If you were to remove a chimpanzee’s brain from its cranium and place it in a liquidiser, the resultant goo would fill an average-sized coffee mug. If you were to do the same with a human brain, it would fill four coffee mugs. You might ask what this has to do with the evolution of intelligence. Given that humans and chimpanzees evolved from a common ancestor a mere 6 million years ago, a central question for evolutionary psychology is what were the evolutionary pressures that led to this huge increase in processing power in us but not in our closest relatives. Currently, there are two main competing hypotheses to explain our level of intelligence: social and ecological factors. Before we consider these explanations, however, we need to have a definition of intelligence.
Intelligence is notoriously difficult to define, but most experts would agree that it involves the ability to adapt and function effectively within a given environment. Note this definition is broad and allows us to consider that other animals have intelligence.
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