I gave a talk titled “The Biology of Intelligence” on Sunday to the Atheists of Florida. It went OK, I think, with some of the familiar problems of Zoom talks. I sound a bit like a Dalek at times, and early on I had a catastrophic crash — my computer went down hard and I had to restart it all — but we muddled through.
I’m not a fan of the concept of “intelligence” — it’s something we can’t define and can’t even objectively measure, yet we seem to be comfortable saying that one species is more intelligent than another. A lot of the biology research seems to be contrived towards finding morphological correlates that align with our intuition, which is just plain bad science. Maybe I just don’t trust it because nobody ever intuits that spiders are the smartest species on earth.