Millenniums later, the monolith crops up on the Moon and astronauts travel to its point of origin to find the alien intelligence controlling the evolution of man.
"The Beginning of Infinity" is equally bold, addressing subjects from artificial intelligence to the evolution of culture and of creativity; its conclusions are just as profound.
The report contains a detailed and a meticulous recitation of the intelligence reporting and the evolution of the analyses.
Though the overall death toll was low — only one Afghan civilian was killed in the attacks within Kabul, for instance — the brazen and coordinated nature of the attacks have got Western military and intelligence officials talking about the evolution of the Taliban.
Scientists devised the social intelligence hypothesis to explain the evolution of the human brain.
What may emerge from this phase-change in the evolution of intelligence, is by all accounts runaway evolution on hyper-speed -- an intelligence that will saturate the universe, or to use famed futurist Ray Kurzweil's term, these digital minds will "impregnate the universe with intelligence".
Previous work has offered income, education, low levels of agricultural labour (which is replaced by more mentally stimulating jobs), climate (the challenge of surviving cold weather might provoke the evolution of intelligence) and even distance from humanity's African homeland (novel environments could encourage greater intelligence) as explanations for national differences in IQ.
In humans, one possibility is that tool use promoted the evolution of exceptional intelligence, without requiring high intelligence to get started.
The evolution of intelligence may be hard.
Although many paleoanthropologists have come to doubt that stone tools were the sole province of humans, they remain a proxy for the evolution of intelligence, and scientists have been on the hunt for even older ones.
Darwin's young colleague, George Romanes, compiled a systematic collection of stories and anecdotes about the behaviour of animals, upon which he built an elaborate theory of the evolution of intelligence.
