Intelligence (biology)

In biology, intelligence refers to the ability of an organism to adapt to its environment through learning and memory. 'Intelligence', then, translates as the ability of an organism to exhibit 'intelligent behavior'. Interindividual differences in intelligence reflect differences in the 'quality' of learning and memory, where quality may consist in efficiency, speed, capacity, and/or structure, among other factors, all of which remain under active investigation.

Measuring the intelligence of an individual organism requires performing some kind of intelligence testing, in which case what the intelligence test measures defines 'intelligence' in that circumstance. In that regard, intelligence is what intelligence tests measure.

To say that intelligence is what intelligence tests measure is an incomplete statement but it is not vacuous. The content of a battery of test items is defined by what is common to the set of items which were used to construct it. These items are not chosen haphazardly but selected to convey, as far as our crude notion will allow, what we mean by the word 'intelligence'. In a real sense, this set of items is a way of saying what we mean by 'intelligence'.

The crucial question is: what does this test battery measure? The answer to this question is our provisional definition of intelligence. Intelligence, we repeat, is a collective property of the set of items. If the individual items have meaning, so does the aggregate (Bartholomew 2004).

Prerequisites

An organism exhibits intelligent behavior when it successfully adapts to the stimuli impacting upon it, however limited the informational content of the stimuli.

The role of sensation

The ability of an organism to exhibit intelligent behavior depends in part on the width of its sensory input spectrum — the number of sensory input types — and in part on the character and breadth of the sensory input channels. The greater the number and types of sensory input channels, and the greater their informational density, the better chance the organism has to adapt to real-time changes in its surroundings (Agutter and Wheatley 2007).

References

• Agutter PS, Wheatley DN. (2007) About Life: Concepts in Modern Biology. Springer. ISBN 978-1-4020-5417-4.

• Bartholomew DJ. (2004) Measuring Intelligence: Facts and Fallacies. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521544785. | Google Books preview. | Excerpt: The great intelligence debate: science or ideology?.