The Evolutionary Paradox of Human Intelligence ー Why Intelligence Does Not Eliminate War

Abstract

The dynamics described here parallel cultural narratives such as the Tower of Babel.In that story, a collectively constructed symbolic structure expands until it exceeds the constraints of the external world,after which the shared referential network collapses and language fragments.Human shared referential networks exhibit a similar vulnerability:once internal models become recursively self-amplifying, they may generate divergent symbolic frameworks that organize cooperation within groups while simultaneously producing conflict between them.The Babel metaphor therefore captures a structural feature of human cognitive evolution—the tendency for expanding internal models to create both unprecedented coordination and profound fragmentation. Human intelligence presents a longstanding evolutionary paradox. While humans alone have developed symbolic language, cumulative culture, science, and planetary-scale technologies, organized warfare has persisted throughout history. Existing explanations, including the social brain hypothesis, cumulative cultural evolution, and niche construction, account for important aspects of cognitive evolution but do not fully explain why intelligence became exceptionally self-amplifying in humans or why this expansion did not eliminate conflict. This Comment proposes a conceptual framework in which successive network phase transitions progressively expanded referential function throughout evolution. Environmental structure enabled increasingly connected biological and social networks, giving rise to major evolutionary transitions, including the emergence of life, multicellularity, nervous systems, language, collective intelligence, and human civilization. Human language transformed internal referential function into shared referential function, allowing predictive internal models to become collectively distributed and recursively self-amplifying. From this perspective, large-scale cooperation and organized warfare emerge as complementary outcomes of the same predictive cognitive architecture rather than opposing evolutionary processes. The framework further suggests that the Anthropocene may represent a transitional stage preceding a future expansion of referential function at the planetary scale. By integrating evolutionary biology, cognitive science, complex systems, and the social sciences, this perspective offers a unified conceptual hypothesis for understanding the evolution of human intelligence and its enduring paradox.