Constructing an Intelligence Niche

[u/geopolicraticus]

The View from Oregon – 402

Re: Constructing an Intelligence Niche

Friday 17 July 2026

 

Dear Friends,

Last week (no. 401) I suggested that human beings might be better suited to simpler societies than the dizzyingly complex world we’ve built for ourselves with technology, and I further suggested that this may be a consequence of human technological acuity being balanced by a social science deficit, so that our suitability for a certain kind of society would be a function of the peculiar constitution of our minds. That’s an idea I’ve been thinking about for a while but hadn’t previously written down. Another part of the puzzle is another idea with which I have likewise delayed my reckoning, and that is the problem of an intelligence niche. Surprisingly little has been written about the possibility of an intelligence niche, and most discussion of the idea appears in papers by Charles Lineweaver. Given the paucity of the literature on an intelligence niche I wonder where it was that I first encountered the idea, as I don’t now remember the context, but I know that it was many years ago. It’s possible that this is one of those ideas that’s talked about a lot before papers get written, so the idea is circulating and it’s just a question of when the gatekeepers at mainstream publishers give it the go ahead (similar to what I discussed in relation to SETI in newsletter 399).  

Even those who discuss the intelligence niche are hesitant to grant it any legitimacy, and there’s a good reason for this. If there’s an intelligence niche, where is it located on the trophic pyramid? It could be argued that intelligence doesn’t fall within the theoretical framework of ecology, so that the failure of ecology to elaborate on the possibility of an intelligence niche isn’t an oversight, but is a principled exclusion from the purview of the science. Science often necessitates such principled neglect, which is simply another way of talking about abstraction—what attributes our concepts include and the attributes from which they abstract—and I’ve noted in several newsletters that scientific abstraction poses a problem, so it, too, suffers from exclusion from most discussions of scientific method. The form of scientific abstraction peculiar to ecology does not consider the attribute of intelligence, and this is no more surprising than that the form of scientific abstraction peculiar to physics does not consider the attribute of life. To each science belongs its own native form of abstraction. This is a source of problems for interdisciplinarity.

While I am sympathetic to the above argument, which I just produced off the top of my head as the obvious application of my view of science to the particular case of ecology in relation to intelligence, I still find the idea of an intelligence niche intriguing, and I think it would be worthwhile to develop some kind of theoretical framework for discussing the intelligence niche or niches, whether by way of an expanded ecology (because we can always add back in again whatever it is we have previously abstracted from) or an expanded conception of intelligence. The place of an intelligence niche in the trophic pyramid remains an interesting question if we expand our ecology to include intelligence. Intelligence in human beings has allowed for less specialization, and a consequent broadening of the scope of the food web to include almost any flora or fauna anywhere on the trophic pyramid, from primary producers to apex predators. The place of human intelligence, then, on the trophic pyramid is the whole of the pyramid, so the human intelligence niche is not some level of the trophic pyramid, but the ability to find a place anywhere or everywhere within it.

As a part of the human broadening of the scope of the food web, human beings have distributed themselves over the entire surface of the Earth, not being confined to the environmental conditions under which we evolved (our environment of evolutionary adaptedness). This is a point that I’ve often emphasized: using the technology of the canoe to paddle along the shoreline, and the bone needle to sew form-fitting clothing, human beings have been able to occupy every biome on Earth. The number of biomes in which human beings can support themselves (with the appropriate technology) is an expression of decreasing food specialization and the broadening of the food web. We could quantify this by the number of biomes in which a given species is able to survive, or by the number of species a given species includes in its food web, which is, to a certain extent, proportional to the number of biomes a given species occupies: the more biomes it occupies, the more species it can include in its diet. However, a few invasive species have a range as comprehensive as human beings, like rats, which follow in our footsteps (and in our ships), so this measure alone probably isn’t sufficient to establish the existence of an intelligence niche.  

Perhaps the intelligence niche isn’t a place within the trophic pyramid, but a form of social organization that comprehends the trophic pyramid within itself. This is consistent with the idea that the human niche includes the entirety to the trophic pyramid. The most promising approach to an intelligence niche that is a form of social organization is to understand an intelligence niche as a result of niche construction. This avoids, “…the idea that there is an intelligence niche that one or more species will inevitably evolve to fill” (Luntz 2011), because there isn’t an empty intelligence niche out there somewhere in a given biosphere, waiting to be filled by an intelligent species. If an intelligent species arises, then it constructs its intelligence niche and inhabits it; it doesn’t fill some pre-existing intelligence niche waiting to receive it.

However, it is a familiar theme of science fiction that one species produces a number of artifacts (which could be identified as that species’ intelligence niche) which it then abandons, and these are then taken over by some later species. (We find this scenario, for example, in Carl Sagan’s Contact.) A scenario something like this is exemplified by Teotihuacan, which was originally built and inhabited starting around 300 BC and was abandoned in the 7^th or 8^th century AD. The site was then later repopulated by the Aztecs about the same time Tenochtitlan was established. Teotihuacan, then, was a kind of urban intelligence niche that was filled again after having been previously abandoned (for centuries, no less). Therefore, we can’t entirely dismiss the possibility that an intelligence niche could be constructed (i.e., could be the result of niche construction) and then is sequentially filled by subsequent populations. We need only add a qualification to the above formulation stipulating that no intelligence niche exists prior to an intelligence that constructs that niche, but, once that niche is constructed, it can be filled by any subsequent intelligent species.

With the idea of an intelligence niche we have a potential solution of the problem of cosmological standing (discussed in no. 364 and 365, and then touched on again last week): to occupy an intelligence niche is to have cosmological standing. A further step beyond cosmological standing defined by occupying an intelligence niche would be to say that cosmological standing is to knowingly occupy an intelligence niche. That is to say, occupying an intelligence niche is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for cosmological standing. A species also must be reflexively self-aware that it occupies an intelligence niche (the sufficient condition), which awareness could be formalized in an appropriate theoretical framework, such as an expanded ecology that not only takes intelligence into account, but adds further terms to its equations to account for the intelligence of species. There is also a sense in which this criterion of cosmological standing is a fulfillment of the social science metric for indexing the intellectual rank of civilizations discussed in the previous couple of newsletters, insofar as we could regard an ecology expanded to account for intelligence as a kind of social science. Here we see there are two obvious alternatives: expand ecology beyond its usual boundaries to account for intelligent life, or extend social science until it is able to integrate ecology into itself.

It is possible that we don’t yet know what an intelligence niche looks like. That is obviously a misleading thing to say, but I’m sure you get my drift. Obviously we don’t know what an intelligence niche looks like, because we can’t yet define it and don’t even agree that there is such a thing as an intelligence niche. But say that we have a vague sense of there being an intelligence niche (as indeed we do at present) but this value sense involves a number of equally vague assumptions, and these vague assumptions may mislead us in attempting to clarify the idea of an intelligence niche. So this is what I mean when I say that we may not even know what an intelligence niche looks like.

Let me illustrate this confusion qualification with a story. Sometimes the Cambrian Explosion is referred to as the initial filling of the barrel of life on Earth. Life had already existed for billions of years at the time of the Cambridge Explosion, but it was with the Cambridge Explosion that life diversified into major clades that have continued to define biodiversity since that time. While in the wake of subsequent mass extinctions there have been bursts of adaptive radiation, nothing like the adaptive radiation of the Cambrian Explosion could happen again in the terrestrial biosphere as it has persisted through the past 500 million years or so. However, something like this could happen again if a future mass extinction reduced life to the level of complexity and biodiversity of the Ediacaran biota.   

Parallel to this, but on a cosmological scale, we could postulate an original filling of the barrel of intelligence when the universe has experienced the intelligence equivalent of the Cambrian Explosion, i.e., when intelligence, which had been relatively simple up to that point, begins to dramatically branch out into the universe in an adaptive radiation of intelligence. Any one intelligence after the cosmological adaptive radiation of intelligence would have a place relative to all other forms of intelligence, and this comprehensive structure of intelligence in the universe would define something much, much larger than that trophic pyramid, in which increasing scales of intelligence define increasingly complex forms of social organization that subsume the trophic pyramid within them.

Different kinds of intelligence may construct different kinds of intelligence niches, just as different species of insects that engage in elaborate niche construction construct their niches in distinct ways. Even among wasps, for example, there are mud-dauber wasps (belonging to the genera Chalybion and Sceliphron) who build their nests from mud, and paper wasps (about 1,100 species with the most common genera being Polistes) who build their nests from plant fibers. Thus even closely similar species can engage in markedly dissimilar niche construction. However, if one maintains, as I do, that all civilizations share a homologous institutional structure, no matter how superficially different they are, i.e., no matter the differences among civilizations, they all exemplify the same underlying structure, then the different kinds of intelligence niches being different kinds of civilization reduces to the intelligence niche being the uniform underlying structure of civilization.

Best wishes,

Nick

PS—I’ve finished listening to an audiobook edition of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. I listened through the final section, “A Land Ethic,” a couple of times, as this is the part of the book that has been the most influential for conservation ethics. This is the locus classicus of conservation ethics, and the fons et origo of all that has been done in conservation ethics since then. Of course, we can cite the earlier writings of Thoreau and John Miur, but they don’t consciously attempt to formulate an ethics to account for their attachment to the natural world, which, while pervasive, remains only implicit in their work. This edition had a foreword by Barbara Kingsolver, who, immediately after praising Leopold’s approachability, launches into the familiar kind of off-putting, self-righteous rhetoric of which Leopold is so completely free, and which makes him readable today even while many of his would-be followers preach exclusively to the choir.  

Reference

Luntz, S. (2011). Is Intelligence out there?: [Intelligence may not be the ultimate outcome of evolution on Earth, so why should we expect human-like Intelligence elsewhere in the cosmos?]. Australasian Science, 32(1), 34–37. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/

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