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Is Intelligent Life Inevitable?
Consider this...
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Look at all the different kinds of animals there are. Think of the number of different species of beetle alone. They've gotten along fine. It doesn't pay to be smart.
--Ernst Mayr, interview, 10 November 2000
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Consciousness at our level of language and conceptual abstraction has evolved but once on Earth -- in a small lineage of primates (some 200 species), within a small lineage of mammals (some 4,000 species), while the more successful beetles now number more than half a million ... If complex consciousness has evolved but once ... how can anyone defend the inevitability of its convergent evolution?
--Stephen Jay Gould, Natural History, December 1998
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Beetle Mania: Are they more successful than we are?
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To understand how creatures that are descended from very different groups can evolve similar forms and functions, consider that dolphins, which evolved from dog-like mammals, are shaped like fish because there exists an optimal shape for moving through water -- a classic example of convergent evolution. Or consider another example: both placental mammals and marsupials produced a large, saber-toothed carnivore on separate continents ... Almost any planet with life, in my view, will produce living creatures we would recognize as parallel in form and function to our own biota. But first, life must arise, and we have no idea how rare an event that might be.
--Simon Conway Morris. Natural History, December 1998
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The bat and the bird show off their wings, functionally similar traits that evolved from very different origins. |
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You've seen the evidence. This is your last chance to decide:
Is intelligent life an inevitable result of evolution?
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