Cephalization

James Dwight Dana's 1852 "law," in Moynihan's account: evolution moves "headward," toward "centralization and intensification of the organism's energies in an increasingly hefty brain," culminating in an "Era of Mind" — the theory from which the Psychozoic Era took its name. Moynihan reads it as self-compliment dressed as law, and as the root of the nineteenth-century habit of seeing the planet itself "cephalizing": Ernst Kapp (1877) on telegraph wires as nerve fibres, the world "growing its own nervous system," later Teilhard's Earth becoming "cephalized, or ensouled" — the lineage the Noosphere inherited. Useful as the name for the inevitabilist, headward reading of intelligence that the program's "agency preceded subjectivity" and multi-scale framing reject. What Is Intelligence? uses the word in its plain neurobiological sense (the first knot of neurons at the front end of the animal).