Who can forget the epic opening scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, where a blood-thirsty ape, fresh from a fight, hurls a thighbone into the sky and its revolving outline morphs into that of a spaceship? The scene has become something of a leitmotif, encoding an arrogant, masculinist notion of how intelligence evolves – from thuggish survivalism, via tool-making, to societies based on sophisticated technologies. At its heart is the idea that evolutionary success is predicated on dominion, with intelligence recruited into the triumphalist charge of progress.
Such ideas live deep under our skins. They colour our assumptions in subtle ways we seldom question, even the ways
