yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Intelligent Species Have Only Risen Once on Planet Earth


3m read
·Nov 3, 2024

Now that's one argument, and we have to be humble in the face of uncertainty. Here, no one knows. But I want to give an argument that rarely gets any air time. The argument is that we are alone, and the argument has nothing to do with astronomy; it has everything to do with biology.

The argument goes like this: look at planet Earth and look at the number of species, not only that exist right now—millions of them—but the number of species that have ever existed on planet Earth—hundreds of millions. When life arose, something like three and a half billion years ago, for about two and a half billion years, for most of the history of life on Earth, there was nothing but bacteria. So life apparently doesn't have much impetus to evolve quickly beyond bacteria; it just remains as simple as possible.

A lot of people have this misconceived idea that Darwin really did away with the idea that evolution has a direction in mind. You see these pictures of evolution that appear in high school textbooks of the monkey that's hobbling around on all fours, and he's hunched over, and then eventually he's standing up and holding a briefcase, as if this is what evolution had in mind. It only seems to be what evolution had in mind in retrospect.

By looking backwards, this American academic, his name is Charlie Lineweaver, calls this the "Planet of the Apes" hypothesis, as if if you removed the humans from a planet, the apes would naturally evolve to fill the intelligence niche. He said you could imagine another situation where you're an elephant that is able to think about themselves, and they reflect on the length of their trunk, and they look back through biological evolution, and they see that trunks get ever shorter.

So what they conclude is, "Ah, evolution has been geared towards making ever longer trunks; that's what evolution is all about." Of course, we can see that that's ridiculous. It just happens to be the case that this creature called the elephant has evolved, and it's got this long trunk, but length of trunk doesn't appear to be a convergent feature of evolution.

So we say a convergent feature of evolution is a feature that exists within biological entities which has arisen again and again independently. Wings is my favorite example. Fish have wings of a certain kind; there's flying fish. Butterflies have wings, so we've got them in insects. They arose in mammals as well, with flying foxes and certain kinds of possums. And of course, birds and dinosaurs had wings as well.

So independently, in all these species, the wings keep on arising. So do eyes; so do organs for sound. But now let's think about the capacity to do mathematics or to build radio telescopes—in other words, to be an intelligent, creative species.

How many times has that arisen in geological history of the Earth? In one species and one species alone. Can we conclude on that basis that therefore it's inevitable that intelligent species will arise? If you were to repeat the experiment by sprinkling a little bit of bacteria around all the bio-friendly planets that exist throughout the universe, would you be guaranteed to get an entity like us?

More Articles

View All
Bill Ackman on Starting His Own Hedge Fund at 26 and Activist Investing
To put this in context, you were mid-20s and I had just gotten—I just started as a rookie professor two years before. So, Bill, at the time, was trying to set up an interesting business, which ultimately became Gotham Partners. So, for those of you who ar…
How Do Bathrooms Work in Space? | StarTalk
We’re talking about life aboard the International Space Station featuring my interview with a guy who was there for nearly a year, Scott Kelly. I had to ask Scott the question that we all want to know the answer to: how do bathrooms work in space? Check …
Message to LearnStormers from Paralympic ski racer Josh Sundquist
Learn, Stromer’s! My name is Josh Sundquist. I am a YouTuber, best-selling author, and a Paralympic ski racer. I first started ski racing when I was a teenager. I went to my first race thinking I was like the best skier of all time, and it was gonna be am…
The Two Mindsets That Can KILL Your Startup
And you feel like you’re strapped to this crazy person. You’re like, oh no, I’m like this. I’m in a car and the driver of the car is completely insane, and it’s going to take us all down. Yes, what have I done with my life? [Music] This is Michael Seibe…
Bill Ackman Predicts Massive Economic BOOM | These are the Stocks He Owns
Billionaire investor Bill Ackman runs one of the most closely followed stock market portfolios. In this video, we are going to talk about what stocks he owns and, who knows, you may just get an idea for your own portfolio. Let’s jump into the video! Befo…
Elephant Encounter in 360 - Ep. 2 | The Okavango Experience
Travie giant elephants in front of you, interacting with you, connecting with you, smelling you, listening to you, looking at you, telling you to stop, telling you to go away, telling you to stay. I am fine with you. Those interactions are powerful to me.…