SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 345perception, conceptual categorization, learning, knowledge, memory, and
thinking— are properties of attractor co ali tions at successive levels of
emergence.
Th e evolved intelligent systems that create such cognition in brains are
brought into still higher co ali tions in social groups. Chapter 8 reviewed
research on the kinds of “epicognition” that result, from swarm intelli-
gence in bees and ants, through bird fl ocks and fi sh schools, to the vari-
ety of groups in mammals. It showed how the same logic of evolving
dynamic systems has been most useful in describing these interactions
in cognition and be hav ior.
Th e chapter also questioned the popu lar idea that the evolution, brains,
and social cognition of apes somehow represents the pathway to humans.
Th is notion seems to have arisen from weak ecological analyses. Evolving
as social hunters, true cooperation was demanded far more intensively
in humans than in even the most “social” primate groups, presenting far
greater demands on cognitive systems.
Th is deeper ecological analy sis was accordingly taken up in chapter 9.
It explained how the need for intense cooperative action between brains
created a new intelligent system— the socio- cognitive or cultural one—
that sets humans apart from apes and other mammals. I showed how the
refl ective abstraction through this new attractor landscape has produced
such enormous creativity of cognition and be hav ior—so much so that
humans, unlike all other species, are freed from specifi c environments (or
niches).
Th e realization that humans are obligatory users of “cultural tools”
and develop from the outside in, as much as the inside out, has impor-
tant implications for intelligence (IQ) testing. Claims to be mea sur ing
brain or cognitive “power,” in de pen dently of cultural background, are se-
riously misleading. I also suggest that if human intelligence systems really
were a simple quantitative trait, like height or weight—as behavioral ge-
ne ticists suggest— then humans would still be confi ned to a single niche
like the apes.
All of that has profound consequences for understanding social
inequalities and for intervention programs aiming to ameliorate them.
Chapter 10 considered the “models” of ge ne tic and environmental inter-
ventionism that have fi gured in research and some of the programs
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