The author discusses concepts around intelligence without articulating what definition of intelligence he is adopting. When he discusses the innovation in unde

The author discusses concepts around intelligence without articulating what definition of intelligence he is adopting. When he discusses the innovation in understanding planetary motion, or chemical substances, it represents examples of where scientists could place observed data amongst a common frame of reference (ie, a meaningful definition to contextualizes observation leads the way to a theory which explains the data). A more meaningful direction for article, imo, would have been to adopt a concrete definition of intelligence, and then talk about how ferrets, chimps, babies and adults fall on this continuum. Perhaps, connectomics, molecular biology, psychology or neuro-anatomy help us approximate the 'atomic number', giving us the opportunity to speculate about the underlying equivalent of quantum mechanics. Like the article states, evidence is lacking, and we're somewhere between 1-100 nobel prizes away. But, the power of a concrete definition helps point to what we know we don't know, and discussion about whether the definition of intelligence itself needs to be re-framed to answer a question like this.