Re: News: Is there anybody out there?

On Apr 29, 12:35 pm, Anthony Campbell <a...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2008-04-28, dkomo <dkomo...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:





Where do you get this stuff?  I was talking about progressions in *time*
and factual observations about the evolution of life.  For example: the
1st fishes appeared in the Ordovician, the 1st land plants in the
Silurian, the 1st insects in the early Devonian, the 1st reptiles in the
Carboniferous, the 1st apes during the Oligocene, the 1st hominids
during the Miocene, the 1st modern humans in the early Pleistocene, and
so on and so on and so on.  These are the "many progressions" I referred
to.  These are *facts*.  I wrote absolutely nothing and implied
absolutely nothing about "progress".

Now, it is also a fact that human level intelligence appeared at the end
of this progression.  Noting this is not an instance of anthropocentrism
nor does it necessarily imply anything about evolutionary progress.

I frankly think you brought a red herring into the discussion by raising
the issue of progress.  Andrew Watson in his mathematical modeling makes
use of the historical fact that human intelligence developed late in the
life span of the earth, and that the earth has already used up most of
its allotted life span.  In my original reply, I suggested that on other
planets evolution could proceed much faster, and that you can't conclude
that because it took 4 billion years before intelligent creatures
appeared on earth, it would also take 4 billion years somewhere else.

And it could also never happen at all. If by "progression" you merely
mean "one damn thing after another" (as someone, I forget who, defined
history), then I have no quarrel, but then the idea seems to become
trivial. Of course intelligent life did appear, but so what? As we have
only one example of it we are unable to say anything abut its
probability. But perhaps we are at cross-purposes here.


Shifting the goal posts, I'm willing to attribute intelligence to
organisms much older than just humans. Arthropods come to mind - they
have been so successful in so many environments for so long that they
represent multiple examples of (more or less) independent evolution
of intelligence, right here an planet earth.

--
Joe



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