Humans are really smart, but how did intelligence evolve?

If we're trying to look back at the history of intelligent brains,

do we have to look all the way back to our common ancestors with the apes,

or all mammals, or all rept reptiles or can the origins of

intelligence be traced back even further and now that our species is good and smart what does

a knowledge of our past mean for us as we work to build intelligence artificially.

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford,

and in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three-pound universe

to understand why and how our lives look the way they do.

Today's episode is about intelligence and the history of intelligence. How did human intelligence arrive on the scene?

Now, this is an important question because we seem to be operating at a different level than our

neighbors in the animal kingdom. We are the only ones, as far as we can tell, who compose symphonies

and launch Mars rover missions and discover

DNA and build courthouses and have congresses and construct windmills and write novels and build

screws and screwdrivers to hold things together and so on and so on, none of which any other animal does.

And this is how we've taken over the whole planet.

But how the heck did this happen?

Why are humans such a runaway species?

Well, traditionally, the explanation has been something, this is a special gift from your deity,

whichever deity your family believed in at whatever moment in history.

But centuries of people looking at this carefully, sometimes in a microscope,

...