October 31, 2006
Not impossible, just highly improbable
What he’s saying is that there doesn’t seem to be any evidence for a predisposition to favor intelligence in biology. Features like multicellularity, photoreception, long sharp fangs, flight, etc., pop up in life’s history over and over again, independently; but intelligence? Feh. The universe doesn’t seem to like smart guys. We happened once, and what’s more, we seem to be teetering at the end of one long chain of improbable events in the history of one marginal set of lineages, of which most of its members are in decline.
Link (via Blowing and Drifting)