A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains

by Max Solomon Bennett

Sugar is produced only by life, and thus there are only two ways for large multicellular respiratory organisms to feed. One is to wait for life to die, and the other is to catch and kill living life. Early in the fungi-animal divergence, they each settled into opposing feeding strategies. Fungi chose the strategy of waiting, and animals chose the strategy of killing.* Fungi eat through external digestion (secreting enzymes to break food down outside the body), while animals eat through internal digestion (trapping food inside the body and then secreting enzymes). The fungal strategy was, by some measures, more successful than the animals’—by biomass, there is about six times more fungus on Earth than animals. But as we will continually see, it is usually the worse strategy, the harder strategy, from which innovation emerges.