Is Intelligence Even Useful?
Solar eclipse through a brain scan.
I read something interesting: “What people haven’t seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It’s not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value” (Tim Maudlin).
Evolution As Dance
The idea of evolution as progress is pernicious, and probably wrong. Darwin (according to Stephen Jay Gould) avoided the term evolution, opting for natural selection. It has to be seen as a two way process, species adapt to a changing environment, thus adaptations which once seemed awesome (dinosaurs) can become liabilities with environmental change. It’s not a steady progression towards anything, it’s more of a never ending dance.
Humans As Bit Players
Humans, however, tend to think we are the pinnacle of evolution and that all things trend towards us. Including alien life. However, we are by no means the most successful species possible. According to Gould, we actually live in the age of bacteria, which has been going on for 4 billion years.
In that sense, I think we’ve confused the act of being conscious of what we’re doing with actually being good at what we’re doing.
The Other World
The promise of humanity, however, is that we have some other capacity in us, something which is more adaptive to this universe. We’re like the kid in class that gets in fights and sleeps through class, but who just might be a genius. On one level, we could be creating artificial intelligence with God-like powers, and we could venture out into space, likely some combination of the two. The past may look back and see us as the biological substrate of highly sophisticated light beings that travel around the universe and do awesome things. Or they may look at us as a soggy blip. Or they may not look back at all.
Like you wrote, evolution shouldn’t be mistaken for progress. It doesn’t have an overarching direction as such. We aren’t going to naturally end up as galaxy spanning clouds of sentient energy (most probably). Our forms and attributes are just supremely geared toward living in the environment we live in.
What I find fascinating is that we’ve come to the point where we can fashion our surroundings to suit us better. Our intelligence comes in handy there. If we were to suddenly be dropped into even a slightly more hostile element, most of us would perish and the ones that would survive are the ones that can adapt to that environment. This simply means that the person who survived is more suitable for that environment. A round peg in a round hole.
Intelligence doesn’t guarantee success in the world the species has fashioned for itself either. MENSA candidates are found in all sorts of nooks and crannies.
This is splitting hairs, but I have to say it. That (picture) is a lateral skull x-ray, not a brain scan.
I think the Tim Maudlin quote above is actually rather silly. Look at a timeline of the earth, then look at the complexity of all the organisms from the first single-celled life to us now. Obviously it has taken a long time to get to our level of complexity so it’s far too simplistic to say that because we’re the only organisms with technology-producing intelligence that it is not really useful or of evolutionary value (by which I think he must mean avoiding a dead end). It may be incredibly ‘useful’. Our intelligence will probably lead to the dominance of our species above all others (presently we’re still at risk from microorganisms and such) and crucially it allows us to adapt our environment to suit us, rather than the other way round for every other living organism.
One day the earth will die, taking everything living on earth with it. Intelligence is the only way to overcome this by being able to move to a different planet. Perhaps the most ‘useful’ evolutionary trait will be for the organisms that are lucky enough to come with us without having had the biological cost of our complexity.
It’s also rather ironical that in that very same interview Mauldin accuses Steven Hawkings of “not knowing what he’s talking about” with reference to hawkings comments about philosophy not keeping up with science. I found the entire interview highly amusing but worthwhile reading