Cognitive Evolution: The Biological Imprint of Applied Intelligence

In a bold, reasoned, and meticulously researched knowledge leap, Cognitive Evolution erases the demarcation between life and intelligent life, deciphers the concepts of intelligence and cognition, and moves our kind to the precipices of digitizing the anatomical gnome of reason. Cognitive Evolution suggests that the high order mental behaviors of Homo sapiens are rooted in the same biology as the moth's attraction to light, worker bees' foreknowledge of their assignments, ants' knowledge of the mechanics to execute the architectural design of an ant hill, or a female cat's instinct to open the umbilical sack after giving birth. Author Alice Travis ponders, "If we begin with what we accept to be intelligent life, at what point does life become non-intelligent?" It was the recognition that there is no such point that gave birth to Cognitive Evolution, and its groundbreaking interpretation of intelligence.

Alice Travis is an information theorist. She is an award winning veteran television broadcast journalist. Her undergraduate studies at Immaculata College and graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University coincided with the publication of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn's use of paradigm and paradigm shift related to scientific thought and the much earlier published Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia kindled a keen interest in the sociology of knowledge. Her broadcast interviews with To Sir With Love's E.R. Braithwaite on his encounter with the brutal world of "apartheid" chronicled in Honorary White, and Nadine Gordimer on A Guest of Honor, her saga of a nation struggling to be born in a Third World, both answered and raised questions for Ms. Travis about the cerebral nature of man and his society. Long after a television discourse with B.F. Skinner centering on his call for a technology of behavior defended in Beyond Freedom & Dignity, "...a person does not act upon the world, the world acts upon him," Alice Travis concluded that some of our most scientifically sacred understandings of man and his intellect seemed at odds with the plethora of documented studies and inquiries of the distinguished who spanned the disciplines, many with whom she had conversed.