have they found anything?

[JoeTheJuggler]

Humans are vastly superior to any other animal on this planet. How can anyone postulate that the difference between chimpanzees, dolphins, etc is almost nothing?

Because the difference is of degree and not kind--which is what I said.

To think otherwise is to consider humans to be some special act of creation or some such. In fact, we're just part of the biosphere of the planet.

Imagine rather than discussing the character of "intelligence" you were talking about the character of "height". One or another species of giraffe is currently the tallest animal on the Earth. (Though there were certainly taller animals that are now extinct.) Would you consider the giraffe to be unique? If the tallest giraffe species went extinct, would you say that the Earth no longer had any tall animals?

Height and intelligence are comparable characters in that they've both proven to provide great adaptive success to different species.

For about the third time now, have you read the Darling book? Do you understand the idea of convergence? How can you rule out that intelligence--even of the degree humans have--is something that hasn't/won't ever evolve in another species?

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

If we were to die out tomorrow, there is no other species that can possibly take our place.

This is a false statement.

We don't know whether another species would take over the niche left by us. (On the other hand, it would take a huge catastrophe to wipe out nearly 7 billion humans, so it's likely that whatever wipes us out would change the environment so as to wipe our niche out of the ecology, at least for a while.)

There is no reason whatsoever that it is impossible for the level of intelligence humans have to evolve in another species. The rules of biology (esp. natural selection), chemistry and physics apply the same for all species.

To argue otherwise is to say there is something supernatural about humans.

 

[amb]

No, not supernatural. A giant fluke.[ mutation] Like spinning two coins into the air and getting more than 100.000 tails in a row. What caused man to climb out of the tree and start walking upright, developing a level of intelligence never seen before. The very origin of life is still a mystery that may never be solved although I'm confident that progress will continue.
When I see a monkey start playing a complex instrument and belting out a tune, I'll believe that we have a species ready to take our role in developing a civilasation if we were to become extinct.
A planet of the apes, Earth will never be.

 

[LarianLeQuella]

A planet of the apes, Earth will never be.

Uh... dude... WE ARE apes.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

No, not supernatural. A giant fluke.[ mutation] Like spinning two coins into the air and getting more than 100.000 tails in a row.

You're pulling numbers out of thin air, though.

How do you know it's not like tossing 100 tails in a row? If you toss a coin billions of times, getting a streak of a 100 is virtually inevitable.

As I said before, if you consider a 1 in a million event (one that occurs to a human only once in a million days--meaning most of us never experience such an event), given that there are 6.7 billion people, such an event happens thousands of times every single day!

The same laws of physics, chemistry and biology (especially natural selection) that operate on humans operate on all matter everywhere.

That's why your claim that humans are unique smacks of a religious claim based on the supernatural.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

When I see a monkey start playing a complex instrument and belting out a tune, I'll believe that we have a species ready to take our role in developing a civilasation if we were to become extinct.

And this is exactly a Creationist technique. "If I can't witness a big change in a species, then it can't possibly happen."

(Again, I don't think chimpanzees are likely to be the successor to humans since there are billions of us and less than 200 thousand of them--that's some 4 orders of magnitude difference. Whatever wipes out humans is likely to wipe them out first, since they're already on the brink of extinction.)

 

[amb]

You're pulling numbers out of thin air, though.

How do you know it's not like tossing 100 tails in a row? If you toss a coin billions of times, getting a streak of a 100 is virtually inevitable.

As I said before, if you consider a 1 in a million event (one that occurs to a human only once in a million days--meaning most of us never experience such an event), given that there are 6.7 billion people, such an event happens thousands of times every single day!

The same laws of physics, chemistry and biology (especially natural selection) that operate on humans operate on all matter everywhere.

That's why your claim that humans are unique smacks of a religious claim based on the supernatural.

The coin has been flipped more than a billion times on Earth already.
It only came up tails enough times to produce us.
In answer to Larian, yes we are apes, but very smart apes.
If intelligence is inevitable in the scheme of things, why didn't an intelligent dinosaur appear, after all they lived here for millions of years.

 

[LarianLeQuella]

If intelligence is inevitable in the scheme of things, why didn't an intelligent dinosaur appear, after all they lived here for millions of years.

They were a dead end as far as intelligence of our magnitude is concerned, however they were very successful at breeding and surviving. Evolution is full of such dead ends. That said, there was a nasty asteroid that cut them short. Who knows what could have happened. The timescale isn't the factor, it's the niches. I would say that earth as a planet is a poor place for intelligence to develop, and you need a more dynamic and chaotic planet to force species to develop intelligence.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

The coin has been flipped more than a billion times on Earth already.

That's another Creationist argument--that evolution through natural selection is random. Selection is not a coin toss. Each species does not arise as an independent, random thing. See the 4th of the Five Major Misconceptions about Evolution on the TalkOrigins site.

And again, even on the Earth, humans are not the only species to have the trait of intelligence. Indeed, you can look through the layers of the brain and trace them back through our phylogeny.

In the context of SETI, we don't have enough information to calculate the probability of life on other planets. We also don't yet know how many planets there are (though what we've been learning lately indicates that planets are the rule and not the exception).

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

If intelligence is inevitable in the scheme of things, why didn't an intelligent dinosaur appear, after all they lived here for millions of years.

No one is arguing that intelligence is inevitable. I'm arguing against your assertion that another instance of very high intelligence is impossible.

At the same time, you should read what the Darling book says about convergence.

 

[amb]

You keep bringing up this Darling. Could you please give me the title of the book and whether I can purchase it on Amazon? Thanks in advance.
I have read many books on the subject of evolution and origins by Dawkins, Gould and some others who escape my memory for the moment. Dawkins latest, The Greatest Show On Earth is worthwhile reading. I find it informative and aimed at the layman such as I.

 

[Roboramma]

I think this whole thread is pure speculation.

Well, the rest of this post certainly is:

I agree with Paul Davies when he says that although SETI is worth the effort, it would be a miracle if it produced positive results.
If there is other intelligent life forms out there, don't count on it been in the numbers Drake quoted. Darwinian evolution requires a huge time span. I doubt there may be some planets where it could possibly arise faster than what it did here even without an asteroid belt which is a planet that failed to form.

 

[Roboramma]

Depending on what you mean by intelligence, I think that intelligence such as ours or higher
is extremely rare in the universe. Lower intelligence such as an ape or a dolphin, much more likely.

That makes no sense at all. We are more closely related to chimpanzees than they are to... anything else. They are not only our closest relatives, they are ours.

Of course, that doesn't mean so much, in itself. But the intelligence of a chimpanzee is much greater than you seem to think.

They are capable of language, at least to some extent.
They make and use tools.
The have complex social relationships.

If a chimpanzee could evolve elsewhere, what would stop the evolution of a slightly greater intelligence? I just don't see what stops it.

 

[Roboramma]

Humans are vastly superior to any other animal on this planet. How can anyone postulate that the difference between chimpanzees, dolphins, etc is almost nothing?
Can any other animal on Earth have the hair on the back of the neck literally stand up at a Mozart symphony?

Maybe. Or, if not literally, to have the same sort of emotional reaction that a human not raised in our culture, say someone from New Guinea, would have?
Maybe. Of course, maybe not so similar, but considering that that music was composed specifically to evoke emotional reactions in humans, that's not particularly surprising.

Be in awe at an image of a galaxy from Hubble?

Is a child, who doesn't know that the picture is of, in awe?
If you could explain to a chimpanzee what it was looking it, it may be in awe too. That's not a question that we can answer.

Cry at a very sad part of an emotional movie or laugh at a comedy film.

Again, if it could understand the context, maybe. Try watching the same movie in a different language, and put gorrillas in as actors, rather than humans. See if you have the same emotional response.

What we can say is that great apes are capable of strong emotional responses.

No, we are unique on this planet as the only ones able to do all that and much more.

What is so special about the above, and what does it have to do with intelligence?
Its not hard to imagine an intelligent species, capable of creating a technological civilization, that has rather weaker emotional responses than ours.

At the risk of repeating myself. If we were to die out tomorrow, there is no other species that can possibly take our place. Civilization would die.
The coincidence that produced us must of necessity be extremely rare.

They wouldn't replace us. But I don't see any reason why its impossible for other intelligent species to evolve and eventually fill the same niche which we have filled, going on to form a new and very different technological civilization.
It may not necessarily happen, but I see no reason to believe it's impossible, or even particularly unlikely.
Intelligence, after all, has been increasing since life began on earth, even if only through a random walk.

 

[Roboramma]

The coin has been flipped more than a billion times on Earth already.
It only came up tails enough times to produce us.
In answer to Larian, yes we are apes, but very smart apes.
If intelligence is inevitable in the scheme of things, why didn't an intelligent dinosaur appear, after all they lived here for millions of years.

Dinosaurs were intelligent. If you had lived at that time, you might have said something similar: "after all these billions of years, nothing more intelligent than a dinosaur has evolved, therefore its very unlikely that anything ever will".

Life is becoming more complex over time. It sort of had to be that way: it started out very simply, there was only one way to go. And intelligence requires complexity. So it had to come late.

Something had to be the first life form on earth the was intelligent enough, and in the right ways, to create a technological civilization. But the difference between us and chimps is much much less than between that chimp and a dinosaur.

And intelligence is a very adaptive feature. That it will continue to be selected for in other species is not particularly unlikely.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

You keep bringing up this Darling. Could you please give me the title of the book and whether I can purchase it on Amazon? Thanks in advance.

It's the book we talked about back around post 655 in April. Life Everywhere

You know, the one that should be sitting on your bookshelf by now since you ordered it before I did in April:

I just ordered it through Amazon. I see Ward has a book out a well which sounds good seeing he is co-author of ''Rare Earth,'' titled ''Life As We Not Know it.''
I wish I had the time and money. I would order a dozen such books on that page.

It really is a fascinating subject with a hundred differing views.
The book ''Rare Earth'' has not really been criticized as much as I expected by orthodox astrobiologists. Is it because it's possible?
Looking forward to reading Darling's book. I should get it within a week.

Seems odd that now you don't even know what book I'm talking about. It's got a chapter that goes through and rebuts the arguments made in Rare Earth, and points out the Creationist connection to those arguments.

But more recently I was referring to the stuff about convergent evolution.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

If a chimpanzee could evolve elsewhere, what would stop the evolution of a slightly greater intelligence? I just don't see what stops it.

Exactly.

Amb keeps claiming that humans are the only species ever to have evolved more intelligence than is necessary for survival. This shows a stark lack of understanding of evolutionary biology. (And again, it smacks of Creationist thinking.)

 

[amb]

It's the book we talked about back around post 655 in April. Life Everywhere

You know, the one that should be sitting on your bookshelf by now since you ordered it before I did in April:



Seems odd that now you don't even know what book I'm talking about. It's got a chapter that goes through and rebuts the arguments made in Rare Earth, and points out the Creationist connection to those arguments.

But more recently I was referring to the stuff about convergent evolution.

Right! I did get it along with another two books which I still have. Why Aren't They Here? By Surenora Verma [2007] by Icon Books. And the one that really wheted my appetite Where Is Everybody by Stephen Webb, Copernicus Books [2002] This book is about Fermi's Paradox.
I wasn't too impressed with ''Life Everywhere'' and it's laying around somewhere in a spare room.

 

[amb]

All animals on this Earth at the present time have now been here for more than two million years, including our cousins the chimpanzee. Yes they have a certain amount of intelligence and a whole heap of instincts which we may mistake for intelligence. But if you think that given another two million years this monkey may develop our level of intelligence while we stay still at our present level, or become extinct is naive thinking.
If we were to disappear from the face of the planet, animals will remain as they are with some exceptions, but I doubt a chimp, or other can take the place of man.
The chimp and man both sprouted from the same ancestor at roughly the same time.
Why did mans brain, or mind develop to a level where he has built a civilazation while the chimp has more or less stayed still. I call this jump a mutation that may only happen once or no more than a dozen times in the whole galaxy. And that's conceding little ground.

 

[JoeTheJuggler]

I wasn't too impressed with ''Life Everywhere'' and it's laying [sic] around somewhere in a spare room.

That's an insufficient counter argument to the arguments presented in that book that debunk the Rare Earth stuff.

Also, what do you think of the connection between the Rare Earth arguments and the Creationist astronomer?

And what about the idea that evolutionary convergence might be relavitely common? (This is sort of like the debunking of the Fine Tuner arguments. A lot of "variables" in biology aren't really so free to vary. Physics pretty much determines an efficient shape for moving through water, for example.)