Steering allowed early organisms to navigate their environment by categorizing stimuli into “good” and “bad.” That kind of intelligence emerged six hundred million years ago from coral-like life. Hormones such as dopamine and serotonin were also a product of this breakthrough, which still guide many of our behaviors today. Pleasure, pain, satiation, and stress were also direct results.
Five hundred million years ago, life acquired the capability to learn to repeat behaviors that lead to good or bad outcomes. It happened within the first vertebrates, which today we would call fish. This breakthrough also gave us time perception, curiosity, fear, excitement, disappointment, and relief.
One hundred million years ago, in small mammals, a newly formed brain structure called the neocortex allowed for the simulation of possible outcomes of actions before taking them. It allowed mammals to plan or recall past events, leading to more complex behaviors and more efficient learning by imagination.
Ten to thirty million years ago, in early primates, the neocortex grew in size and complexity, allowing for mentalizing — predicting the behavior of themselves and others based on their mental states. Now, these animals could anticipate their own future needs, understand the intents and knowledge of others, and learn skills through observation! This, in turn, allowed for even more complex social structures, cooperation, and politics.
The speech was the breakthrough that enabled the accumulation of thoughts and knowledge across generations. You no longer needed to see someone get poisoned by red berries to learn they are inedible — your mom telling ”red berries bad” was enough.
There is no unique brain structure responsible for speech in humans. What’s unique to humans is the learning “program” — a set of behaviors — that teaches you speech. That is why teaching children languages gets increasingly harder as they age.
Each breakthrough was built on top of the previous one. Who knows what breakthrough #6 will be, but it seems increasingly likely to be artificial superintelligence. Max argues that we are already seeing the first signs of it with large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s GPTs. While still very different and inferior to humans, biology will not constrain their evolution. Considering it took only a few billion years to go from single-cell organisms to a human intellect, it’s hard to imagine what will become of us in another few billion years.
Whatever it is, it’s sure to be exciting.