Although substantial progress has been made on the question of the origin of life, less progress can be seen concerning the origins of intelligence. There is not even general agreement of what intelligence is. The paper proposes a definition of intelligence grounded in biology, which makes the question of the origins of intelligence seem more approachable. It then identifies two major transitions that must have been crucial in the development of intelligence: the origins of 'general purpose' neural networks and the origins of language. Some experimental work is reported that tries to recapitulate these major transitions using an artificial life perspective.

The research and writing of this paper has been financed by the Belgian Federal government FKFO project on emergent functionality (FKFO contract nr. G.0014.95) and the IUAP 'Construct' Project (nr. 20) of the Belgian government, with additional support from the external researcher program of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Tokyo.

Trabajo presentado a la Conference on Artificial Life, celebrada en la Fondazione Carlo Erba (Milán-996).

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