Life: is it inevitable or just a fluke?

I was thinking, human intelligence really isn't that spectacular in context. Sure, the ability to build spacecraft seems kind of overkill considering the capacity of the next most intelligent life forms on the planet, however we only have the capacity to use our intelligence in that way due to generations of transferred knowledge and specialisation. Standing on the shoulders of giants. Dump an average human from today back into the stone age and they would have to use all of their intelligence to survive back then, maybe even more so since they would not have the convenience of machines to do as much of the work for them. They would have to learn hunting skills, tracking skills, herbology, tanning hides for clothes and warmth, how to map a large territory and know when and where to find what food and how to exploit it. Stone age men had to do a lot of thinking and learning. So the same intelligence we use to make amazing technologies today we would have needed just to survive when humans first evolved.

Our current technology is more a product of cultural and academic evolution than any actual increase in our intelligence.

Meep wrote:Our current technology is more a product of cultural and academic evolution than any actual increase in our intelligence.

Ah, but thats the nub, isn't it? For whatever reason, we're capable of that.

We really are a very unusual species.

Yes, but this leads me to suspect there must be some kind of intelligence 'event horizon'. If a species gets enough intelligence and communication ability then, wham, naught to space age in sixty seconds.

This would also mean that the idea of super intelligent aliens we see in fiction is unlikely. Once a species reaches the level of intelligence needed to develop science and technology, it can advance simply by innovating and advancing on past discoveries so becoming even more intelligence is redundant. If that's true, then all aliens capable of technology are going to be about equal to the the brain power of humans.

Meep wrote:Yes, but this leads me to suspect there must be some kind of intelligence 'event horizon'. If a species gets enough intelligence and communication ability then, wham, naught to space age in sixty seconds.

This would also mean that the idea of super intelligent aliens we see in fiction is unlikely. Once a species reaches the level of intelligence needed to develop science and technology, it can advance simply by innovating and advancing on past discoveries so becoming even more intelligence is redundant. If that's true, then all aliens capable of technology are going to be about equal to the the brain power of humans.

The "event horizon" is probably written language. Once you get that it's possible for obscure knowledge to persist for generations without suffering from the "chinese whispers" effect.

Before that only immediately useful knowledge would have been passed on. A man spends a lifetime accumulating knowledge. Passing all that knowledge on would take another lifetime.

TheTurnipKing wrote:

Meep wrote:Our current technology is more a product of cultural and academic evolution than any actual increase in our intelligence.

Ah, but thats the nub, isn't it? For whatever reason, we're capable of that.

We really are a very unusual species.

Not really. We were only capable of that in a few locations at a particular point in time.

Anyway, a nice video from NT.

Saying another species could be vastly more intelligent than humans by another slight alteration ignores all the past evolution shared with chimps that human intelligence exploits.Think of it like over-clocking a processor or turbo boosting an engine. The structure of the processor is basically the same but a way has been found to squeeze more juice out of it what is already there.

Evolution takes the shortest route possible, which usually means adapting a feature already there for another purpose, like turning a leg into wing or a wing into a flipper. Exploiting existing potential. Human intelligence did not just suddenly flash into being, it was pulled out from what already existed beforehand. For example, bats did not just suddenly sprout wings; they needed all the evolutionary legacy of limbs and digits that their ancestors developed for the purpose of walking.