solving novel problems. That tracks, actually: our hardware is not a million-fold more sophisticated or larger.

When testing raw capabilities, divorced from the substantial leverage of cultural knowledge, humans don’t perform leaps and bounds better than other animals. Animals often outperform humans in feats of memory, pattern-matching, inference, and even probability intuition. Ze Frank has some good examples of living beings solving puzzles (amoebas, crows, pigeons) that in some cases exceed what my dad could have done (picture an affable Homer Simpson, but with a college degree in accounting—he was terrible managing money). I say this based on watching him problem-solve in novel situations, like finding the keys locked in the car. He’d be so angry as to bat down my suggestions before I could spit them out (like: “True, you can’t reach the keys through the open triangle-vent window [1974 Chevy truck], but you can reach the window handle to roll it down.”). It’s the kind of solution that would dawn on a crow, but would forever elude my dad: he’d break the window before realizing he could roll it down.

Real Genius

I have recently taken the first baby steps into mushroom identification. When friends see my mushroom books sitting around, they frequently express concern that a fatal mistake is too easy to make. Yet, the Douglas squirrel behind my house eagerly harvests and eats mushrooms the size of his head. Genius.

Until about 2008, Anna’s hummingbird was rare on the Olympic Peninsula, but now they are quite common. Not only that, they’ve figured out how to survive winters—not migrating like almost all other hummingbirds outside the tropics. This means they figured out what to eat (bugs, sap) when flowers are not available. Genius.

Spiders weave exquisite structures that are incredibly strong for their vanishing weight, and are then able to pinpoint the coordinates of a trapped morsel based on vibrational patterns. You try it! Genius.

Chickadees actually seasonally adjust the size of their brains in order to remember where they stashed many thousands of seeds for winter survival. Supporting the larger brain year-round is overly-taxing, especially during the energetically-challenging period of raising chicks—at a time of year when abundant caterpillars don’t require encyclopedic memory. Genius.

Cuttlefish create patterns on their skin that look like the bands of light and dark formed by sunlight interacting with surface waves. As they approach prey, they slide these patterns back-to-front to create the illusion that they are receding rather than approaching. Genius.

Honeybees use sun-oriented symbolic language to communicate accurate locations (and a measure of quality) for food and new nest sites. They also employ a consensus-building process to select a new home. Drones and newly-hatched queens somehow know what aerial location in a region is the rendezvous zone for mating. Genius.

Amoebas can optimally solve mazes, design economically credible rail system route maps, learn to overcome novel challenges, and even pass on this learning to others they contact. Genius.

Obviously, such a list as this could go on for millions more entries. For loads more examples, I recommend (again) Ze Frank’s True Facts videos, and also a book I’m just now listening to called The Genius of Birds, by Jennifer Ackerman. Every form of life does something amazing—often unknown to us, and generally baffling as to how. Even the basic molecular operations of a cell stretch or exceed our ability to understand, let alone design from scratch.

Pull Einstein out of his artificial context and plop him (with colleagues, sure) into a wild place and you’ll quickly find out who the real geniuses are. Humans are certainly capable of such genius survival, but only if loaded with the appropriate cultural software—as vanishingly few are today. Not genius.

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