Development of Intelligent Life?

science_rules

Why do some scientists assume that intelligent life may be rare--that because only one high-intelligence--homo-sapiens (us) developed on Earth, that inteligent life is rare to evolve throughout the universe?
Instead of seeing it that way, why can't you turn that thought around and assume that for every potential life-evolving planet, given sufficient time, there will evolve atleast one high-intelligence (human-level) creature among all of the other different (lower-level) species. that is the way i see it. given each planet(including ours) which goes through a long process of evolving many many different species, there will develop atleast one high intelligence, hyper-conscious being such as ourselves. that makes a bit of sense to me. the fact that we did evolve shows that high-intelligence is indeed possible! arent there any scientists who have this view? or anyone.

LURCH

Although one can speculate any scenario one desires, we have only one "real world" model on which to base theories. In this will one and only example, only one intelligent race occurred out of the billions of species developed.

DavidSnider

Because there is nothing special about intelligence. Some animals survive by having sharp teeth, some by running fast, we happen to survive by our superior ability to communicate. To us, intelligence is the pinnacle of the evolutionary tree, to an elephant it would probably be their trunk.

Our intelligence happened to be beneficial in the environment we evolved in. So the question just comes down to what is the probability of a section of space being in a state favorable to intelligent beings?

It looks very improbable.

Evo

It is suggested that if the dinosaurs had not been wiped out, humans might not have had a chance to evolve. We actually don't know if another potentially intelligent species was wiped out before they could evolve. Lucky for us, whatever we evolved from managed to survive.

D H

I see it the other way around. Every time I play with Drake's equation (a complete hack, IMHO) I get one civilization per galactic cluster at best. Extrapolating from our sample of one (a dangerous thing to do), primitive life may well be somewhat common. Beyond that, I suspect multicellular life is fairly rare, life that can think *at all* is very rare, and "intelligent life" is so extremely rare that each intelligent species is for all practical purposes alone (e.g., one per galactic cluster).

billiards

I would expect that if intelligent life were common we would've heard from it by now or at least detected it in some way. Of course, it is still possible that intelligent life is out there and is ubiquitous, but then you have to explain why they are not communicating with us...

To paraphrase Fermi and his famous paradox: If they're out there, then where are they?

Well what if they're not out there? That seems to me to be the simplest explanation that fits our evidence.

wolram

What type of creature (can) attain human like intelligence, i guess it would have to be a creature that had time to think, for example, i can not imagine a humming bird ever reaching human like intelligence.
http://www.stanford.edu/group/stanfo...etabolism.html

I can imagine horses, cats , dogs reaching some higher intelligence level, but if they can not use tools they will probable never reach human like intelligence.

DavidSnider

wolram: Your question is phrased oddly. Of course hummingbirds as they are now can't have human intelligence, but that's not to say that it couldn't spawn an evolutionary line that could (You may also be right, that all living birds have no possible pathway to human-like intelligence, but I doubt it has anything to do with 'time to think', and is more a consequence of Dollo's Law).

From an evolutionary perspective fish 'attained' human intelligence.

Andre

I wonder which of the posts here are complying with the new rule.

Evo

Of course there were neanderthals that have disappeared. That was a branch that was intelligent, we were more intelligent though.

DavidSnider

His link says nothing about the ability of birds to evolve human-like intelligence...

What would you have me do to be compliant with the new rule? Post a paper showing we evolved from fish? A link to Dollo's law? Amazon.com link to Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins?

wolram

I used the humming bird as an example because it has a very high metabolism, it has to spend all it's time feeding or at rest, this suggests to me a dead end of its evolution,
it would simply die if it took time off for experiment.

A dolphin may have the ineligence to imagine making a tool, but it could not mine the ore
or smelt it or work it, another dead end.

In other words a creature would have to evolve to a human like form, or be able to use tools as well as as having human like inteligence.

DavidSnider

'Take time off for an experiment?' Evolution is not driven by the organism itself. It's not like if hummingbirds could take some time to work out puzzles their brains would get better in future generations. An organism can't control which genes mutate or what selective pressures are put on it.

D H

There is no way to prove life doesn't exist elsewhere. Our ability to detect life has very limited range, and even then we may be overlooking what will be in retrospect obvious signs. Discussion of alien life will remain overly speculative for at least a while. Discussion of alien intelligent life will remain overly speculative for a lot longer (unless Joe Alien lands on the White House lawn or calls us).

The discussion of alien life is pertinent to science (and even gets some scientific funding). The concept has been discussed in several prestigious technical magazines. So long as everyone involved agrees that discussion of alien life, intelligent or not, is purely speculative, this might well be one place where the more strict rules do not quite apply.

Andre

If science is about applying the scientific method to any conceptual thought, eventually testing it against reality, then alien life cannot be tested. Also if science is about Popperian falsifiability then the concept of alien life cannot be falsified.

Hence, alien talk is not science. And if the standards are that rigourous then this thread should not exist here.

D H

So move this thread to General Discussions, particularly since it focuses on alien intelligence.

Discussion of alien life can be scientific. We can talk about what to look for a signatures of life, what life would look like in other star systems (i.e., how to falsify the hypothesis that the Earth is unique). For example, http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=...n-other-worlds.

nrqed

I personally think that this is a narrow-minded view of science. I think that many great scientific thinkers did not tell themselves "I must first think of a way to cnfirm or to falsify my ideas before I devote more time hinking about them".

I don't think that Darwin thought that he should not pubish his ideas until they could be proven or falsified. The concept of hidden variables in quantum physics was thought to be unfalsifiable for a very long time...it did not stop Einstein and his colleagues from bringing up the question and even publishing about it.