Intelligence is closely intertwined with memory, but more specifically, the ability to use memory efficiently to adapt: a potential to learn.

In one way or another, every biological system, from bacteria to caterpillars to humans, has a way to memorize and adapt – if not as an individual, then as a species, through natural selection. Because what else is evolution than a solution to the problem of an ever changing environment, by iterating genetic memory until a viable outcome is found? This is independent learning in the most fundamental way, where each member of a species becomes a storage unit for memory, and the world becomes the class room from which only the most appropriate combinations of stored memories will graduate.

In that sense, intelligence permeates through this world, and is an inherent property of all living creatures. It has led to the invention of myriads of solutions to the problem of survival, through the use of myriads of tools, from molecules, to body parts, to behavior.

Learning means survival, so learning is the nature of all living things.

It is consequently the fundamental difference between a living creature, like a fish, or a bird, or a monad, and a non-living thing, like a virus or a prion. Because the living creature can grow, on its own and in isolation, beyond the tools that it has been given. It exists at a level of complexity where deterministic processes give way to stochastics, where decisions are made that are no longer predictable, where new, higher functions emerge spontaneously, and where the whole becomes more than the interplay of the sum of its parts.

Or does it?

Look at humankind. We like to believe we are great inventors, and surely, we have the most sophisticated tools of all living beings on this planet. But how many of our ideas are truly original? When have we ever truly pushed the boundaries of nature? We use the tools that millennia of evolution have left us with, like our intellect and our physique, and we use it to make new tools, like our technology, to investigate nature in turn.

But in one way or another, our tools have existed before we invented them. Levers. Electricity. Data storage. Computation. I used to hold the belief that the wheel – a freely rotating structure driven by a force to facilitate a task – was at least one thing man invented that nature hadn't invented first. Then I saw the structure of ATP-synthase, a rotational molecular motor that is so fundamental in its function that all living creatures make use of it. And so I realized that I was wrong even on that account.

It stands to reason that any other species, had it climbed to the top of the food chain in the way humans have managed, would have arrived at the same point eventually. All our tools are just iterations of those that came before, all our achievements were born from the interplay of these tools with our minds, a great, big, messy result of the randomness and complexity of our biological prerequisites. Nonetheless amazing, but in no way unique.

So what does that say about our intelligence?

Have any of our tools truly helped us push the boundary of natural law? Have we ever created something that nature hadn't allowed us to create, rather than even having failed numerous times to re-create something that nature already had invented long before us, through millions of years of trial and error? Has any of our technology truly made us more intelligent beings?

This situation that we find ourselves in today, could it have been avoided if any of the tools we had been given were different, if millions of years of evolution had brought us along a different way, made us different beings?

And lastly, have we truly grown beyond our primitive instincts that tell us to fight for survival? Has our supposed intelligence really made us better beings?