Reason as a Social Structure

Vernadsky's argument (§103) that the growth of human reason is not neural but social: Paleolithic skulls show no structural difference from modern ones, so "reason is a complex social structure, erected … on the same neural substrate, but in different social circumstances." Intelligence scales through organization and accumulated science, not through a better brain. This is the Vernadskian root of the journal's refusal to locate intelligence in individual heads — compare Agüera y Arcas on intelligence as "networks of networks" and the hominin explosion as social (theory of mind), and Bratton's humans as the medium of cognitive evolution rather than its master (Noocene).