Human Intelligence and the Environment

I'll begin with an interesting debate that took place some years ago between Carl Sagan, the well-known astrophysicist, and Ernst Mayr, the grand old man of American biology. They were debating the possibility of finding intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. And Sagan, speaking from the point of view of an astrophysicist, pointed out that there are innumerable planets just like ours. There is no reason they shouldn’t have developed intelligent life. Mayr, from the point of view of a biologist, argued that it’s very unlikely that we’ll find any. And his reason was, he said, we have exactly one example: Earth. So let’s take a look at Earth.

And what he basically argued is that intelligence is a kind of lethal mutation. And he had a good argument. He pointed out that if you take a look at biological success, which is essentially measured by how many of us are there, the organisms that do quite well are those that mutate very quickly, like bacteria, or those that are stuck in a fixed ecological niche, like beetles. They do fine. And they may survive the environmental crisis. But as you go up the scale of what we call intelligence, they are less and less successful. By the time you get to mammals, there are very few of them as compared with, say, insects. By the time you get to humans, the origin of humans may be 100,000 years ago, there is a very small group. We are kind of misled now because there are a lot of humans around, but that’s a matter of a few thousand years, which is meaningless from an evolutionary point of view. His argument was, you’re just not going to find intelligent life elsewhere, and you probably won’t find it here for very long either because it’s just a lethal mutation. He also added, a little bit ominously, that the average life span of a species, of the billions that have existed, is about 100,000 years, which is roughly the length of time that modern humans have existed.

With the environmental crisis, we’re now in a situation where we can decide whether Mayr was right or not. If nothing significant is done about it, and pretty quickly, then he will have been correct: human intelligence is indeed a lethal mutation. Maybe some humans will survive, but it will be scattered and nothing like a decent existence, and we’ll take a lot of the rest of the living world along with us.

alpine joe wrote:I understand what the biologist is trying to say but it doesn't take human intelligence to wipe out most of the life on earth. Nature has done a pretty good job of that herself many times in the past, with absolutely no help from mankind whatsoever.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event

I'm not trying to condone the pollution of our planet or anything like that, it's just that I find the idea that intelligence is a lethal mutation a bit silly when we consider that nature had already destroyed 99% of all known species before intelligent life evolved.

In the long run our intelligence could be a virtue, being unintelligent certainly didn't help all the animals that died out before us. The only real way to tell is to see if we're still here in another 100,000 years.

alpine joe wrote:I understood what he meant all right. I just don't find his argument very convincing. Intelligent life on other planets is just as likely to be wiped out by forces of nature, if not more so, than it is to wipe itself out. If we take the earth as an example, like the biologist said, then being intelligent has absolutely nothing to do with a species overall chance of survival.

I would like to know what Sagan replied to him though, hopefully it was something intelligent.