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Chapter 9 Evidence for the Existence of Intelligence (7) Intelligence permeates and governs the motion and direction of all living tissue (plant and animal) and is also manifested at the cellular level. Chomsky states that natural selection, acting on chance mutations, is not sufficient to explain the elaborate creations of nature, and cannot by itself account for what happens in evolution.1...Pierre-Paul Grasse, France's leading zoologist, says Darwinism cannot account for the most striking and obvious aspect of evolution, namely its inventiveness.2...This requires the presence of intelligence, which helps direct the evolutionary process. As suggested before, intelligence has a direct mathematical relationship to the process of entropy. It has had to become very creative in finding new ways to overcome entropy. The process of entropy utilizes all of the recognized physical laws to bring about the destruction of any and all complex material forms, and the operation of intelligence is competing against this natural process. Entropy could be considered as anti-intelligence. The two opposing processes are very natural and very much interdependent because without the entropic process intelligence would not have evolved to the state that we now recognize. Through natural selection intelligence has evolved in opposition to entropy, which has shaped and molded it. The instinct for survival is a basic property of intelligence, which is programmed into all life forms beginning at the molecular level, and operates in direct opposition to the entropic process. Life-forming molecules which are capable of reproducing themselves have this basic "instinct for survival" property which competes against the basic destructive property of entropy. In life forms the instinct for survival has been edging out the destructive process of entropy and an upward evolutionary process has resulted. This has also resulted in less evolutionary pressure toward the development of organisms that respond to individual atomic events, but more toward the development of receptors that measure properties of distributions like temperature and atmospheric pressure.3 Prigogine, who won the Nobel prize for chemistry in 1977, suggests that organized systems arise naturally out of unorganized matter. He proposes the existence of a principle which pushes living organisms, including human beings themselves, to states of greater and greater complexity.4...States of greater complexity are associated with higher levels of intelligence. The "instinct for survival" may represent a component of the principle he proposes. Intelligence permeates the entire plant and animal world, no matter how simple or complex the organism. It is most easily recognizable in primates. Most of science has rejected any recognition of creative intelligence or consciousness within animals, probably out of blindness, or even arrogance, which humankind has always been so well endowed with. A new attitude is beginning to surface within the scientific world which is starting to reverse this opinion. We are beginning to realize that many animals do have a rather sophisticated intelligence that allows them to communicate with other members of their own species. A few, such as higher primates and possibly porpoises, can even be taught to communicate with man. Chimpanzees have the ability to learn and use human sign language and even to invent new expressions with them. This begins to give us evidence that animals do indeed have intelligence as well as consciousness. The latter is probably less than the self-awareness that humans experience, but I am convinced that it undoubtedly exists.
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