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Is Intelligent Life Inevitable?
Consider this...
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Only one primate lineage -- the human one -- evolved the unique cognitive specialization that enables us to represent explicitly our own psychological states and those of others ... Our new awareness of the mental dimension of behavior was woven into our existing neural circuitry forever altering our understanding of our own behavior and the behavior of those around us. Other species, including chimpanzees, may simply be incapable of reasoning about mental states -- no matter how much we insist on believing that they do.
--Daniel J. Povinelli, Scientific American, November 1998
We don't know yet what mechanisms in our brain allow us to discriminate different languages, but we do know now that these mechanisms are not unique to humans.
--Marc Hauser, Science, 4 April 2000
As long as 32,000 years ago humans began creating representational art, like these cave paintings from Chauvet, France. This is something no other creature has learned to do. |
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Orcas (killer whales) within a pod, or family unit, use calls to communicate specific information to other members of the group. (Based on the research of Barrett-Lennard and Ellis.)
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These Nicaraguan school children have created a language from scratch, perhaps just as the earliest humans did thousands of years ago.
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Is intelligent life an inevitable result of evolution?
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