Recently revisited this in a comment thread on Boing Boing. Pasting my comment here so I can find it again.
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I have really lost patience with the Fermi Paradox lately. It’s only a paradox for people with no real understanding of evolution.
Evolution isn’t teleological, it’s random. This time, here, two legged apes with opposable thumbs evolved sapience. Some other time or place, maybe whales evolved sapience, or elephants. There’s no guarantee that sapience is going to come with a package of manipulatory organs suited to knapping flint, building fire, forging metal, and so on through the technological chain up to building radio telescopes and sending out space ships.
Consider our closest relatives, chimps and gorillas. In response to habitat destruction, gorillas have become more rare - despite being only 1% different from us genetically, they don’t seem able to adapt to new environments. Chimps have managed to diversify from forest dwelling to scrub and savanna dwelling now that humans have come along and chopped down most of their forests. But they never spread out to cover the entire world the way we did. We’re a lot more like rhesus macaques, eager to spread throughout the world and able to put down roots wherever we find ourselves. There’s no guarantee that a sapient ET species is going to be as aggressive at expanding its range as we are, as interested in exploring and colonizing as we are. If they turn out to be homebodies like gorillas or chimps, then they’re probably never going to make spaceships.
Consider sapient pandas or sapient koalas: restricted to a single food source, how easy would it be for a plant disease or an ice age to wreak havoc on their food supply and wipe out their civilization.
What I’m trying to get at is that it’s not just sapience, it’s a big package of multiple attributes that humans just happen to have in combination by random chance, including sapience, which have enabled us to build our civilization and have arguments about Fermi’s paradox on the internet. Another planet with multicellular life is not going to necessarily come up with a similar full package by random chance. But you need a compatible package of many attributes beyond sapience to get ET civilizations capable of and interested in broadcasting evidence of their existence that we could detect.
And we haven’t even touched on the likelihood of evolving sapience. Elephants mourn their dead. Humpback whales have incredibly complex songs that we are only now learning how to hear and analyze, and they exhibit altruism, thwarting the preying of their orca relatives against seals and other species. Clearly elephants and whales are among the most intelligent species on the planet. Yet both have been decimated by human predation. They have been unable to act in a coordinated manner in response to our wholesale murder of their kind, either to flee and avoid us or to defend themselves from us.
If sapience is something that just evolves gradually and inevitably over time, then we’d see more evidence here on earth of beings other than us that could organize and coordinate their behaviour in response to threats. Instead, there’s a quantum leap in mentation between other smart creatures and us.
A quantum leap in evolution means an evolutionary bottleneck, a time when the species nearly died out. We made it. All the other hominids that ever evolved did not. Again, evolution is random. It’s also historically determined - you are stuck with all the random decisions of your ancestors back to the beginning, and cannot go backward in time and choose a different set of optimizations. Each species in a bottleneck needs to kludge together what solutions it can, using random chance.
We can’t be sure what the bottleneck was for us, but Terrence Deacon speculates that it had to do with our peculiar way of living. All other monkeys and apes either have polygamous reproductive arrangements and live in tribes… or they have pair bonding reproductive arrangements and live as isolated nuclear families. Each reproductive strategy is better suited to a different way of life and a different set of habitats.
We, and only we among primates, pair bond but also live in tribes. Dixon suggests that evolving a sophisticated symbolic language (ie, sapience) was our evolutionary kludge to enable us to change our social arrangements without changing our reproductive strategy, or vice versa. Basically we learned to talk so we could discuss our relationships.
And that’s not something that’s going to happen over and over again – rewind the tape to however many millions of years ago when our ancestors needed to shift their reproductive and social strategy, and evolving a sophisticated language is only one of millions of possible solutions that might have been.
We know there are millions of habitable planets in the galaxy. How many millions, we need better telescopes to be able to say. Lots of those planets will probably have multicellular life. But there is no guarantee that any of those planets is going to randomly produce beings that can talk and think like we can. And there’s no guarantee that even if they do, those beings will be both equipped and inclined to behave in ways that would enable us to learn of their existence.
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Date: 2017-10-01 05:03 pm (UTC)---
I have really lost patience with the Fermi Paradox lately. It’s only a paradox for people with no real understanding of evolution.
Evolution isn’t teleological, it’s random. This time, here, two legged apes with opposable thumbs evolved sapience. Some other time or place, maybe whales evolved sapience, or elephants. There’s no guarantee that sapience is going to come with a package of manipulatory organs suited to knapping flint, building fire, forging metal, and so on through the technological chain up to building radio telescopes and sending out space ships.
Consider our closest relatives, chimps and gorillas. In response to habitat destruction, gorillas have become more rare - despite being only 1% different from us genetically, they don’t seem able to adapt to new environments. Chimps have managed to diversify from forest dwelling to scrub and savanna dwelling now that humans have come along and chopped down most of their forests. But they never spread out to cover the entire world the way we did. We’re a lot more like rhesus macaques, eager to spread throughout the world and able to put down roots wherever we find ourselves. There’s no guarantee that a sapient ET species is going to be as aggressive at expanding its range as we are, as interested in exploring and colonizing as we are. If they turn out to be homebodies like gorillas or chimps, then they’re probably never going to make spaceships.
Consider sapient pandas or sapient koalas: restricted to a single food source, how easy would it be for a plant disease or an ice age to wreak havoc on their food supply and wipe out their civilization.
What I’m trying to get at is that it’s not just sapience, it’s a big package of multiple attributes that humans just happen to have in combination by random chance, including sapience, which have enabled us to build our civilization and have arguments about Fermi’s paradox on the internet. Another planet with multicellular life is not going to necessarily come up with a similar full package by random chance. But you need a compatible package of many attributes beyond sapience to get ET civilizations capable of and interested in broadcasting evidence of their existence that we could detect.
And we haven’t even touched on the likelihood of evolving sapience. Elephants mourn their dead. Humpback whales have incredibly complex songs that we are only now learning how to hear and analyze, and they exhibit altruism, thwarting the preying of their orca relatives against seals and other species. Clearly elephants and whales are among the most intelligent species on the planet. Yet both have been decimated by human predation. They have been unable to act in a coordinated manner in response to our wholesale murder of their kind, either to flee and avoid us or to defend themselves from us.
If sapience is something that just evolves gradually and inevitably over time, then we’d see more evidence here on earth of beings other than us that could organize and coordinate their behaviour in response to threats. Instead, there’s a quantum leap in mentation between other smart creatures and us.
A quantum leap in evolution means an evolutionary bottleneck, a time when the species nearly died out. We made it. All the other hominids that ever evolved did not. Again, evolution is random. It’s also historically determined - you are stuck with all the random decisions of your ancestors back to the beginning, and cannot go backward in time and choose a different set of optimizations. Each species in a bottleneck needs to kludge together what solutions it can, using random chance.
We can’t be sure what the bottleneck was for us, but Terrence Deacon speculates that it had to do with our peculiar way of living. All other monkeys and apes either have polygamous reproductive arrangements and live in tribes… or they have pair bonding reproductive arrangements and live as isolated nuclear families. Each reproductive strategy is better suited to a different way of life and a different set of habitats.
We, and only we among primates, pair bond but also live in tribes. Dixon suggests that evolving a sophisticated symbolic language (ie, sapience) was our evolutionary kludge to enable us to change our social arrangements without changing our reproductive strategy, or vice versa. Basically we learned to talk so we could discuss our relationships.
And that’s not something that’s going to happen over and over again – rewind the tape to however many millions of years ago when our ancestors needed to shift their reproductive and social strategy, and evolving a sophisticated language is only one of millions of possible solutions that might have been.
We know there are millions of habitable planets in the galaxy. How many millions, we need better telescopes to be able to say. Lots of those planets will probably have multicellular life. But there is no guarantee that any of those planets is going to randomly produce beings that can talk and think like we can. And there’s no guarantee that even if they do, those beings will be both equipped and inclined to behave in ways that would enable us to learn of their existence.