You know, Stephen J. Gould was wrong about everything other than punctuated equi

You know, Stephen J. Gould was wrong about everything other than punctuated equilibrium. But we are stuck with a lot of popular sentiment because of his success at ‘wrongness’.

The one question I have yet to wrestle with, is whether intelligence is a deterministic outcome of life over long periods.

His position was that intelligence was so costly that it’s doubtful. That intelligence is a temporary and unsustainable strategy compared to it’s opposite: bacteria.

Mine is that it is hard to think of conditions that WOULDN”T generate it, just by watching crows, elephants, octopods and wolves.

Or it could be for example, that man evolved most by competing with other great apes, and will end up a dead end like the bear.

The most significant concern that I know of is not the determinism of the evolution of intelligence.

It’s that the universe is not a gentle place to ‘bake’ a life form in relative safety in the galactic suburbs for five billion years.

And worse, these periodic extinctions appear to accelerate the development of life toward greater complexity. What if we hadn’t had them? Would each era have ‘peaked’?

So it just seems to take a very long time to cook intelligence while still not ‘freezing’ it at an equilibrium.