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Michio Kaku on the Evolution of Intelligence | Big Think

Big Think | January 21, 2026



Michio Kaku on the Evolution of Intelligence
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Michio Kaku on the evolution of intelligence.
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MICHIO KAKU:

Dr. Michio Kaku is the co-founder of string field theory, and is one of the most widely recognized scientists in the world today. He has written 4 New York Times Best Sellers, is the science correspondent for CBS This Morning and has hosted numerous science specials for BBC-TV, the Discovery/Science Channel. His radio show broadcasts to 100 radio stations every week. Dr. Kaku holds the Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics at the City College of New York (CUNY), where he has taught for over 25 years. He has also been a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, as well as New York University (NYU).
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TRANSCRIPT:

Michio Kaku:  Some people think that intelligence is the crowning achievement of evolution.  Well if that’s true there should be more intelligent creatures on the planet Earth.  But to the best of our knowledge we’re the only ones.  The dinosaurs were on the Earth for roughly 200 million years and to the best of our knowledge not a single dinosaur became intelligent.  We humans, modern humans, had been on the Earth for roughly a hundred thousand years.  Only a tiny fraction of the 4.5 billion years that the Earth has been around.  So you come to the rather astounding conclusion that intelligence is not really necessary.  That Mother Nature has done perfectly well with non-intelligent creatures for millions of years and that we as intelligent creatures are the new kid on the block.

And so then you begin to wonder how did we become intelligent?  What separated us from the animals?  Well there are basically three ingredients – at least three that help to propel us to become intelligent.  One is the opposable thumb.  You need a tentacle, a claw, an opposable thumb in order to manipulate the environment.  So that’s one of the ingredients of intelligence – to be able to change the world around you.

Second is eyesight.  But the eyesight of a predator.  We have eyes to the front of our face, not to the side of our face and why?  Animals with eyes to the front of their face are predators – lions, tigers and foxes.  Animals with eyes to the side of their face are prey and they are not as intelligent – like a rabbit.  We say dumb bunny and smart as a fox.  And there’s a reason for that.  Because the fox is a predator.  It has to learn how to ambush.  It has to learn how to have stealth, camouflage.  It has to psych out the enemy and anticipate the motion of the enemy that is its prey.  If you’re a dumb bunny all you have to do is run.  And the third basic ingredient is language because you have to be able to communicate your knowledge to the next generation.

And to the best of our knowledge animals do not communicate knowledge to their offspring other than by simply communicating certain primitive motions.  There’s no book.  There’s no language.  There’s no culture by which animals can communicate their knowledge to the next generation.  And so we think that’s how the brain evolved.  We have an opposable thumb, we have a language of maybe five to ten thousand words.  And we have eyesight that is stereo eyesight – the eyesight of a predator.  And predators seem to be smarter than prey.  Then you ask another question.  How many animals on the Earth satisfy these three basic ingredients.  And then you come to the astounding conclusion – the answer is almost none.  So perhaps there’s a reason why we became intelligent and the other animals did not.  They did not have the basic ingredients that would one day propel us to become intelligent.

Then the next question asked in Planet of the Apes and asked in any number of science fiction movies is can you accentuate intelligence.  Can you take an ape and make the ape intelligent.  Well, believe it or not the answer could be yes.  We are 98.5 percent genetically equivalent to a chimpanzee.  Only a handful of genes separate us from the chimps and yet we live twice as long and we have thousands of words in our vocabulary.  Chimps can have maybe just a few hundred.  And we’ve isolated many of those genes that separate us from the chimpanzees.  For example the ASP gene governs the size of the crane, cranial capacity so that by monkeying with just one gene you can literally double the size of the brain case and t…

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Comments

This post currently has 48 comments.

  3. @ALavin-en1kr

    January 21, 2026 at 8:32 am

    The Precession of the Equinoxes makes a big difference. Without that we would not be past the halfway mark in our evolution as human beings with our increasing intelligence from our own unique prototype; as DaVinci correctly saw it. Darwin in the mid-nineteenth century was wrong—-an animal is not man’s prototype, the universe is. Man made in the image of God; the Universe. The materialists are still clueless; atheistic philosophers puzzle over “The hard problem of consciousness.” The Church is not puzzled knowing that the definition of God is: Consciousness; Existence; Bliss. We share in the first two, until we are liberated we have cognition and sense perception for the latter.
    Maybe the atheists will wise up and stop coming up with ideologies, now that communism has been defeated but it appears trans humanism may be next in the pipeline. As Christ proved there is no such thing as trans humanism. The Church will deal with it as it dealt with the dark occult and with communism.

  8. @DakilangAtsoy

    January 21, 2026 at 8:32 am

    Humans are intelligent because also we live longer than any other animal and we pass our knowledge to our children. We learn to document our knowledge and the most important thing is we learned what makes things work. We learned not only how to make fire and what is the composition of fire and thereby we learned what is the composition of most of the things around us. We learned the truth and those that are made up beliefs that we use to take advantage of others. We develop rules to go by to live in peace with each other. We learn the simple truth: “Do unto others what others do unto you”

  13. @jeremy.rapposellirapposell2792

    January 21, 2026 at 8:32 am

    Size of the brain shouldn't matter as much as the amount of surface area via the amount of folds. If other apes did that….we'd be doomed. Physically we stand no chance and we would be out competed. As by the laws of mother nature that ultimately rules all. We try to forget that we're on the food chain, where does an unarmed human realistically stand.

  22. @IrisTheEvilSlime

    January 21, 2026 at 8:32 am

    All good points. But I see a few glaring flaws. I believe it is an unfortunate position to set the bar for "being intelligent" to the level of humans. We are perhaps only the most intelligent, at least as far as the things that satisfy our needs.

    Obviously I would bring up at this point dolphins and various birds. Dolphins don't know human words, but they don't need human words, because communicating with humans is not important to them, just like it is irrelevant to our survival to communicate with them. Dolphins have the capability to communicate a lot more than "a few hundred words". But all of their words are dolphin words. By your logic flipped around to their perspective, dolphins might say humans are stupid, because we understand maybe only a few dolphin words.

    Similarly, corvids have a very vast language and communicate and spread information to other corvids in very detailed ways. It has been shown that a single crow being mistreated or otherwise scared or threatened by a specific person, will then tell all the other crows about that person. Specifically (iirc) the face of that human is described by the crow to other crows. This is demonstrated by that same human wearing a mask, causes the crows to not avoid that human as much. However, without the mask, even crows that had never seen or interacted with that exact person will all act as if they recognized that person and avoid them. This is impossible unless the crows have language. And very accurate and diverse language at that. It can be argued, that crows as a whole on average know more human words than humans know crow words. Because we teach crows our words, but never typically think to try and learn their language. And so actually, one point you made is very wrong, all birds are descendants of dinosaurs. By definition, dinosaurs have developed the highest non ape intelligence.

    But you are right about the ingredients. These animals have ways to manipulate tools accurately (beaks and talons, and clever use of mouths and water by dolphins), are predators, and diverse and expensive language. Levels of intelligence can be demonstrated and observed, but just because humans build machines and study the universe, you can't exclude the intelligence of other animals from a human perspective, because they are not human, and don't need or care about human things. We likely know the most stuff, and are the most clever and intelligent, but manipulating the environment as a goal post for intelligence is a bad premise. Otherwise we should say that beavers and ants are more intelligent than crows, which is obviously not the case.

  25. @reubenyancey9899

    January 21, 2026 at 8:32 am

    There are limitations to how fully cognition can discern the nature of intelligence through a rational approach. Nature is more complex than Humans can grasp. If intelligence is recognized as a quality of an ecosystem overall than many ecosystems are far more brilliant and complex than the human species can comprehend. Humans are under the rather incredible misconception that an individual human can be highly intelligent. When that intelligence is actually a reflection of a successful ecosystem rather than a particular individual. It’s possible to transcend this limitation through the abandonment of the dominance of rationality. Rationality is a tool among many tools.

  27. @pinfish7459

    January 21, 2026 at 8:32 am

    Philosophy and intelligence are 2 different things. Animals are intelligent, humans are thoughtful. Life and death are all we really know, everything else is basically nonsense.

  30. @rimajuro7748

    January 21, 2026 at 8:32 am

    Scientists are like buffets and not so smart one are slave murderer in any way are prisoners , and the humble ones are always being bullied. This is the cycle of life, survival of the orders.

  32. @luiscardoso6578

    January 21, 2026 at 8:32 am

    Great Video!!! Really interesting!!

    Although… I must say that, even this not being my area of expertise; it seems to me, from a logical stand point, that there are two key ideas mixed in a trendy/ tricky way here…. and they are: The idea of "how necessary intelligence (as a phenomenon) is to nature and the time and effort from the very nature to enable or provide the conditions to its evolution"….

    For instance: From a logical stand point it could be mistaken (or a limited perspective) to conclude that "if intelligence is quite rare (not abundant) than it is not so necessary to nature" – actually the understanding from this observation (of how rare it is) could lead it to the absolute opposite conclusion!!

  34. @amandavanheerden7980

    January 21, 2026 at 8:32 am

    Disagree on the point that animals don't have their own culture.😂 Wolf packs teach their young to hunt and survive, to read the environment, to play and communicate with yelps and hows. Much the same as for example an Inuit family would teach their offsping in the wild. Animals may not be as advanced, but nevertheless in their natural habitat wolves, gorillas, elephants, lions have their own pack behaviour – their own pack or herd 'culture.'

  43. @matthill1294

    January 21, 2026 at 8:32 am

    But HOW did it happen? over such a short evolutionary time line to have evolved so far beyond all other species, even species very similar to ourselves, and species that have been around far longer than humans. What caused the evolutionary leap in intelligence? Magic mushrooms? I’m sure apes have eaten magic mushrooms too. Alien intervention? God? What made humans so unnecessarily socially complicated to one another? How did we harness the forces of nature and mold them into digital technologies ? A confounding mystery

  45. @raymondanaya3714

    January 21, 2026 at 8:32 am

    Serious question here. What if physical objects are not fundamental. They are just imagined. What it every animal has a different view of the world and animals have stories in their mind that only they can see.

  47. @Timefairyjina

    January 21, 2026 at 8:32 am

    Intelligent people are new kids on the block. How did we become intelligent?
    1. Opposable thumb; Claws
    2. Eyesight as a predator; anticipate the motion of the enemy
    3. Language; communicate to the next generation, offsprings through books and culture.

    Human is the only species with these three ingredients. We live twice as long and have thousands of languages differing ourselves from chimpanzees.
    Larger brain and the Ability to articulate larger vocabulary is the key that differentiates us from the chimpanzees.

  48. @paul5475

    January 21, 2026 at 8:32 am

    I have a question does the humans today are more inteligent than the past generation and does the future generations is going to be smarter than us?

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