Comment by thrownthatway
13 days ago
> if it was so easy
That’s one giant leap you got there.
That the probably that intelligent life exists in the universe is 1, says nothing about that ease, or otherwise, with which it came about.
By all scientific estimates, it took a very long time and faced a very many hurdles, and by all observational measures exists no where else.
Or, what did you mean by easy?
> By all scientific estimates, it took a very long time and faced a very many hurdles, and by all observational measures exists no where else.
We know how long it took. We have a good idea when life started, and for almost all its history, it was single-cellular. Multi-cellular life is relatively fresh, and on evolutionary time scales, the progression from first eukaryotes to something resembling a basic nervous systems to basic brains to humans, was fairly quick. We have many examples of animals alive today from every part of the progression, and we know they actively use it. We know how natural selection works, that it makes small moves, and that each increment has to be net non-negative in terms of fitness (at least averaging out over populations) - otherwise it would die out instead of accumulating.
All that adds up to, yes, it's surprising evolution stumbled on our level of intelligence so easily.
> We know how natural selection works, that it makes small moves, and that each increment has to be net non-negative in terms of fitness (at least averaging out over populations) - otherwise it would die out instead of accumulating.
If you’re going to get about claiming to know how evolution works, at least know how evolution works:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium