Genes, Brains, and Human Potential The Science and Ideology of Intelligence

248 POTENTIAL BETWEEN BRAINS

a diff er ent place. Th ey were even more likely to do so if they had experi-
ence themselves of stealing other jays’ food (as they also habitually do).
Th ese observations have been confi rmed in replication studies. As before,
the jays re- cached a much higher proportion of the peanuts if another
bird could see them.^14
Of course, these abilities have less to do with social cooperation than
with general (nonsocial) interactions with other animals. But they may
be indicative of ways in which social interactions could encourage the
evolution of even more complex cognition. For example, it has been
claimed that birds that have experienced social hierarchies are more ca-
pable of transitive inference of the kind:

A is higher than B;

B is higher than C;

therefore, A is higher than C.

However, there have been doubts, mainly to do with the interpretation
of observations and lack of experimental control. I will not go into these
details here. However, these studies may indicate that birds have cogni-
tive intelligence more advanced than previously thought.

SOCIAL COOPERATION IN MAMMALS

So far we have discussed the nature of cognition in social groups and in-
quired how individual diff erences might be related to them, at least in ants,
fi sh, and birds. Variation seems to depend on the actual degree of cohesion
of the group. And the cohesion varies with the range of advantages gained
over the kinds of environmental changes to be contended with.
Th e social insects, facing unpredictability of many kinds, exist entirely
in highly cohesive groups and cannot exist outside them. Individual dif-
ferences are achieved through developmental plasticities, aff ecting anatom-
ical and physiological, as well as cognitive and behavioral, diff erences.
Th at is, the dynamical rules emerging in the group as a whole are re-
fracted through the already- developed biases in individuals to set up
structured feedforward and feedback loops.

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