4 ms·

It took single celled organism 1 billion years to happen on Earth, it then took another 2 billion years for the first multi-celled animal. The jumps you're desc

It took single celled organism 1 billion years to happen on Earth, it then took another 2 billion years for the first multi-celled animal. The jumps you're describing aren't easy at all. And there's no such thing as evolution towards intelligence. Evolution does not favor certain traits and at this point the most successful organisms on Earth are bacteria and the most successful multi-cellular animals are the insects. And actually intelligence requires big brains, which requires energy and thus fuel, so in constrained environments it can be a trait that's detrimental for survival. Even if multi-cellular life developed on other planets, to go from that to fairly intelligent dinosaurs or mammals is still very unlikely. Obviously, the problem with extrapolating what happened on Earth is that we've got a sample of 1.

leoreeves 8y ago
One could also argue that plants are the most successful because they have the largest biomass. Diagram here: http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2018/05/15/1711842115/F1.large.jpg?width=800&height=600&carousel=1 http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2018/05/15/1711842115...
fdej 8y ago
It's possible that evolution inherently drives life towards intelligence (as a likely outcome, not in the teleological sense). Three counter-points: * Sure, an extreme minority of organisms are intelligent right now, but considering that intelligence is such a recent invention, we can't assume that this is the terminal state of affairs. Indeed, intelligence is making progress in taking over the biosphere that shows no signs of slowing down. Perhaps thousands or millions of years from now, we will have converted all biomass to sustain our own civilization and perhaps (artificial?) life entirely devoted to intelligence will be dominant. * "Evolution towards intelligence" can be a "thing" even if this only occurs to a small minority of species. This is not to say that evolution is a linear progression from primitive to intelligent life; rather, if evolution makes life expand like a tree, and the degree of variation and complexity afforded by this tree is sufficiently large, it could be likely that some of the branches eventually reach intelligence (among myriads of other possible adaptations). This would be sufficient for intelligence to arise with high probability. * Life is inherently concerned with representing and processing useful information about the environment. The chemical feedback loops that probably made up proto-life would have implicitly encoded information about their chemical environment (and the fundamental chemistry of life still echoes this information). Eventually the incorporation of more complex feedback loops combined with evolution led to the development of complex biomolecules, proper replicators, genetic code, multicellular organisms, nervous systems, brains, the mammalian neocortex, and whatever adaptations enabled human-level intelligence. What we see is a gradual progression through great many improvements towards more sophisticated information processing. It's plausible that a similar progression in information processing complexity occurs with high probability whenever life evolves, although the concrete steps could be radically different. Yes, it took billions of years on earth, but the universe has billions of years to spare and it's massively parallel. Again, there doesn't have to be a linear progression towards intelligence for all life; the conditions just have to be favorable for intelligence to occur as a particular adaptive niche in sufficiently complex ecosystems. Of course, we can't really say much since we don't know what the actual probabilities given that we only have a sample size of n=1 for life and realistic experiments or simulations are far beyond our current capacity.

leoreeves 8y ago

One could also argue that plants are the most successful because they have the largest biomass. Diagram here: http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2018/05/15/1711842115/F1.large.jpg?width=800&height=600&carousel=1 http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2018/05/15/1711842115...

fdej 8y ago

It's possible that evolution inherently drives life towards intelligence (as a likely outcome, not in the teleological sense). Three counter-points: * Sure, an extreme minority of organisms are intelligent right now, but considering that intelligence is such a recent invention, we can't assume that this is the terminal state of affairs. Indeed, intelligence is making progress in taking over the biosphere that shows no signs of slowing down. Perhaps thousands or millions of years from now, we will have converted all biomass to sustain our own civilization and perhaps (artificial?) life entirely devoted to intelligence will be dominant. * "Evolution towards intelligence" can be a "thing" even if this only occurs to a small minority of species. This is not to say that evolution is a linear progression from primitive to intelligent life; rather, if evolution makes life expand like a tree, and the degree of variation and complexity afforded by this tree is sufficiently large, it could be likely that some of the branches eventually reach intelligence (among myriads of other possible adaptations). This would be sufficient for intelligence to arise with high probability. * Life is inherently concerned with representing and processing useful information about the environment. The chemical feedback loops that probably made up proto-life would have implicitly encoded information about their chemical environment (and the fundamental chemistry of life still echoes this information). Eventually the incorporation of more complex feedback loops combined with evolution led to the development of complex biomolecules, proper replicators, genetic code, multicellular organisms, nervous systems, brains, the mammalian neocortex, and whatever adaptations enabled human-level intelligence. What we see is a gradual progression through great many improvements towards more sophisticated information processing. It's plausible that a similar progression in information processing complexity occurs with high probability whenever life evolves, although the concrete steps could be radically different. Yes, it took billions of years on earth, but the universe has billions of years to spare and it's massively parallel. Again, there doesn't have to be a linear progression towards intelligence for all life; the conditions just have to be favorable for intelligence to occur as a particular adaptive niche in sufficiently complex ecosystems. Of course, we can't really say much since we don't know what the actual probabilities given that we only have a sample size of n=1 for life and realistic experiments or simulations are far beyond our current capacity.