Challenges to the Evolution of Intelligence

This chapter explains how the world offers many resources to organisms, noting that obtaining resources is hard. It covers exploration that takes time, behavior that may have delayed consequences, and informative stimuli that are often mixed with noninformative ones. It also mentions animals that have evolved several solutions to challenges, such as learning by trial and error and learning from others. The chapter discusses the emergence of solutions with humans that couples cultural information with the capacity to think. It explores the transition from animal to human intelligence that can be understood by reasoning about sequences of behavior, sequences of information-processing steps, and sequences of stimuli.