Future evolution of intelligence

[modest]

Originally Posted by Moontanman

i am surprised no one has brought up the octopus... I saw a show on the science channel that showed a couple of possible ways this might be able to happen

//edit:
I moved this reply to its own thread, it was off topic.

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Moontanman

What species we know of today show promise for evolving into the another intelligent species after humans have left the Earth?

I count my self of the futurist/extropian school, so expect and hope that humans will someday sooner than later have most of our population off Earth. However, I doubt that we’ll abandon Earth, any more than Europeans have abandoned Europe for the Americas in the past four centuries. This is to say, like most biological life, we’re population area expanders, not movers.

Still, over a long time period, I suspect that humans may disappear from the terrestrial ecosphere, or adopt such a low-impact way-of-life as to effectively stop participating significantly in it, clearing our niche as top eater/maker for other species to evolve into. I’d be a poor extropian if I didn’t mention another possibility, that we’ll utterly consume Earth in a very short time (biologically speaking), rendering it unlivable to large animals or even disassembling/blowing it to smithereens altogether, but that’s a possible future history branch better for another thread.

Disclaimers done, I’d say the next preambling step in answering MTman’s question is, as several previous posts have pointed out, defining a clear threshold criteria for what we mean by “intelligent”. I’ll go with “launches artifacts into space” – that is, building rockets or some more novel spacecraft. On an individual and collective level, this criteria seems a bit arbitrary - just as there are very intelligent people who have next to no rocket science skills, and advanced intellectual cultures with no interest in shooting stuff into space, one can conceive of a very smart, communicative, social, information-storing, tool-making non-human culture with no interest that way – but I suspect that, given enough time, shooting stuff into space is one of those “if you can do it, eventually you will” activities

Preamble done, to the ideas.

Dismissing the Lovecraftian idea of the evolution of a species evolving that can physically and without the assistance of tools fly into space as fantasy, though imagination stirring I think this thread has focused over much on the biological aspects of the question - big, active brains, mostly – to the exclusion of the many somewhat randomly conspiring environmental and evolutionary coincidences that appear responsible for the rise of humans to meeting the specified intelligence criteria. In no particular order, a few of them:

Ignoring braininess, you’ve got to be pretty close to a top predator/scavenger/forager on physical strength and efficiency alone. When comparing humans to other animals, we’ve a tendency to characterize us as helpless and tool-dependent, but this is far from accurate – we’re big, fast, dangerous, metabolically and dietarily versatile and efficient beasts, individually more than a physical match for most of our ecological niche competitors. While there are a few large predators – lions and tigers and bears, etc. - that will make a meal of us, we’re individually dangerous enough that even those tend to pass us (and our ape and larger monkey relatives) by in favor of an easier meal, if one’s available. And, if a human sees it coming with our near-to-notch vision, we’re hard to run down, almost impossible if we can manage to make it into a distance race. On the flip side of that, there are few non-flying, burrowing, swimming, or otherwise getting-where-we-can’t prey animals on the planet that we can’t eventually run down.

You’ve gotta be social. This is true of so many animals, it almost goes without saying. Even with her/his fancy brain, effective physique, and balance-upsetting tools, a line of solitary-except-for-mating humans has little chance of multi-generational survival.

Language, time binding, and all that. To live any other way than (as Steven Hawking/Pink Floyd put it) “just like animals”, you’ve got to great communicators. Beyond merely effective, even nuanced “help”, ”come and get it”, ”run/fight for your lives” / “wanna mate?” vocalizations, you’ve got to be symbolic. Eventually, if you hope to make spacecraft, you’ve got to be able to write stuff down and do math.

The first requisite for language is, IMHO, a good voice. We humans are pretty much the best all-round singers on the planet, capable of belting out an amazing range of distinct sounds, almost perfectly (or at least recognizably) every time. Perhaps more than any other area, this is one at which we put our fellow primates and other big-brained animals to shame.

You’ve gotta have good hands – or tentacles, or whatever. We humans have amazing hands, able to do things from spinning husks into thread and weaving it into rope and cloth to chucking sharp sticks dozens of meters to smashing stones to gravel using other stones. Add a bit of smarts and creativity, and there’s not telling what may … actually, there is telling, what can happen: human prehistory and history happened.

Crows and octopi may have impressive claws and tentacles, but they can’t do macramé, swing a bat, and pitch a fastball (even a tiny, crow-scale one). Chalk up another top-of-the-chart position for H.Sap.Sap – though some of the other primates do well in the hand department, too.

Finally (though I’ve certainly left a lot of important requisites out of this short list), you can’t be to comfortable. If you have great thermal control – a thick body, nice fur, etc – that just lets you plop down and be comfortable wherever you are after a day of top-of-you-niche hunting/scavenging/foraging/grazing, what’s your motivation for inventing language, fire, houses, agriculture, etc. - and, eventually, rocket science?

Another necessary source of discomfort, IMHO, is overpopulation – you’ve got to be prolific baby-makers, not some beast with reproductive systems finely tuned with your environment (eg: infrequent fertility cycles, restrictive mating behavior, or a tradition of devouring your offspring) to prevent your population from exceeding your local environments ability to sustain you.

Taken altogether, I’m awed by the long string of unlikely coincidences we humans had to meet to get where we are now, a string of successes that another species filling our niche would have to, at least in part and likely in new areas, match.

Throw into the future mix that, on a time scale of millions of years, the Earth is likely to be an environmentally very different place – our star’s evolution is in for long, gradual, inexorable increase in brightness (about 1%/100,000,000 years) that, unchecked by artificial efforts, will lead to such dramatic changes as the evaporation of the oceans (in about 2 billion years). Given how finely-tuned the environmental coincidences were for the ascent of humans, it seems to me that the future may favor some physically very different occupants of our niche – or, possibly, there will never be another evolutionary story like ours in the history of the Earth.

[Moontanman]

Originally Posted by CraigD

I count my self of the futurist/extropian school, so expect and hope that humans will someday sooner than later have most of our population off Earth. However, I doubt that we’ll abandon Earth, any more than Europeans have abandoned Europe for the Americas in the past four centuries. This is to say, like most biological life, we’re population area expanders, not movers.

Still, over a long time period, I suspect that humans may disappear from the terrestrial ecosphere, or adopt such a low-impact way-of-life as to effectively stop participating significantly in it, clearing our niche as top eater/maker for other species to evolve into. I’d be a poor extropian if I didn’t mention another possibility, that we’ll utterly consume Earth in a very short time (biologically speaking), rendering it unlivable to large animals or even disassembling/blowing it to smithereens altogether, but that’s a possible future history branch better for another thread.

Disclaimers done, I’d say the next preambling step in answering MTman’s question is, as several previous posts have pointed out, defining a clear threshold criteria for what we mean by “intelligent”. I’ll go with “launches artifacts into space” – that is, building rockets or some more novel spacecraft. On an individual and collective level, this criteria seems a bit arbitrary - just as there are very intelligent people who have next to no rocket science skills, and advanced intellectual cultures with no interest in shooting stuff into space, one can conceive of a very smart, communicative, social, information-storing, tool-making non-human culture with no interest that way – but I suspect that, given enough time, shooting stuff into space is one of those “if you can do it, eventually you will” activities

Preamble done, to the ideas.

Dismissing the Lovecraftian idea of the evolution of a species evolving that can physically and without the assistance of tools fly into space as fantasy, though imagination stirring I think this thread has focused over much on the biological aspects of the question - big, active brains, mostly – to the exclusion of the many somewhat randomly conspiring environmental and evolutionary coincidences that appear responsible for the rise of humans to meeting the specified intelligence criteria. In no particular order, a few of them:

Ignoring braininess, you’ve got to be pretty close to a top predator/scavenger/forager on physical strength and efficiency alone. When comparing humans to other animals, we’ve a tendency to characterize us as helpless and tool-dependent, but this is far from accurate – we’re big, fast, dangerous, metabolically and dietarily versatile and efficient beasts, individually more than a physical match for most of our ecological niche competitors. While there are a few large predators – lions and tigers and bears, etc. - that will make a meal of us, we’re individually dangerous enough that even those tend to pass us (and our ape and larger monkey relatives) by in favor of an easier meal, if one’s available. And, if a human sees it coming with our near-to-notch vision, we’re hard to run down, almost impossible if we can manage to make it into a distance race. On the flip side of that, there are few non-flying, burrowing, swimming, or otherwise getting-where-we-can’t prey animals on the planet that we can’t eventually run down.

You’ve gotta be social. This is true of so many animals, it almost goes without saying. Even with her/his fancy brain, effective physique, and balance-upsetting tools, a line of solitary-except-for-mating humans has little chance of multi-generational survival.

Language, time binding, and all that. To live any other way than (as Steven Hawking/Pink Floyd put it) “just like animals”, you’ve got to great communicators. Beyond merely effective, even nuanced “help”, ”come and get it”, ”run/fight for your lives” / “wanna mate?” vocalizations, you’ve got to be symbolic. Eventually, if you hope to make spacecraft, you’ve got to be able to write stuff down and do math.

The first requisite for language is, IMHO, a good voice. We humans are pretty much the best all-round singers on the planet, capable of belting out an amazing range of distinct sounds, almost perfectly (or at least recognizably) every time. Perhaps more than any other area, this is one at which we put our fellow primates and other big-brained animals to shame.

You’ve gotta have good hands – or tentacles, or whatever. We humans have amazing hands, able to do things from spinning husks into thread and weaving it into rope and cloth to chucking sharp sticks dozens of meters to smashing stones to gravel using other stones. Add a bit of smarts and creativity, and there’s not telling what may … actually, there is telling, what can happen: human prehistory and history happened.

Crows and octopi may have impressive claws and tentacles, but they can’t do macramé, swing a bat, and pitch a fastball (even a tiny, crow-scale one). Chalk up another top-of-the-chart position for H.Sap.Sap – though some of the other primates do well in the hand department, too.

Finally (though I’ve certainly left a lot of important requisites out of this short list), you can’t be to comfortable. If you have great thermal control – a thick body, nice fur, etc – that just lets you plop down and be comfortable wherever you are after a day of top-of-you-niche hunting/scavenging/foraging/grazing, what’s your motivation for inventing language, fire, houses, agriculture, etc. - and, eventually, rocket science?

Another necessary source of discomfort, IMHO, is overpopulation – you’ve got to be prolific baby-makers, not some beast with reproductive systems finely tuned with your environment (eg: infrequent fertility cycles, restrictive mating behavior, or a tradition of devouring your offspring) to prevent your population from exceeding your local environments ability to sustain you.

Taken altogether, I’m awed by the long string of unlikely coincidences we humans had to meet to get where we are now, a string of successes that another species filling our niche would have to, at least in part and likely in new areas, match.

Throw into the future mix that, on a time scale of millions of years, the Earth is likely to be an environmentally very different place – our star’s evolution is in for long, gradual, inexorable increase in brightness (about 1%/100,000,000 years) that, unchecked by artificial efforts, will lead to such dramatic changes as the evaporation of the oceans (in about 2 billion years). Given how finely-tuned the environmental coincidences were for the ascent of humans, it seems to me that the future may favor some physically very different occupants of our niche – or, possibly, there will never be another evolutionary story like ours in the history of the Earth.

Yes, humans are extraordinarily lucky, some would say too lucky,I think there have been several people who like the idea that we were somehow bred to be what we are by some alien intelligence to be human. There was this guy called Lazar (or something like that ) who claimed he worked at area 51 and saw not only alien technology but a manuscript that detailed how these aliens were responsible for human evolution from hominids to fully human. We were bred to be slave labor or something like that. Of course this needs a lot of proof before anyone would take it seriously but i wonder if we could help a species along to become a human type intelligence?

[HydrogenBond]

One way to look at the brain, to help determine conscious evolution for other animals, is with a computer analogy. If you look at the octopus, connected to its brain are very complex input-output devices. It has to move eight arms, can change color even using patterns. Its brain is sort of multi-tasking in ways that require a lot of base processing power. Its adaptation is excellent, but the brain may have less free CPU bandwidth.

Humans don't have sensory systems at par with a lot of animals. For example, the eagle can see better, the dog can hear and smell better, etc. This better quality peripheral devices, in these animals, may come with some CPU cost. Humans are more frail but the trade-off may be more free CPU bandwidth for ingenuity. In the final analysis, this is what makes the difference since we can invent technology to see farther, move faster, hear better, without biologically tying up as much CPU bandwidth.

A good analogy is running the monitor at different resolution settings. The highest settings can place a strain on the CPU during games. If you try to doing other things at the same time there is little bandwidth. With humans our monitor settings, so to speak, were reduced in resolution compared to many of the animals. This freed up more CPU bandwidth. Losing natural instinct was analogous to shutting off background processes.

If I was to guess the most likely animal for evolutionary consciousness, I would pick the dog. There are many factors. One is domestication shut off some of their background processes freeing up bandwidth. Dogs have the ability to work in groups, both with other dogs, other animals and with people. They are adaptive able to survive almost anywhere. Apes are like orchids, beautiful, but too narrow in adaptation. One key thing about dogs is they are the master of linguistics able to learn any human language; not just language but dialects. They can also read body language and emotion. They can also teach and supervise other animals, such as during herding. They like the company of humans, which has given them an evolutionary edge. Mother nature made them apprentice; next in line. They needed to go to human school to get the right training. The apes were food.

What is sort of interesting is the relationship some dog owners and their dogs. One almost gets the impression little "fifi", is in charge. The dog reacts to the human and if the human wants them to be the boss, the dog is smart enough to play along. After a while it learns to control and tries to teach the human the cause and affect needed for its whims. "not that cookie you know I don't like liver flavor; or I will teach you to leave me alone that long; or you need something to do, so clean this up. The human apprentice gradually adapts to the ways and moods of their canine master.

[Moontanman]

Originally Posted by HydrogenBond

One way to look at the brain, to help determine conscious evolution for other animals, is with a computer analogy. If you look at the octopus, connected to its brain are very complex input-output devices. It has to move eight arms, can change color even using patterns. Its brain is sort of multi-tasking in ways that require a lot of base processing power. Its adaptation is excellent, but the brain may have less free CPU bandwidth.

Humans don't have sensory systems at par with a lot of animals. For example, the eagle can see better, the dog can hear and smell better, etc. This better quality peripheral devices, in these animals, may come with some CPU cost. Humans are more frail but the trade-off may be more free CPU bandwidth for ingenuity. In the final analysis, this is what makes the difference since we can invent technology to see farther, move faster, hear better, without biologically tying up as much CPU bandwidth.

A good analogy is running the monitor at different resolution settings. The highest settings can place a strain on the CPU during games. If you try to doing other things at the same time there is little bandwidth. With humans our monitor settings, so to speak, were reduced in resolution compared to many of the animals. This freed up more CPU bandwidth. Losing natural instinct was analogous to shutting off background processes.

If I was to guess the most likely animal for evolutionary consciousness, I would pick the dog. There are many factors. One is domestication shut off some of their background processes freeing up bandwidth. Dogs have the ability to work in groups, both with other dogs, other animals and with people. They are adaptive able to survive almost anywhere. Apes are like orchids, beautiful, but too narrow in adaptation. One key thing about dogs is they are the master of linguistics able to learn any human language; not just language but dialects. They can also read body language and emotion. They can also teach and supervise other animals, such as during herding. They like the company of humans, which has given them an evolutionary edge. Mother nature made them apprentice; next in line. They needed to go to human school to get the right training. The apes were food.

What is sort of interesting is the relationship some dog owners and their dogs. One almost gets the impression little "fifi", is in charge. The dog reacts to the human and if the human wants them to be the boss, the dog is smart enough to play along. After a while it learns to control and tries to teach the human the cause and affect needed for its whims. "not that cookie you know I don't like liver flavor; or I will teach you to leave me alone that long; or you need something to do, so clean this up. The human apprentice gradually adapts to the ways and moods of their canine master.

I agree that dogs are master manipulators of each other and their owners but Dogs to not have hands, nor can they walk upright. Dogs have a very long road to travel before they can even start the road to tecnology.

[Kayra]

HydrogenBond: Interesting proposition, but I think we were far more evolutionarily advantaged before we started using technology to shore up any perceived shortcomings.

CraigD
Superb post. You nailed every point I was considering, and 2 more as well.

to Reiterate:

• pretty close to a top predator/scavenger/forager on physical strength and efficiency alone
• You’ve gotta be social.
• Language (including good range of communications)
• You’ve gotta have good hands
• you can’t be to comfortable.

I have to say that I did not think that being a top predator/scavenger/forager was on my list. Could you elaborate on why you believe this is necessary?

The last item on your list had escaped me as well, but upon thinking about it I am of the opinion that it might very well be one of the more profound observations.

The social, language, and tool manipulation(hands) are inherent capabilities (pre-existing genetic traits) that, each providing a possibly powerful survival advantage, would have required the eventual development of different areas of the brain to realize, but only if we were uncomfortable in our current environment. It fits quite comfortably (bad pun.. BAD.) into my view on evolution.

I have always believed that our current level of intelligence is either an accident or inevitable outcome of the synergies of development of these areas of our brain.

With that in mind, given the time left for the earth to maintain a survivable and nurturing environment, I do not see much hope for a second species of raising itself to our current level. Every species I can think of is far to comfortable in it's current environment.

All hubris aside, I personally believe that the next intelligent species on this planet with be the one we decide will be.

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Moontanman

Yes, humans are extraordinarily lucky, some would say too lucky,I think there have been several people who like the idea that we were somehow bred to be what we are by some alien intelligence to be human. There was this guy called Lazar (or something like that ) who claimed he worked at area 51 and saw not only alien technology but a manuscript that detailed how these aliens were responsible for human evolution from hominids to fully human. We were bred to be slave labor or something like that. Of course this needs a lot of proof before anyone would take it seriously but i wonder if we could help a species along to become a human type intelligence?

A fun, thoughtful, and well-written exploration of this idea in a central subject of David Brin’s excellent “uplift series” of hard science fiction novels. Though Brin’s use of the concept, most commonly termed “biological uplift”, is considered by most scifi historians to be the best known, the idea is considered to be at least as old as H.G. Wells’ 1896 “The Island of Doctor Moreau”.

Brin’s fiction goes much deeper than vague ideas of “slave labor”, including a complicated system of contract law by which the uplifted “client species” are bound to long (typically about 100,000 year) indentures to their uplifting “patron species”, constrained by codified legal rights and reciprocal obligations to assure that the client is prepared to assume its place in interstellar civilization at the end of this period. There are, therefore, rarely mysteries concerning species origins. A major twist concerns humans, who none of the libraries in all of interstellar civilization can reveal with certainty evolved naturally, or were uplifted by an irresponsible patron who in ignorance or secretly and illegally abandoned them early in the process. Humans have further complicated legal matters by, ignorant at the time of the existence of interstellar civilization and law, uplifting a few client species of our own - dolphins, chimpanzees, and, less successfully, dogs – an action usually not legally permitted to such a “junior” race.

Unlike Area 51 conspiracy, or ID, proponents, Brin “plays by the rules” of hard science fiction, avoiding intentionally including details contradicted by archeological evidence or physics, while leaving open the possibility that maybe we were bread by extraterrestrials to be slave labor. I recommend his books highly.

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Kayra

I have to say that I did not think that being a top predator/scavenger/forager was on my list. Could you elaborate on why you believe this is necessary?

If you’re not fairly high up in the food chain, or at least too dangerous to species that are to be considered worth the risk of hunting, and also good at competing with species lower on the food chain, you’re at risk of extinction if your environment goes sour on you (famine, ice age, etc.), as higher predators seek to eat you to avoid extinction, and lower ones seek to out-compete you for yet lower prey and resources.

In principle, I think you could fail the “close to the top predator/scavenger/forager” criteria if you had an unusual ability to hide, taking yourself out of the food chain/circle of life. For example, an exotophile (“far-out place loving”) treetop dweller, deep burrower, or an aquatic equivalent, might evolve intelligence without being able to stand up to big predators and repel efficient herbivores. However, in humans’ case, this doesn’t appear the case – physically, we’re stuck on the same playing field with Elephants, tigers and bears (or at least we were, ‘till, it appears, we pretty much killed them all nearly to the brink of extinction).

It would also be tricky for an exotophile species to avoid the “too comfortable” problem. Without intense eat-or-be-eaten/eat-it-before-the-other-guy-does competition, there’d be little selection pressure on you to invent new tricks. That we see a lot of exotophiles, none of them very intelligent, seems to me to bear this idea out.

Again, as I mentioned previously, due to how little we seem to rely on such traits, I think we’ve a tendency to under-appreciate what a physically big, tough, fast, dangerous animal we actually are, if a bit “underdressed” for the non-tropical climates most of us are experienced in. “Dumbed down” and stripped naked and tool-less, we’d certainly have to shrink our habitat, but would still, I think, do pretty well as a species – though it wouldn’t be pretty!

[Moontanman]

Originally Posted by CraigD

Unlike Area 51 conspiracy, or ID, proponents, Brin “plays by the rules” of hard science fiction, avoiding intentionally including details contradicted by archeological evidence or physics, while leaving open the possibility that maybe we were bread by extraterrestrials to be slave labor. I recommend his books highly.

Yup, great books, I've read them, I think the guy from area 51 was serious, seriously lying or deranged but serious non the less!

[coldcreation]

Originally Posted by Moontanman

It would appear just from inspecting the pictures that a cetacean brain is even more convoluted and complex than a human brain as well as being larger. It is pointed out that the cetacean brain is made of more primitive layers than other large mammal brains but an elephant brain is very complex as well. I remember seeing a show about elephants that said the elephant brain is significantly more complexly folded than the human brain. I'm not sure the complex folding of the cortex is the last word on this or even the main reason humans are smart (in our own definition of smart) or that other mammals with complex brains do not seem as smart (by our definition) as humans.

In this article; Cetacean intelligence [Tool use by animals] it is written:
As of 2005, scientists have observed limited groups of bottlenose dolphins around the Australian Pacific using a basic tool. When searching for food on the sea floor, many of these dolphins were seen tearing off pieces of sponge and wrapping them around their "bottle nose" to prevent abrasions."

Interesting.

And this: "Captive orcas have often displayed interesting responses when they get 'bored' with activities. For instance, when Dr. Paul Spong worked with the orca Skana, he researched her visual skills. However, after performing favourably in the 72 trials per day, Skana suddenly began consistently getting every answer wrong. Dr Spong concluded that a few fish were not enough motivation. He began playing music, which seemed to provide Skana with much more motivation."

My vote goes to killer whales. I suspect they understand much about the heavens (however limited their telescope time ).