A lot of professional researchers peddle in bullshit.
Animats•6mo ago
"Figure 1: Fantasy sci-fi imagery of terraforming. Chatgpt 4.0’s hallucination of early Earth with seeded biomaterial, jump starting Darwinian evolution."
Not a good sign in a scientific paper.
A more interesting result is that intelligence on Earth has evolved at least three times - mammals, corvids [1], and octopuses.[2] Those all evolved intelligence after branching off in evolutionary history. And they all have different "hardware" for intelligence.
That's significant. All the mammals have roughly the same brain architecture, with the major components present but in different sizes. Corvids have a different architecture, which is a relatively recent and surprising result.[1] Octopuses are even more different. Yet all three have good vision and manipulation systems, and can learn.
So we now really know that there's more than one way to do it. Once complex life emerges, intelligence probably follows. In the Drake equation, that's fᵢ, the fraction of life bearing planets on which intelligent life emerges. Now that we've seen intelligence evolve three times on our planet, we can be reasonably confident that fᵢ is reasonably large, not close to 0.
Our planet only seems to have one evolutionary form of life. Not sure what that tells us. Is it an unlikely event? Or did our kind of life chemistry eat or crowd out the competition? This paper addresses the issue but is not close to resolving it. Unlike the intelligence issue, which is now settled.
Funghi and viruses are quite different with one of the two not even considered living.
kjkjadksj•6mo ago
They aren’t as different as you might expect. They both use nucleic acids and polymerase activity. That is probably what gp means by life having one form here and it is right, all life uses genetic material like this.
Virus is only considered not “alive” because it uses a host for its life cycle but that is more or less an opportunistic adaption like we see all over life in different situations, even humans in terms of some of the amino acids that must be sourced from the environment: why make everything you need yourself when you can instead steal that thing from your neighbor?
kjkjadksj•6mo ago
I still don’t believe this suggests intelligence is inevitable. Case in point there are very few species out of all species that show intelligence. A fraction so small it rounds out to 0% of earths species showing intelligence. Seems if anything the data suggests that intelligence is not a needed adaption for life to proliferate.
Adaption depends on context to find success. We see intelligent life more or less operating on the edge cases of ecological niches, taking us back to prehistorical times for this example when our numbers were fewer until agriculture increases carrying capacity of the land. In all cases intelligent life did not dominate, it exists at the edge of some ecological niche scraping together what few resources an intelligent species can gleam from the environment. Indeed the oceans are not dominated by octopus, the skies not dominated by corvids, and for most of human history our numbers were quite small until agriculture. Even today we don’t dominate the planet, only really the most ideal habitable zones for our species.
Flight is far more widely distributed shared among most birds, bats, some reptiles, and many thousands of insects. And that only worked because everything was just right for it. Temperature and oxygen content happened to select for organism sizes capable of flight in our particular atmosphere and overcoming our gravity with sufficient lifting forces. If any of these variables were changed its possible flight would have never happened on this planet.
To put something into a formula based on its rate of emergence on earth is therefore based on a lot of assumptions about latent variables involved.
Animats•6mo ago
Not inevitable, but not miraculous, either.
Machine learning today consists of a simple unit replicated a huge number of times, interconnected somewhat randomly.
That's the sort of thing evolution can do.
gmuslera•6mo ago
One _surviving_ evolutionary form of life. And it barely survived through mass extinctions that ended the majority of the existing life during those events. For all we know the great oxigenation event could had ended any of the alternative life by then.
In any case, the existence of life, or the emergence of intelligence should not be considered a necessity. Intelligence was the way of surviving and keeping on the race for the particular conditions we had a few millions of years ago. And about life, it could be more rare than what we think, just that we are doing the question where it managed to succeed.
mwkaufma•6mo ago
bookofjoe•6mo ago
https://profiles.imperial.ac.uk/r.endres
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=i_y_mxoAAAAJ&hl=en
https://www.amazon.com/Physical-Principles-Sensing-Signaling...
https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Robert...
suddenlybananas•6mo ago
Animats•6mo ago
Not a good sign in a scientific paper.
A more interesting result is that intelligence on Earth has evolved at least three times - mammals, corvids [1], and octopuses.[2] Those all evolved intelligence after branching off in evolutionary history. And they all have different "hardware" for intelligence.
That's significant. All the mammals have roughly the same brain architecture, with the major components present but in different sizes. Corvids have a different architecture, which is a relatively recent and surprising result.[1] Octopuses are even more different. Yet all three have good vision and manipulation systems, and can learn.
So we now really know that there's more than one way to do it. Once complex life emerges, intelligence probably follows. In the Drake equation, that's fᵢ, the fraction of life bearing planets on which intelligent life emerges. Now that we've seen intelligence evolve three times on our planet, we can be reasonably confident that fᵢ is reasonably large, not close to 0.
Our planet only seems to have one evolutionary form of life. Not sure what that tells us. Is it an unlikely event? Or did our kind of life chemistry eat or crowd out the competition? This paper addresses the issue but is not close to resolving it. Unlike the intelligence issue, which is now settled.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cne.25392
[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mind-of-an-oc...
NonHyloMorph•6mo ago
kjkjadksj•6mo ago
Virus is only considered not “alive” because it uses a host for its life cycle but that is more or less an opportunistic adaption like we see all over life in different situations, even humans in terms of some of the amino acids that must be sourced from the environment: why make everything you need yourself when you can instead steal that thing from your neighbor?
kjkjadksj•6mo ago
Adaption depends on context to find success. We see intelligent life more or less operating on the edge cases of ecological niches, taking us back to prehistorical times for this example when our numbers were fewer until agriculture increases carrying capacity of the land. In all cases intelligent life did not dominate, it exists at the edge of some ecological niche scraping together what few resources an intelligent species can gleam from the environment. Indeed the oceans are not dominated by octopus, the skies not dominated by corvids, and for most of human history our numbers were quite small until agriculture. Even today we don’t dominate the planet, only really the most ideal habitable zones for our species.
Flight is far more widely distributed shared among most birds, bats, some reptiles, and many thousands of insects. And that only worked because everything was just right for it. Temperature and oxygen content happened to select for organism sizes capable of flight in our particular atmosphere and overcoming our gravity with sufficient lifting forces. If any of these variables were changed its possible flight would have never happened on this planet.
To put something into a formula based on its rate of emergence on earth is therefore based on a lot of assumptions about latent variables involved.
Animats•6mo ago
Machine learning today consists of a simple unit replicated a huge number of times, interconnected somewhat randomly. That's the sort of thing evolution can do.
gmuslera•6mo ago
In any case, the existence of life, or the emergence of intelligence should not be considered a necessity. Intelligence was the way of surviving and keeping on the race for the particular conditions we had a few millions of years ago. And about life, it could be more rare than what we think, just that we are doing the question where it managed to succeed.