A CREATIVE COGNITION 213EVOLUTION OF COGNITIONCognition- like interactions are apparent in metabolic and developmen-
tal systems, as mentioned earlier. But brain- based cognitive functions
prob ably emerged in evolution as soon as brains evolved. Th ey did so as
a means for dealing with an enormous leap in environmental change.
And that arose as soon as animals started to move around more, in a
world full of other organisms and objects.
To the individual organism, those “ others” are experienced as moving,
transforming, fl eeting, and usually incomplete, impressions. Animals
need the ability to integrate these unreliable impressions into some more
defi nite internal repre sen ta tions of that turbulent world outside. Th ey
needed to obtain predictability of the unfolding be hav iors of other ob-
jects, both animate and inanimate; and also to fashion fruitful responses
to them, even while the scene is changing and being changed by the
individual’s own activity.
Th e unique function of cognitive systems, then, is to go beyond the
information given: to disambiguate confusing, incomplete, and rapidly
changing data while generating equally unique, yet adaptive, responses.
Such functions arose very early in the evolution of ner vous systems.
Even the soil- dwelling nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans has cogni-
tive abilities. Although barely one millimeter long, and with a brain of
only 302 neurons, it can learn the smells, tastes, temperatures, and oxygen
levels that predict aversive chemicals or the presence or absence of food.^12
Cognition in fl ies and bees is quite sophisticated by comparison. Th e
honeybee has a brain of less than a million neurons. But it exhibits com-
plex concept formations that go beyond what Martin Giurfa calls
“elemental associative learning.”^13 For example, bees learn categorizations
based on generalized properties such as vertical and horizontal, a basic
cognitive function in advanced systems. Moreover, aft er foraging in their
usual zig- zag fashion, bees do not fi nd their way home by simply retrac-
ing their outward meanderings: they memorize and integrate the direc-
tions and distances experienced to construct the most direct route. In
doing so, the bees internalize the higher- order relations of the landscape
topography. In other words, they have assimilated the statistical struc-
tural par ameters.
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