Requirements for Intelligent Life

An environment that selects for intelligence via natural selection.
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It only has to do that at the last minute. Remember:

- evolution hasn't got a direction (apart from the requirement that to evolve complex entities you must first evolve slightly-less-complex ones).
-intelligence is a process, and one that we don't understand very well; that it's so difficult to recognise that white Europeans of 300 years ago often didn't recognise other coloured humans as intelligent.
- even now we don't really know how many animals on this planet are intelligent, or even how we would decide.
- we probably wouldn't even know how to recognise life if it involved another chemistry, operating on a different timescale.
 
LarianLeQuella said:
My biggest problem with your list is that it seems to be very human-centric. I know we only have one sample point to look at right now, but some of the items on your list seem to be taken directly from that one sample point.

While a large moon and tides may be "desirable" for our kind of intelligent life, I would hesitate to label it a requirement. Many of the items on your list could probably fall in the "nice to have" category as well. We just don't know; and in my experience, us humans have been incredibly unimaginative when thinking about lifeforms on THIS planet.
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Too true. Has anyone read Sagan's wonderful book The Cosmic Connection? He has a chapter called 'chauvinism' and stresses that we tend to be terribly human-centric when it comes to life. For example, there are too often 'oxygen chauvinists', people who stress that there must be oxygen on a planet in order for life to arise, forgetting that life grew up on this planet in spite of the killer gas -oxygen- that floated in the atmosphere.

There are 'UV Chauvinists', who cry that the Earth appears to have been designed to protect us from UV light, yet miss the fact that UV light is damaging because our ancestors were born onto a planet without UV light. Could there not be a species that shouts praise to the heavens because of their UV-Absorbing shell plate, that provides them with energy? 'What would our world be like if the sky blocked out UV?' their priests may preach.

As for the moon and the waves, why couldn't a certain life arise in the water in the sea? We have two intelligent species in our own sea already.

Could intelligent life not dwell deep under the clouds of a Jupiter-like planet, avoiding the blast of a supernovae? Or could intelligent life that requires no sunlight not exist in the oceans of a planet, unaware and uncaring that their world has just been ripped out of its orbit by a colliding galaxy?

Life adapts to whatever hand the planet deals.
 
The tube worms at the sea vents seem to function free of photosynthesis, which is a big change in the requirements of life.
 
Scazon said:
It only has to do that at the last minute. Remember:

- evolution hasn't got a direction (apart from the requirement that to evolve complex entities you must first evolve slightly-less-complex ones).
-intelligence is a process, and one that we don't understand very well; that it's so difficult to recognise that white Europeans of 300 years ago often didn't recognise other coloured humans as intelligent.
- even now we don't really know how many animals on this planet are intelligent, or even how we would decide.
- we probably wouldn't even know how to recognise life if it involved another chemistry, operating on a different timescale.
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Just to make myself perfectly clear a little bit more comprehensible. I don't mean that the environment actively selects. The word is shorthand for "allows for selection". ;)
 
Undesired Walrus said:
Could intelligent life not dwell deep under the clouds of a Jupiter-like planet, avoiding the blast of a supernovae? Or could intelligent life that requires no sunlight not exist in the oceans of a planet, unaware and uncaring that their world has just been ripped out of its orbit by a colliding galaxy?

Life adapts to whatever hand the planet deals.
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The counter argument is one potential barrier to intellgent life is the lack of advantage intelligence offers. For example in the cases you offer none of those species can reach the bronze age and the gas giant dwellers would have rather significant problems getting as far as the stone age.
 
geni said:
The counter argument is one potential barrier to intellgent life is the lack of advantage intelligence offers. For example in the cases you offer none of those species can reach the bronze age and the gas giant dwellers would have rather significant problems getting as far as the stone age.
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'Intelligence' does not necessarily mean 'industrialised'.

I can quite easily imagine beings, either on-planet or off-planet (like Fred Hoyle's intelligent interstellar cloud), that are highly intelligent but have no need or can't be bothered to invent tools or control fire/electricity.
 
The Drain said:
'Intelligence' does not necessarily mean 'industrialised'.

I can quite easily imagine beings, either on-planet or off-planet (like Fred Hoyle's intelligent interstellar cloud), that are highly intelligent but have no need or can't be bothered to invent tools or control fire/electricity.
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Your problem then is what is the reason for evolution to select in favor of intelligence? Remember intelligence is rather energy hungy so it is not something that is going to evolve without a strong driveing factor.
 
geni said:
The counter argument is one potential barrier to intellgent life is the lack of advantage intelligence offers. For example in the cases you offer none of those species can reach the bronze age and the gas giant dwellers would have rather significant problems getting as far as the stone age.
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See, you fall into the human-centric trap. Why can't intelligence -as The Drain said- evolve independent of tools?

Who knows what sonnets the Whales sing to each other under the waves.
 
Considering the long run of life, intelligence is merely an aberration, a quirk in some mammals that failed to develop much of anything during the Age of the Dinosaurs, and requiring another 64 million years to emerge after that. And likely to self-extinguish itself, becoming just another thin layer in the sediments of the planet.
 
Undesired Walrus said:
See, you fall into the human-centric trap. Why can't intelligence -as The Drain said- evolve independent of tools?
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What is the motivation for it do so? Your brain burns through energy at very high rate (one of the reasons to expect intilligence may require oxygen is that it is one of the few ways to get enough energy fast enough). That is something evolution will tend to select against unless there is something firmly pushing it in the other dirrection.
 
geni said:
What is the motivation for it do so? Your brain burns through energy at very high rate (one of the reasons to expect intilligence may require oxygen is that it is one of the few ways to get enough energy fast enough). That is something evolution will tend to select against unless there is something firmly pushing it in the other dirrection.
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The motivation, of course, is to have grandchildren.

Whether you do this by having bigger teeth or faster legs or a bigger oxygen-hungry brain that can make clever plans is not so important. All such methods are expensive.

Being clever just happens to be one way for a species to survive and maybe flourish.

But it's surely possible to flourish by being cleverer than the competition without stone axes or the industrial revolution. An octopus can successfully catch a crab by being clever, without having to use an artefact in the process. Likewise chimpanzees hunting monkeys.

As for the need for oxygen: If the entire ecology is slow (let's say it's a completely different chemistry or just very very cold) then all you have to be is a comparatively faster thinker or mover than the competition. A single coherent thought might take a hundred or a thousand years, but that doesn't matter if everyone else is moving in equally slow motion.

If we ever come across such slow intelligent life, I doubt either side would recognise the other. (So maybe we already have!)
 
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The fungi that cover an acre or more, as a single organism, are up to something.
If they were intelligent, how would they express it to us?

A super colony of ants is easier to relate to. The colony is intelligent. The individuals are less so. As an 'entity' such a colony is nearly immortal.
 
As a biologist, I'm perpetually annoyed by the tendency to treat intelligence and consciousness as binary traits that one has or doesn't have, and to place humans above the bar and everything else below to the bar. To mirror and earlier comment, this is a giant stroke of chauvinism that reflects old-school philosophical conceits much more than it reflects modern biology.

Many small mammals (e.g. rabbits, cats) have personalities. They learn, they can develop behavioral quirks that are not purely programmed responses, and so forth. Nonetheless, I don't plan on asking my rabbits to design any bridges for me anytime soon.

That said, I meet many, many fellow humans who reply to any basic arithmetic problem by claiming that "math is hard." I think that's sad, but I, in turn, found linear algebra a bit tricky, and have many friends for whom it was just another class.

Bacteria operate via programmed chemotactic and other responses -- there is no problem-solving on per-organism basis. But as you start walking "up" the brainpower scale, you'll hit the whole range, including cows, tool-shaping crows, chimps that can act in movies, and those of us who do or don't think "math is hard."

My point is that intelligence is a gradient. I think to an off-planet observer, early homo sapiens and other primates would be hard to distinguish in terms of "intelligence." As a consequence, asking about the requirements for "intelligent life" is an overly fuzzy request.

An interesting variant on the original question might be "What conditions are required for a planet to generate organisms that will develop means to escape that planet's gravity well?" I don't think we have enough examples to realistically answer that question, but it comes closer to asking the question that was really being asked up "How likely are we?"

(Or you could ask about generating radio signals, or some other benchmark.)
 
quarky said:
The fungi that cover an acre or more, as a single organism, are up to something.
If they were intelligent, how would they express it to us?

A super colony of ants is easier to relate to. The colony is intelligent. The individuals are less so. As an 'entity' such a colony is nearly immortal.
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Despite my advocating that intelligence is a continuum, I think you're being a little too fuzzy here. Ants appear to operate by pretty basic algorithms, and a colony is a bunch of those little guys running those algorithms together. I wouldn't say an ant colony is particularly "smart" even from an outside evaluation; it's just well-adapted to its situation. Colonies as a whole don't problem solve especially well, nor do they innovate or develop personality quirks.

Ant colonies are awesome, but not well along on the intelligence scale.
 
If survival is part of the I.Q. test, we might see this differently...maybe not.
I first encountered my suspect prejudices, as per anthropomorphism, when observing dolphins at a research facility. I can't prove how 'smart' dolphins are. From what I've seen, they're real sharp, with a sexy sense of humor, to boot.

The big brain is seductive. Whales and dolphins have it. We do too, though smaller.

Which had me wondering if I wasn't being stunned about the big brain, in a single lump.

Communal brains is a possibility, in the case of ant colonies. The big colonies might have more nuerons working together than I do. How can I possibly determine if that colony has a sense of humor?
 
sanguine said:
As a biologist, I'm perpetually annoyed by the tendency to treat intelligence and consciousness as binary traits that one has or doesn't have, and to place humans above the bar and everything else below to the bar. To mirror and earlier comment, this is a giant stroke of chauvinism that reflects old-school philosophical conceits much more than it reflects modern biology.
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Absolutely out-bloody-standing post.

Nominated.

(Pity you don't post more, on the strength of that!)
 
I ain't no biologist but...

Isn't intelligence merely an adaptation - as per drought tolerance - that facilitates one (or more) species to adapt to a niche?

It seems - to me, in my ignorance - that trying to analyse the "requirements for intelligent life" is putting the horse before the cart; a diverse environment 'breeds' diversity
 
geni said:
What is the motivation for it do so? Your brain burns through energy at very high rate (one of the reasons to expect intilligence may require oxygen is that it is one of the few ways to get enough energy fast enough). That is something evolution will tend to select against unless there is something firmly pushing it in the other dirrection.
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A brain requiring more energy is no different than any other physical thing requiring more, like a cheetah's running muscles or koala's stomach. Early human conditions selected for the brain over other traits. So did a lot of other conditions for creatures with higher intelligence--squid, dolphins, other primates, who survived better per generation with a mutation of a better brain than they did a better other body part. Perhaps selection pressures on them weren't/aren't still sufficient to evolve their brains any farther, but if they had been they'd be as intelligent as us.

Some animals have remarkably different metabolism, or ways to store and output energy. Birds that fly without stop 10,000 miles at a time for example, are very efficient at fat-flap energy transfer. Or, reptiles who only need to eat one meal every few months. There's a lot of diversity in energy systems, and no real reason to think brain-energy is special or couldn't be fed into in a more efficient way for a species which differs quite a bit from our general biology. Or brains that function differently according to how much energy is available for use.

Finally, just how much greater is our species' brain-energy usage compared to dozens of others of almost-comparable intelligence? How much greater is it today than just before we entered the stone-age? Perhaps there are several other species at the moment who are just-before-stone-age in terms of intelligence, but small condition variances haven't quite forced them to enter its analogue. Or perhaps they have already, but since we strongly correlate intelligence to both language and tool-use (or the reverse), we don't recognize it in species who lack similar vocalization structures or object-manipulation appendages.
 
shadron said:
Did I say something demeaning about human/ET rights that you feel needed informing?
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The two are very closely related. Clearly chickens have some level of intelligence - do they constitute "intelligent life"?

I speculated about a possibility of life so bizarre (in "14th dimension of one particular black hole") that all your "requirements" are left in the dust. How do you tell if some weird spacial anomaly is "life" or just a "natural resource"? Where you draw the line is a matter of economics, as I described above.
 
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