Page Content (OCR)
79 Davies concluded that consciousness, far from being a trivial accident, is a fundamental feature of the universe, a natural product of the outworking of the laws of nature. Others caution that by making intelligence a natural and inevitable feature of life in the universe, the principle of mediocrity raises the quality most prized by humans to a norm.” Is intelligence an evolutionary advantage? Many see it as an adaptation for more complex behavior, adaptive only in an organism that has behavior patterns involving many alternative choices.'! Is complex social life a prerequisite for the evolution of intelligence? The selective pressures of complex societies may have favored cognitive skills that were evolutionary precursors to some components of human sentience. However, social structure is not necessarily associated with intelligence; although ants and bees live in highly structured societies, they are not very bright.'” Some argue that human intelligence reduced to its essentials is synony- mous with improved communication—the transmission of more complex information from one individual to another. However, the capacity for language may not have emerged because of some selective advantage; several scientists have suggested that it may have descended from ancestral systems evolved for other purposes.'* Sagan versus Mayr The debate about the probability of extraterrestrial intelligence reached a publicly visible high point in the mid-1990s when Ernst Mayr criticized the optimism of Sagan and others about finding alien civilizations. Mayr, who thought adaptations toward greater intelligence highly improbable, argued that “only one of the approximately 50 billion species that have lived on Earth was able to generate civilizations. Among these approximately 20 civilizations, only one developed elec- tronic technology.” If intelligence has such high survival value, he asked, why don’t we see it in more species? Mayr’s attack provoked quick responses. Drake argued that the evo- lution of so many species in the terrestrial biota demonstrates its flexi- bility and its ability to exploit any characteristic, such as intelligence. Among many civilizations, one will be the first, and temporarily the only one, to develop electronic technology. Those who contemplate this issue should never underestimate the opportunistic nature of biological Social Animals Social Animals