"Intelligence is useful and entertaining. Companies go out of their way to hire applicants with high IQ scores, and spectacular intellectual achievements in the arts and sciences can win the hero-worship of generations ([like] Aristotle, Bach, Einstein). Measuring smarts is the job of an industry. Indeed, smartness is so endlessly praised in modern society that questioning its value may constitute one of the most dissident of human acts. High intelligence has been defined in many ways, but typically as the capacity for abstraction, logic, self-awareness, learning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. High intelligence values itself, selects for itself, and fascinates itself. Our remarkable human intellectual achievements are deeply tied to language, whose development occurred as a self-reinforcing evolutionary feedback process. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, early humans derived a collective survival advantage by developing precursors of language, which enabled them to coordinate their behavior and to plan. But language requires extra brain power, so natural selection also worked to increase brain size, which enabled further development of language, which conferred still more survival advantages, and so on. If evolution produced high intelligence, then high intelligence is latent in evolution. Yet high intelligence is quite rare in nature. While all species communicate to some degree, only one has developed abstract, symbolic language. If language-based high intelligence offers survival advantages, why has it cropped up in nature only once?"