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You missed the point. What's the barrier to stop simple organisms from developing into more complex and eventually intelligent systems? There's no delineation b
by aydyn 3y ago
You missed the point. What's the barrier to stop simple organisms from developing into more complex and eventually intelligent systems? There's no delineation between "intelligent" and "simple" life. It's a smooth fitness landscape that evolution would (arguably) climb over time.
- squigz 3y agoEvolution doesn't always work like that though. There's a fair bit of luck involved. You're right that 'intelligence' would certainly help an organism survive, but that is hardly a guarantee.
- aydyn 3y agoIt does "work like that", this is literally my field. Evolution is a random walk where organisms higher up on a fitness landscape are more likely to survive. Over time, the probability of climbing the fitness landscape approaches 1. To claim that intelligent life would not evolve from simple life, you have to posit fitness barriers, i.e. steep discontinuities in the fitness landscape that prevent organisms from climbing. One of those barriers might be the jump from single-cell to multi-cellular in high heat/high entropy environments. But you haven't posited any such mechanisms. Intelligence has evolved multiple times on earth's history (just that the other species are extinct). So there is strong evidence that in earth-like environments there is no such barrier.