Comment by kjkjadksj

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.