
The quantification and rationalization of intelligence has a long history in the human sciences. Intelligence has been a central category in delineating racial, ethnic, and national differences throughout the 19th and 20th century. The effort to define and quantify intelligence has marked eugenics and much of social planning and policy throughout the last two centuries. Today, discourses of artificial intelligence continue to propagate and automate social ideas concerning evolution, adaptation, and race. While much attention has been given to bias within algorithmic technologies, far less has interrogated the actual concepts of decision making, evolution, competition, fitness, and adaptation that shape contemporary design decisions in digital systems. In this research project, we will collect multiple case studies from across many fields that create an alternative way to organize knowledge and reconceptualize intelligence.