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Easily? It took 4 billion years and multiple global extinction events, and it has only happened once. Flight, the eye, air breathing all evolved multiple time
by legutierr 10y ago
Easily? It took 4 billion years and multiple global extinction events, and it has only happened once. Flight, the eye, air breathing all evolved multiple times independently, within distantly related evolutionary lines. Intelligence is rare in nature, in spite of its advantages, probably because it is a very distant jump from local maxima.
- vintermann 10y agoDo you define human intelligence as the only real intelligence, then? Or are you talking about some super-early primitive predecessor of a brain? (I'm sorry, I have no idea whether the latter has only evolved once.)
- legutierr 10y agoThat's the real question though, isn't it? I think what we are talking about is the kind of intelligence that could qualify as a "general AI" if implemented in a computer. Although I'm sure that there many different types of intelligence that could match up, in nature there really is only one that we know about.
- vintermann 10y agoI don't think such a thing as general AI, or even general intelligence, is sensible to talk about. There are always tradeoffs: an algorithm good at finding some sort of patterns, necessarily has to be worse at finding other sorts of patterns. There are actually ways to formalize and prove that, but it's intuitively obvious that an algorithm that can find the answer to a set of questions, can't be faster than an algorithm to find the answer to a subset of those questions.
- adrianN 10y agoCephalopods are reasonably smart and their intelligence evolved mostly idependently. That's reassuring. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalopod_intelligence