How can a biological system ever generate coherent and goal-oriented behavior from the bottom up when there is no external designer?
In fact, intelligence—a purposeful response to available information, often anticipating the future—is not restricted to the minds of some privileged species. It is distributed throughout biology, at many different spatial and temporal scales.
A common solution is emerging in two different fields: developmental biology and neuroscience.
The argument proceeds in three steps. The first rests on one of natural selection’s first and best design ideas: modularity. Modules are self-contained functional units like apartments in a building.
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Related on the SLP
The second step in the argument is that modules can be assembled in a hierarchy: lower-level modules combine to form increasingly sophisticated higher-levels modules, which then become new building blocks for even higher-level modules, and so on.
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A third step in our argument…: each module has a few key elements that serve as control knobs or trigger points that activate the module. This is known as pattern completion, where the activation of a part of the system turns on the entire system.
