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INTELLIGENSICUS
The Evidence
The Peer-Reviewed Ground the Program Stands On
Imran Stanton Cooper
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THE CLAIM AND ITS FOUNDATION

Intelligensicus rests on findings already in the peer-reviewed record, not on speculation. Two of them establish the pathway itself. The rest establish that the animals the program scaffolds already hold and transmit the kinds of capability it aims to raise. This page gathers that ground in one place, because a serious reviewer should be able to check the foundation before weighing the proposal.

THE PATHWAY IS REAL, FAST, AND HERITABLE

The silver-fox domestication experiment selected on tameness alone and produced docile, human-oriented foxes with correlated behavioral change within only a handful of generations. Behavioral change on this pathway is fast and heritable. (Trut, Oskina, and Kharlamova, 2009, BioEssays; Dugatkin, 2018, Evolution: Education and Outreach.)

A WILD POPULATION CAN ADOPT AND HOLD A CULTURE

Robert Sapolsky's savanna baboon troop became lastingly and transmissibly peaceable after a change in its conditions, and the culture was adopted by males who joined the troop years after the original members were gone. A gain can become a wild population's own inheritance. (Sapolsky and Share, 2004, PLOS Biology.)

WILD MINDS ALREADY HOLD AND TRANSMIT CAPABILITY

Chimpanzees maintain regional, socially transmitted behavioral traditions (Whiten et al., 1999, Nature). Tool-using dolphins in Shark Bay pass sponge-tool foraging down the maternal line (Mann et al., 2012, Nature Communications). Wild gorillas use tools (Breuer et al., 2005, PLOS Biology). Ravens plan for future tool-use and barter on a par with great apes (Kabadayi and Osvath, 2017, Science). Crows recognize individual human faces and transmit the association across a flock and its offspring (Marzluff et al., 2012, PNAS). Elephants pass mirror self-recognition and matriarch-held ecological knowledge that raises group survival (Plotnik, de Waal, and Reiss, 2006, PNAS; McComb et al., 2011, Proceedings of the Royal Society B).

THE INVERTEBRATE MINDS

Cognition once thought impossible is now documented across the invertebrates. Octopuses show an active, REM-like sleep stage (Pophale et al., 2023, Nature) and evolved large brains under the pressures cephalopod life imposes (Amodio et al., 2019, Trends in Ecology and Evolution). Cuttlefish exert self-control in a delay-of-gratification task (Schnell et al., 2021, Proceedings of the Royal Society B). Bumblebees improve on observed complex behaviors and engage in apparently playful object manipulation (Loukola et al., 2017, Science; Galpayage Dona et al., 2022, Animal Behaviour). Ants teach by tandem-running (Franks and Richardson, 2006, Nature). Jumping spiders execute planned detours, solve novel confinement problems, and show an REM-sleep-like state, the first reported in a terrestrial invertebrate (Aguilar-Arguello and Nelson, 2021; Cross and Jackson, 2016; Jackson, 2001; Rossler et al., 2022, PNAS).

THE ETHICAL SPINE

The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness (2024) affirms a realistic possibility of conscious experience across the vertebrates and many invertebrates, including cephalopods, decapod crustaceans, and insects. The program adopts a precautionary welfare posture consistent with that declaration and runs every track under the 3Rs of humane experimental technique (Russell and Burch, 1959).

THE GAP

No program has combined these findings into a deliberate, scaled effort to raise the intelligence of wild populations and let them keep it. The foundation is solid and public. The opportunity is to build on it.

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The foundation is peer-reviewed. The program is what has not yet been built on it.
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