The timing of evolutionary transitions suggests intelligent life is rare

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ast.2019.2149

by beefman • 5 years ago

148 147 5 years ago

DOsinga• 5 years ago

This does feel like there's some selection bias here. The assumption is that intelligence hasn't developed before humans. If a planet wide civilization would have sprung up say with the dinosaurs, would we have gotten a shot? It seems somewhat plausible that such a civilization would either have survived ruling any subsequent rise out or have blown up the planet in a way that none would arise either.

sillysaurusx• 5 years ago

The only answer to such questions is "there's no way to know." Which implies that selection bias is the best we can do.

Ultimately, we're here. And we may only be here because we genocided all the other proto-human races (at least four of them). But no one likes talking about that, since it seems much more... personal... than a meteor.

Was it intelligent to slay the neighbors? Maybe. But it was a comparatively rare event, since once it was done, it couldn't be done again.

The interesting thing is that there's no way to know how many events like that have happened throughout all of history. We have very little data compared to the entire timeline. So any kind of measurement of "If this, then that" is very hard, and I have serious respect for the careful work that scientists manage to do in spite of the limitations.

nefitty2• 5 years ago

By the time I was done with school, subgroup dominance was shared among jocks and punk kids. Previously, it seemed that jocks were the most admired. After my time in school, the shift towards "weird and smart" kept increasing, to the point that bullying is now anathema and kids seem much freer to express their non-normie views.

I think this is a micro example of a tendency for people to value raw physical power over mental faculties, and how it eventually shifts as the environment changes. On earth and elsewhere, there may be species that evolved to dominate through power, snuffing out those with the potential for dominating through intelligence. I agree, this might be one of those filters that are hard to surpass. For example, by sheer luck, dinosaurs were wiped out leaving room for mammals to take over the planet. Could dinosaurs have evolved to discover computation?

On an intraspecies level, we breached a similar filter when we began organizing into agricultural/specializing societies. Those societies were started as a way for the physically powerful to harness lower-status humans. The consequence was the emergence of information-societies where intelligence is more valuable than physical power.

oneoff7868• 5 years ago

A planet wide civ would be pretty difficult. I don’t think the earth would have enough Coal or oil to allow for easy energy access.

SEJeff2• 5 years ago

If only there were abundant sources of energy around like maybe nuclear fusion from a giant orange ball in the sky? Or perhaps hydro electric from the plethora of oceans? It wouldn't be easy, but it would be possible to create enormous amounts of energy from the normal daily cycle of the waves if it became necessary.

There are plenty of ways to create energy given the abundance of resources on this planet, even before homo sapiens.

hotpotamus3• 5 years ago

Most fossil fuel deposits formed during the carboniferous period which would have been quite ancient even to the dinosaurs. One of the clues that an intelligent civilization never arose before us is that those deposits are still here for us.

Waterluvian2• 5 years ago

I’m not sure this is what you meant, but onto a tangent:

I feel like us humans have deeply romanticized dinosaurs as these incredibly dangerous, vicious, aggressive creatures. And I’m just not sure there’s any evidence to support that.

If we unearthed bear skeletons a million years from now, we’d think that humans couldn’t cohabitate with bears. Such size. Those teeth. The claws! But bears generally steer clear of humans. Perhaps dinosaurs would too.

Of course I barely know what I’m talking about. But it has me quite curious.

hprotagonist• 5 years ago

"we can't prove they weren't huge fatbirds!" https://imgur.com/gallery/rmad4

roenxi• 5 years ago

It seems a bit optimistic to say that humans are willing to cohabitate with bears. If there are bears in a human population centre they will be exterminated.

Ignoring a different climate humans probably could have existed at the same time as dinosaurs. We would also have all-but wiped out anything larger than us by now though.

Salgat• 5 years ago

Humans and their ancestors were strong enough that anything that evolved alongside them adapted to avoid humans or risk extinction. I'm not sure if human evolution from a simple mammal could survive alongside dinosaurs long enough to reach the point where we could effectively defend ourselves. I imagine we'd mostly be stuck either being small enough to evade them or stuck hiding in trees off the ground.

eevilspock• 5 years ago

Intelligence evolving before humans doesn't refute or contradict anything about this article unless it evolved independently on a different branch from humans.

nkrisc• 5 years ago

There were some very large mammalian predators around during the time of our early ancestors, and even around today, though not quite as large. And yet here we are. Perhaps if humans had arisen in the time of the dinosaurs they’d have hunted them to extinction or destroyed their habitats.

zw1234562• 5 years ago

Maybe there were multiple intelligent civilizations before humans, then the Great Filter Theory kicks in and they wipe themselves out with Global warming or whatever.

I have a pet theory (just a fantasy really) that Dolphins were once land mammals with an advanced civilization but then they too heated the planet up until all the ice melted and they had to adapt and evolve to be sea mammals.

gjvnq• 5 years ago

Sounds like something Douglas Adams would write.

ErikCorry• 5 years ago

I mean, it's true that dolphins evolved from land mammals.

8note• 5 years ago

Afaik we don't see any geological evidence of such a thing

Smoosh• 5 years ago

This seems like an appropriate time to recommend the book West of Eden [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_of_Eden].

It posits an earth where humans and dinosaurs co-exist, but the dinosaurs, having been around longer, are the dominant species.

Flankk2• 5 years ago

Nice work of science fiction. It is impossible to estimate the probability of these events with a sample size of one. It likely took billions of years for our planet to reach the right temperature and composition for life to form. It's probable that life readily forms given the right conditions. In my opinion, it makes more sense that it is rare for a planet to develop the right conditions for life. That doesn't really matter much given there are 700 quintillion planets in our universe.

mod2• 5 years ago

It's probable that life readily forms given the right conditions

Is this true? It is it also impossible to know?

We haven't been able to reproduce it, so is your argument that we just haven't gotten the conditions correct?

phkahler• 5 years ago

An argument for life being expected is made pretty well in the book "At Home in the Universe" by Stuart Kaufman (spelling?).

We the expected.

SEJeff2• 5 years ago

Statistically speaking, if it happened on our planet, it can (and likely has or will) happen elsewhere. Given that there are approximately 700 quintillion planets in the observable universe, it seems sensible to expect it to be mathematically possible and even likely that it has also developed elsehwere.

For all we know, there were space fairing civilizations in or around Alpha Centauri. Maybe they were killed in a cataclysmic event a billion years before earth was formed?

seiferteric• 5 years ago

It seems likely simply because life came into existence almost as soon as physically possible on earth.

Flankk2• 5 years ago

The Miller-Urey experiment produced over 20 different amino acids, the building blocks of life.[1] Scientists think the first cells developed from chemically active water droplets.[2] I'd argue we have reproduced it, there just isn't enough time to be sure.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment

[2] https://www.quantamagazine.org/dividing-droplets-could-expla...

Vetch4• 5 years ago

With bayesian probability a single observation can be informative (in the sense that a single observation leads to a change in distribution over hypotheses or parameters). It's a matter of narrowing down beliefs on weighted possibilities though, not a definitive answer on the state of reality.

GoblinSlayer3• 5 years ago

The author doesn't rely on observation. They propose combinatorial models, obtain large time estimates and notice that observation is consistent with these estimates because sample size one, it's a coincidence.

Ostrogodsky2• 5 years ago

You raise good points but the following:

It likely took billions of years for our planet to reach the right temperature and composition for life to form

.. is not true. As mentioned by Wikipedia below, life formed surprisingly "fast" and its earliest appearance is pushed back every year.

The age of the Earth is about 4.54 billion years;[49][50][51] the earliest undisputed evidence of life on Earth dates from at least 3.5 billion years ago.[52][53][54] Some computer models suggest life began as early as 4.5 billion years ago.[4][5]

From Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earliest_known_life_forms

api2• 5 years ago

Something like this strikes me as the most likely Fermi paradox explanation. We will probably eventually find other life, but it will almost always be bacteria to at most multicellular life on the order of Cambrian era fossils.

If intelligence occurs at a rate less than say once per galaxy per billion years, we may never meet ETI. Might find lots of bugs though.

Intergalactic travel is many orders of magnitude harder than interstellar travel. The time frames are insane even close to light speed. Over millions of years things fall apart at the molecular level. Building anything that could last that long, even dormant, would be far beyond any technology we can foresee.

cft2• 5 years ago

Even if a galaxy is 10 million light-years away, you can get to it in 1 month of proper (spaceship) time, if you travel fast enough. This is time dilation due to special relativity.

nefitty2• 5 years ago

If this is true you just lit a candle in my internal temple of hope lol

ncmncm5• 5 years ago

That would be fine if you did not mind colliding with intergalactic medium at lightspeed for two million years.

The term "erosion" seems inadequate.

api2• 5 years ago

By close to light speed I meant maybe 50%. You are right if you get much closer, but there are some huge problems you get too… like having the cosmic microwave background blue shifted into gamma rays or the fact that a dust particle will annihilate you.

I have wondered about the Alcubierre drive and similar concepts. Even if FTL is impossible due to causality protection principle issues, these may provide a theoretical way to travel at light speed (effectively) without the above issues. But we are talking very far future tech with outrageous energy requirements… if it is possible at all.

zikzak• 5 years ago

Research von Neuman probes

mr_toad• 5 years ago

Intergalactic travel is many orders of magnitude harder than interstellar travel.

Andromeda is about 25 galactic widths away. Our galaxies width is about 25,000 times the distance to Alpha Centauri. Alpha Centauri is about 266,000 AU from our Sun. Relatively speaking, the galaxies are quite closely bunched together, compared to their own mind-boggling sizes.

hotpotamus3• 5 years ago

We don't even need to travel to it. We can just wait a few billion years for it to come to us.

wruza3• 5 years ago

But AU probably isn’t a good way to compare this.

Sun and the Solar System is 1,921.56 AU in diameter (google)

So in these Solar System Units Alpha Centauri is only ~140 SSU away. Still more than 25, but comparable, and we are not in a dense neighborhood, afair: https://astronomy.com/magazine/ask-astro/2006/01/how-close-c...

M15's center packs approximately 4 million stars per cubic parsec — that's more than 75 million times denser than the region around the Sun

But some galaxies pack stars even tighter. M32, one of the Andromeda Galaxy's satellites, has the highest measured stellar density of any nearby galaxy — around 20 million stars per cubic parsec in its core! Not even HST can resolve M32's core into individual stars. A typical stellar separation at this density works out to 0.008 light-year, or 500 AU — about 12 times the Sun-Pluto distance — between stars.

(500 AU being ~0.25 of our “SSU”, or 12 M32’s SSU)

plutonorm• 5 years ago

Natural or directed panspermia completely changes the nature of this discussion.If evolution occurs at the galactic scale then we can greatly raise the odds that we are among the first civilisations.

DyslexicAtheist• 5 years ago

probably not rare, but the combination of having opposable thumbs and being able to collaborate is unique. crows, dolphins and magpies are intelligent, so are apes, dogs, cats, and even insects. the question is if we're smart enough to recognize that intelligence. we perceive animals as more intelligent if we can can find a way to interact with them. measuring intelligence is in itself a non-intelligent thing to do

newsbinator• 5 years ago

We perceive animals as intelligent if they’re good at interacting in complex ways with their environment to get what they want, in novel situations.

Like if you were to trap a human in an alien maze with some food in it and a viable way to get it, the human would improvise rather than starve, demonstrating intelligence.

One could argue stoically accepting fate and not playing the alien’s game is also intelligent (like in Star Trek).

But we work with what we have.

type0• 5 years ago

Koalas have two opposable thumbs, in a parallel universe just imagine how the civilization would be build by them. They would need to be much more social and have a bunch more time over than just sitting there digesting food. We freed so much of our time and metabolic needs just by cooking meals - it's insane. What I'm getting at, there's so many factors that we never even consider.

igorkraw• 5 years ago

Or we might get Ob'enn (I heavily recommend the attached comic universe) https://schlockmercenary.fandom.com/wiki/Ob%27enn

buzzin__• 5 years ago

If you find a german tank with a serial number 200, your best guess of the total number of tanks they have is 400.

With the same logic, we can guess that civilizations that discover nuclear power live around 150 years.

ordu• 5 years ago

I believe, that logic should be different. When you consider tank, you assume that some random process of sampling took one tank out of all tanks that existed from start to end. The reasoning assume that you might get any tank, with a serial number 1 or 500 or whatever. Any existed number.

When you look at civilisation with nuclear power, then sampling process had no chances to took civilisation existed for 120 years. Even if civilisation could live for 120 years. It is a different process of data generation, so the reasoning must be different.

0xGod• 5 years ago

It exists only where God allows it to exist. Some intelligent life forms are separated from the rest by vast stretches of space and time, others are not. Each one has a special reason for existing.

ausbah• 5 years ago

care to explain more? "because my preferred choice of suoernstjentity says so" hasn't held up well as a scientific argument

robwwilliams• 5 years ago

The most fun idea in this article is a tacit proposal to look really hard for signs of advanced technologies in and around red dwarfs because they have had the potential to support an oxygen-rich biosphere for at least 10x longer that earth: roughly 8 billion years versus 800 million years.

dvh• 5 years ago

All red dwarfs are flare stars, with solar winds 10 times stronger, they heat less so planets must be closer which makes it even worse.

Symmetry3• 5 years ago

Yeah. One danger for life is the star cooking it. But the other is that the solar wind will tend to strip away a planets hydrogen if life doesn't develop photosynthesis to give the planet an ozone layer fast enough. It took life on Earth most of a billion years[1] fooling around with chemosynthesis before photosynthesis took off. It's a hard step and life around a red dwarf would be on a much more stringent timeframe than life on our planet was.

[1]http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-drake-eq...

Ostrogodsky2• 5 years ago

For me intelligent life should be from somewhat to very common across the universe.

Simplistically you would need:

A source of energy, aka a star, at the very least there are 10^22 of them

A rocky planet situated in the habitability zone of the star (and this is lacking the imagination for life in other kind of environments).These guys are common.

The creation of chemical self-replication with a stable set of compounds (The hardest part for me, but far from impossible)

The appearance of intelligence as an evolutionary trait (nature loves that explore/exploit game)

Time

We modern humans lived 99.7% of our 200k year history entirely unaware there were other people and land a mere "earth radius" away, we may as well repeat that story in a cosmic scale.

ravi-delia• 5 years ago

The problem is really that we spent 99.7% of our history extremely close to the surface of an extremely large sphere. Space is somewhat less lacking in, like, physical obstacles. I mean really, a priori, if there were loads and loads of intelligent species in our galaxy, wouldn't you expect to see them? Why bother positing a brand new set of technologies that just by chance happens to thread whatever needles are necessary to avoid detection, and just figure "oh, guess for some reason there are fewer technological civilizations than I expected"? Obviously we aren't alone in the universe, but it takes some real gymnastics to justify nearby neighbors.

guerrilla4• 5 years ago

I mean really, a priori, if there were loads and loads of intelligent species in our galaxy, wouldn't you expect to see them?

Not according to the Dark Forest theory. There are either quiet civilizations or dead civilizations due to realpolitik. This video summarizes the details[1]

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAUJYP8tnRE

GoblinSlayer3• 5 years ago

We can't see Planet Nine right under our nose, why would we see anything beyond that?

dash2• 5 years ago

You should read the article. They are making the same kind of argument as you, but more carefully.

In particular, the key logic is: either intelligent life takes much longer to evolve than stars’ lifetimes, or about the same, or much less. We evolved at about 80% of Earth’s habitable lifespan. That would be very unlikely, if on average intelligence took less time to evolve than star lifetimes. Taking the same time on average is a knife edge case (I think this depends on the multiplicative nature of the probability distributions involved). So probably it is more. In which case, life is very rare.

nobrains• 5 years ago

From the abstract: "The emergence of intelligent life late in Earth's lifetime is thought to be evidence for a handful of rare evolutionary transitions".

---

How do we know it is late in the Earth's lifetime? What if this is early?

brabel3• 5 years ago

We know we're at the second half of Earth's life history because life has existed since the very beginning, at least 4 billion years, and it's widely believed that within 1 billion years from now, due to how the Sun will evolve, life will become utterly impossible [1]. Maybe the technology a highly evolved civilization can create could stop that, but given how things are going, that's extremely speculative.

EDIT: correction: by 1 billion years from now, the oceans will be mostly gone and likely animal life will be impossible, but unicelular life will still be possible for another few billion years, according to the linked article... "By 2.8 billion years from now, the surface temperature of the Earth will have reached 422 K (149 °C; 300 °F), even at the poles. At this point, any remaining life will be extinguished due to extreme conditions.". Mind blowing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth#Loss_of_oceans

_xnmw4• 5 years ago

All of these discussions seem to hinge on the assumption that intelligence arises spontaneously from nature given the "right" conditions, but that is an unproven and statistically unlikely assumption [1]. Just as a random byte generator will statistically never output a full featured operating system within the age of the universe (and certainly nothing resembling elegant source code), so are any random chemical/biological/physical processes statistically unlikely to ever spontaneously lead to intelligent life within the age of the universe. Intelligence is created by intelligence, nothing else. Call it "God" or whatever you wish, but it doesn't arise out of randomness, unless the randomness is constrained into highly structured output, which requires intelligence to do.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

rollo• 5 years ago

Since it's everything but random, given the strong, strong selection pressure, what you wrote misses the point completely. And the argument based on that is completely meaningless as well.

_xnmw4• 5 years ago

What creates that selection pressure?

messe• 5 years ago

"Your theory that the sun is the centre of the solar system, and the earth is a ball which rotates around it has a very convincing ring to it, Mr. James, but it's wrong. I've got a better theory," said the little old lady.

"And what is that, madam?" inquired James politely.

"That we live on a crust of earth which is on the back of a giant turtle."

Not wishing to demolish this absurd little theory by bringing to bear the masses of scientific evidence he had at his command, James decided to gently dissuade his opponent by making her see some of the inadequacies of her position.

"If your theory is correct, madam," he asked, "what does this turtle stand on?"

"You're a very clever man, Mr. James, and that's a very good question," replied the little old lady, "but I have an answer to it. And it's this: The first turtle stands on the back of a second, far larger, turtle, who stands directly under him."

"But what does this second turtle stand on?" persisted James patiently.

To this, the little old lady crowed triumphantly, "It's no use, Mr. James—it's turtles all the way down."

— J. R. Ross, Constraints on Variables in Syntax, 1967

_xnmw4• 5 years ago

This joke actually highlights the utter ludicrousness of a scientific-rational explanation of the universe without God. Because as long as you keep searching for "phenomena" to explain existence, the question remains, what caused that phenomena. But "God" is a sort of final answer to the problem, a realization that causation has to stop somewhere, and wherever it stops, that is God.

GoblinSlayer3• 5 years ago

What counts as intelligence though? Worms? Fish? Cats? Apes? Humans?

_xnmw4• 5 years ago

Why not all of them? I never said intelligence was exclusive to humans.

ncmncm5• 5 years ago

They're Made out of Meat!

dividedbyzero• 5 years ago

Don't a bunch of squids, birds, other primates, etc. show plenty of intelligence? Yet none show any ambition to develop high tech that anyone could spot from space, chimps don't even feel the need to communicate all that much even though they're totally capable of using sign language when properly incentivized, they just don't seem to have the urge to express themselves like we do.

Might that not imply that intelligence is pretty frequent, but that what we're looking for isn't intelligence per se, but a bunch of other very specific qualities and factors that channel intelligence to express itself in high tech spacefaring ways? Seeing how much had to fall into place just so in the last 100 000 years so we could put someone on the moon, I guess that seems plausible?

trevyn• 5 years ago

Intelligence without ambition puts a hard bound on future intelligence.

wruza3• 5 years ago

Yet none show any ambition to develop high tech that anyone could spot from space

Above the sea level, anyone who had it is either a part of “our” genome or extinct. Below it is a completely separate biome which may not yet had an event starting this type of evolution. It’s unclear if in a million years (in the absence of humans) squids would stay the same or evolve into walking and then moon-landing.

I think that only one species can do that, because the most energetic natural environment (free oxygen in our case), which is required for it, is usually only one per planet, and you have to fight over it, with hands, wood, metals, fire, ATGMs.

guerrilla4• 5 years ago

Above the sea level, anyone who had it is either a part of “our” genome or extinct.

That's too vague to argue with but I'll do it anyway: No, elephants and crows as just two examples.

deepsun• 5 years ago

chimps don't even feel the need to communicate all that much

Because that wasn't providing any evolutionary benefit. Take a group of chimps, and make offspring of those who communicate more often to have a higher chance of survival, and voila -- they will develop an urge to communicate!

lurquer• 5 years ago

Sounds like a neat experiment.

Perhaps it should be done.

Of course, it’s so much easier to simply imagine such things. All that ‘scientific method’ stuff is just a nuisance when it comes to evolution.

tsol• 5 years ago

Only possible issue-- it'll probably take a few million years

jrowen4• 5 years ago

That’s mostly a question of how one chooses to define “intelligence.” For the purposes of this type of discussion it’s usually equivalent to “whatever humans have that other animals don’t.” We’re looking for something that would be relatable to us, probably the minimum requirement would be the ability to communicate with them at the same level of robustness that we can with each other (edit: or a recognizable demonstration of mastery over the physical world to a level that meets or exceeds our own).

It’s true that other terrestrial life forms possess some capabilities that we could call intelligence, but then we would just need to use another word that defines the special human je ne sais quoi.

Symmetry3• 5 years ago

Probably the most relevant difference is humans forming prestige hierarchies alongside dominance hierarchies with larger brains able to store more of the resulting cultural accumulation being partially downstream of that. Knowledge transmission is always imperfect but if people try to learn from the guy reputed to be the best flint napper you can support a lot more technology than if everybody just learns from their parents.

Learning from non-kin isn't unusual in the animal kingdom. Monkeys seeing other monkeys drop a mix of sand and grain in water to separate them and then copying that is a classic example. But deliberate teaching of non-kin and the way we use language to help with that teaching is pretty unique. An octopus might have smarts comparable to a feral human, but not to an acculturated human.

guerrilla4• 5 years ago

Indeed, I think it's clear a lot of animals can do a lot of things that they just don't want to do and the reason they don't want to is because that just wasn't beneficial for them in their environment. Maybe cultures could be created and spread amongst them that might bring out that ambition though.

Retric5• 5 years ago

You can see beaver dams from space, or atmospheric oxygen. Only sending radio signals is uniquely human.

In terms of space, single called organisms have traveled further from earth than people have. So calling us spacefaring is kind of misleading in the context of alien life. I doubt we’re detectable outside of a 100 light year sphere from earth and none of those stars look like they contain any habitable planets. The only way to suggest alien intelligent life is meaningfully different than beavers in this context is to raise the bar far enough we don’t qualify.

drsnow• 5 years ago

I doubt we’re detectable outside of a 100 light year sphere from earth and none of those stars look like they contain any habitable planets.

Do you have a source for that?

meibo• 5 years ago

Surely no single celled organism built a spaceship or other launch system to go into space because it wanted to do so?

The ability of humans to willingly create the technology to do it is what counts, in this case.

grishka• 5 years ago

There is clear line between human and animal intelligence, the language. It's this ability to exchange information about arbitrarily complex ideas, or, one might say, to exchange and store thoughts in a serialized form, that sets our intelligence apart and opens the possibilities for a civilization as advanced as ours. No other species on this planet has I/O capabilities this advanced.

ASalazarMX• 5 years ago

Humans also didn't show any ambition, besides keeping themselves and their little band alive, for hundreds of thousands of years. We know they had the mental capacity because hunting, foraging, cooking and tool-making needs knowledge and planning, but they were fine as they were.

Somehow humans started cooperating in large groups, planting the seeds of civilization, outcompeting (or possibly exterminating) our less social brethren. We can't know if the first human capable of leading large groups was a genius or a psychopath, but without people like him/her humanity probably wouldn't be very ambitious.

empressplay• 5 years ago

Rare at scale is not rare.

jrowen4• 5 years ago

I love stuff like this, in the past I spent a good amount of time wondering about what were the key milestones in the development of intelligent life. Multicellularity is a good example. From my (admittedly outsider) perspective, a lot of that seems lost on the popular approaches to AI, which seem to focus too heavily on the late-stage result (the brain) and not everything that led up to it. Evolutionary algorithms have been out of vogue for some time, Artifical Life is an under-explored backwater.

One thing that I am surprised has been left out of this analysis is extinction events. In the intro it seems to dismiss “models that appeal to rare chance events” (paraphrasing). But the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction in particular was a chance event that had an absolutely massive...impact...on the evolution of intelligence. Dinosaurs dominated for a couple hundred million years with no signs of moving toward primate-style intelligence, and then suddenly a whole new set of conditions created an environment where scavenger mammals developed rapidly.

3170702• 5 years ago

If you replace "intelligence" with "flying", it becomes more apparent why there is generally little interest in artificial life as an approach to develop artificial intelligence (although there are small conferences on this approach).

In general, to recreate something from nature, so far we have not needed to recreate nature as a whole. It is not clear why we need to treat intelligence any differently.

jrowen4• 5 years ago

For one, flying is a relatively simple physical phenomenon, and once we had a firm grasp on the principles of lift, we were able to design our own solutions.

Intelligence is, in comparison, an incredibly complex phenomenon that seems a lot harder to separate from the inner workings of the biology and evolutionary history. It feels to me like there is an implicit hubris embodied in the industry and reflected in your comment. Obviously there has been an increasing overlap between neuroscience and AI, and the approaches do strive to understand and mimic the biological structure of the brain. What is not clear to me is how we have largely collectively decided that we don’t need to incorporate understanding of how that structure came to be.

And I’m not saying that we need to replicate the whole process exactly as nature did it. That would take billions of years. But perhaps if we understood it better we could take the key insights and mechanisms to design our own system.

Intelligence is more than just processing information. A big part of intelligence is agency, it’s having a reason for doing things because you live in a world where you have intrinsic goals and desires and feelings and needs. I just don’t see AlphaGo or Watson or anything like that ever reaching that level. They’re Frankenstein vat processors built to answer questions within predetermined contexts we bake into them. They’ll never question why they do what they do or simply decide to do something else. I’m convinced we need to essentially create a simulation where something with agency can develop on its own in order to reach truly interesting AGI.

Symmetry3• 5 years ago

I'd say that the big milestones would be photosynthesis, eukaryotic life, and then multi-cellularity. I trust the first and last are obvious but I think people don't appreciate mitochondria enough, for all the memes about "the powerhouse of the cell". Bacteria respirate over their membranes which, through the square-cube law, limits how big they can be. Our cells have many mitochondria scattered though them and can get pretty big. And with size comes the possibility of much larger genomes. Plus in life on Earth at least mitochondria are responsible for apoptosis and its hard to image multi-cellar life without that.

nathias• 5 years ago

There are a countless rare transitions that we don't yet even recognize as important, each of them compounds the rarity of technologically advanced intelligent sapient sentient life.

therealbilly• 5 years ago

Yeah I think our level of intelligence is probably pretty rare. I mean we have a G type star which are not that plentiful in the cosmos. We have a large moon that causes tidal forces on earth and mixes things up. We apparently have a nice selection of elements in our solar system. The problem is that humans took a very long time to evolve. Now we only have .8 billion years to enjoy things before the sun cooks the planet.

machiaweliczny• 5 years ago

I think we have much less, before someone fucks up.

The timing of evolutionary transitions suggests intelligent life is rare

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