Brains Beget Brains

I have a theory.  I think that human intelligence will spawn higher intelligence in other species of animals.  And this isn’t mysterious.  Higher intelligence will produce greater success when sharing an ecosystem that more and more is dominated by human actions.  And the negative situation is already well known.  Animals that can’t adapt to interaction with modern humans have a much lower chance of thriving in the current world.  Maybe the grizzly bear is a good example.  In the first century of interaction with Europeans, the grizzly’s instinct told him to charge into a pack of Europeans.  This resulted in many, many dead grizzly bears.  And this pattern continues to this very day.  Result?  Grizzlies were extirpated from all parts of United States other than Yellowstone where they were protected by law.

But what about animals that have adapted?  Which animals thrive in our company?  Well, obviously dogs and domesticated cats are the prime examples.  And as far as it goes, we’ve done a lot more with selective breeding of dogs than cats.  And I’m guessing that canine brain development has been fundamentally changed by association with man.  I think that some kind of selection is happening that will attune dogs with human intelligence.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  Dogs are not geniuses but they are relatively intelligent animals and so the potential is there for them to continue to evolve into a creature that interacts with humans at a much closer to equal level than is currently seen.  Of course, if we were domesticating chimpanzees or bonobos, I think the process would move at a much faster pace.  Those apes already have significantly greater intelligence.  But apes are truly dangerous animals with unpredictable behavior.  Dogs, for the most part, are already part of the human household and have enormous empathy for people around them (for the most part).  So, I think that some time in the future dogs will move forward significantly in intelligence.

But what other creatures huddle around humanity successfully?  Well, rodents.  Mice, rats, squirrels and chipmunks.  They’ve adapted to humans in a big way.  And their numbers have probably never been higher than they are right now.  But humans are getting better at killing them.  New poisons, better traps and strategies for preventing them from getting into our food stores seems to be making a dent in their success.  My guess is as we use smarter and smarter methods to keep them at bay, we will produce smarter and smarter rodents that keep wanting to break in.

And I have this feeling that one day there will be rodents that are orders of magnitude smarter than they are now.  I’ll go out on a limb and say that rats will be the ones to noticeably grow more intelligent.  This will sound crazy, but I envision a species of rats that become social in a way that mimics human socialization.  I think they’ll develop something approaching speech.  It’ll be like something out of a Disney cartoon with the rats having tribal gatherings and getting their marching orders from the head rat.  Well, I better get some sleep.