The Essential Definition of Intelligence: Evolutionary and Developmental Origins of the Survival Domain
The Essential Definition of Intelligence:
Evolutionary and Developmental Origins of the Survival Domain
Highlights
- Defines intelligence as survival-domain choice-space operation.
- Separates intelligence from adaptation through state-dependent selection.
- Compares species by ecological problem space, not human-likeness.
- Reconstructs hominin intelligence as externalized survival-domain transition.
- Frames human intelligence as culturally buffered vulnerability compensation.
Intelligence is often treated as a vertical scale of cognitive sophistication, with human-like language, abstraction, planning, tool use, and self-report occupying the upper end. This framing risks reducing diverse biological capacities to their proximity to human cognition, while the opposite tendency risks expanding intelligence until it becomes indistinguishable from adaptation in general.
This paper proposes a reframing of intelligence as survival-domain choice-space operation. On this view, intelligence refers to the capacity of an organism to discriminate, select, combine, and modify survival-relevant options within a species-specific ecological problem space. The framework distinguishes simple adaptation from intelligence by requiring state-dependent operation over multiple possible survival paths.
It then applies this definition to comparative cases, including collective, social, non-social, and boundary systems. Through an evolutionary reconstruction of the hominin lineage, the paper traces how the human survival domain became organized around mixed locomotion, bipedal commitment, forelimb availability, object manipulation, social learning, and cumulative cultural transmission. Human-like intelligence is interpreted as the outcome of this transition, through which survival options became increasingly externalized into tools, practices, symbols, and institutions.
The paper further argues that long human development provides implementation time for entering this culturally externalized domain, while curiosity and creativity function as domain-expanding operations. The resulting account offers a non-vertical framework for comparing intelligence across species and within humans, without treating human development as a universal standard.
