So the force with which the question was suddenly put in 1975 by two zoologists working independently had an enormous impact. Richard Alexander of the University of Michigan was one: In the tradition of the Red Queen, he expressed skepticism about whether what Charles Darwin had called " the hostile forces of
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nature" were a sufficiently challenging adversary for an intelligent mind. The point is that the challenges presented by stone tools or tubers are mostly predictable ones. Generation after generation of chipping a tool off a block of stone or knowing where to look for tubers calls for the same level of skill each time: With experience each gets easier. It is rather like learning to ride a bicycle; once you know how to do it, it comes naturally: Indeed, it becomes " unconscious, " as if conscious effort were simply not needed every time.
Likewise, Homo erectus did not need consciousness to know that you should stalk zebras upwind every time lest they scent you or that tubers grow beneath certain trees: It came as naturally to him as riding a bike does to us. Imagine playing chess against a computer that has only one opening gambit. It might be a good opening gambit, but once you know how to beat it, you can play the same response yourself, game after game. Of course, the whole point of chess is that your opponent can select one of many different ways to respond to each move you make.
It was logic like this that led Alexander to propose that the key feature of the human environment that rewarded intelligence was the presence of other human beings: Generation after generation, if your lineage is getting more intelligent, so is theirs. However fast you run, you stay in the same place relative to them.
Humans became ecologically dominant by virtue of their technical skills, and that made humans the only enemy of humans (apart from parasites). "Only humans themselves could provide the necessary challenge to explain their own evolution, " wrote Alexander:"
True enough, but Scottish midges and African elephants are
" ecologically dominant" in the sense that they outnumber or out-rank all potential enemies, yet neither has seen the need to develop the ability to understand the theory of relativity: In any case, where is the evidence that Lucy was ecologically dominant? By all accounts her species was an insignificant part of the fauna of the dry, wooded savanna where she lived.'°
Independently, Nicholas Humphrey, a young Cambridge zoologist, came to a conclusion similar to Alexander 's. Humphrey began an essay on the topic with the story of how Henry Ford once THE INTELLECTUAL CHESS GAME
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asked his representatives to find out which parts of the Model-T
never went wrong. They came back with the answer that the kingpin had never gone wrong; so Ford ordered it made to an inferior specification to save money. " Nature, " wrote Humphrey, " is surely at least as careful an economist as Henry Ford:'
Intelligence must therefore have a purpose; it cannot be an expensive luxury. Defining intelligence as the ability to " modify behavior on the basis of valid inference from evidence, " Humphrey argued that the use of intelligence for practical invention was an easily demolished straw man: " Paradoxically, subsistence technology, rather than requiring intelligence, may actually become a substi-tute for it: " The gorilla, Humphrey noted, is intelligent as animals go, yet it leads the most technically undemanding life imaginable.
It eats the leaves that grow abundantly all around it. But the gorilla 's life is dominated by social problems: The vast majority of its intellectual effort is expended on dominating, submitting to, reading the mood of, and affecting the lives of other gorillas: Likewise, Robinson Crusoe 's life on the desert island was technically fairly straightforward, says Humphrey. " It was the arrival of Man Friday on the scene that really made things difficult for Crusoe. " Humphrey suggested that mankind uses his intellect mainly in social situations. "The game of social plot and counter-plot cannot be played merely on the basis of accumulated knowledge, any more than a game of chess can. " A person must calculate the consequences of his own behavior and calculate the likely behavior of others: For that he needs at least a glimpse of his own motives in order to guess the things that are going through others '
minds in similar situations, and it was this need for self-knowledge that drove the increase in conscious awareness.'
As Horace Barlow of Cambridge University has pointed out, the things of which we are conscious are mostly the mental events that concern social actions: We remain unconscious of how we see, walk, hit a tennis ball, or write a word: Like a military hierarchy, consciousness operates on a " need to know " policy: "I can think of no exception to the rule that one is conscious of what it is possible to report to others and not conscious of what it is not 332 :::
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possible to report." John Crook, a psychologist with a special interest in Eastern philosophy, has made much the same point:
"Attention therefore moves cognition into awareness, where it becomes subject to verbal formulation and reporting to others."
What Humphrey and Alexander described was essentially a Red Queen chess game: The faster mankind ran—the more intelligent he became—the more he stayed in the same place because the people over whom he sought psychological dominion were his own relatives, the descendants of the more intelligent people from previous generations: As Pinker and Bloom put it, "Interacting with an organism of approximately equal mental abilities whose motives are at times outright [sic] malevolent makes formidable and ever-escalating demands on cognition: "13 If Tooby and Cosmides are right about mental modules, among the modules that were selected to increase in size by this intellectual chess tournament was the " theory of mind " module,, the one that enables us to form an opinion about one another 's thoughts, together with the means to express our own thoughts through the language modules." There is plenty of good evidence for this idea when you look about you: Gossip is one of the most universal of human habits. No conversation between people who know each other well—fellow employees, fellow family members, old friends—ever lingers for long on any topic other than the behavior, ambitions, motives, frailties, and affairs of other absent—or present—members of the group: That is the reason the soap opera is the quintessentially effective way to entertain people:" Nor is this a Western habit: Konner wrote of his experience with !Kung San tribesmen:
After two years with the San, I came to think of the Pleistocene epoch of human history (the 3 million years during which we evolved) as one interminable marathon encounter group: When we slept in a grass hut in one of their villages, there were many nights when its flimsy walls leaked charged exchanges from the circle around the fire, frank expressions of feeling and contention beginning when the dusk fires were lit and running on until dawn: 1e
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Virtually all novels and plays are about the same subject, even when disguised as history or adventure. If you want to understand human motives, read Proust or Trollope or Tom Wolfe, not Freud or Piaget or Skinner. We are obsessed with one another 's minds: "Our intuitive commonsense psychology far surpasses any scientific psychology in scope and accuracy, " wrote Don Symons.'9
Horace Barlow points out that great literary minds are, almost by definition, great mind-reading minds: Shakespeare was a far better psychologist than Freud, and Jane Austen a far better sociologist than Durkheim: We are clever because we are—and to the extent that we are—natural psychologists:`°