Traces and artefacts of physical intelligence

This essay picks up on observations made by the late evolutionary biologist and baseball enthusiast Stephen J. Gould. Writing for the New York Times in an essay titled ‘The Brain of Brawn’ (2000), Gould reflects on the sports fan’s tendency to characterise the ‘mental skill of athletes as an intuitive grasp of bodily movement and position — a “physical intelligence”’. This, he claims, is a ‘fallacious belief, a misconception that contributes to the persistent view that bodily achievements constitute a lesser form of intellect as compared with ‘scholarly performance’. Beliefs about where a mind reaches its limits and the body takes over tend to overlook their deep entanglement, and how each shapes the other while simultaneously being ‘dependent on the situation or context’ (Robbins and Aydede 2008, 3).