Perhaps what would really get us excited is the discovery of creatures like us or
at least akin to us, creatures of much higher function and
form that have intelligence or sentience or self-awareness.
What is the role of intelligence in the universe
in terms of the evolution of life?
As with the general question, we have no idea, but it helps to take a slightly
broader view of intelligence among the creatures on this planet.
Without claiming that they're intelligent in any way, even
plants have complex capabilities and ways of responding to their environment that,
seen from afar, shows a signature perhaps of intelligence.
To the people who study them, social insects are fascinating and also
illustrative of the fact that intelligence sometimes comes from the combine or
the commune rather than the individual.
Social insects are capable of engineering marvels and fairly complex behavior.
Even if this behavior is wired,
it also shows the ability to adapt to the environment and change over time.
And remember, the largest structures of the social insects rival in complexity and
in size, scaled to their size, our best structures.
Communication among these creatures often takes place by chemical means, pheromones.
And although this seems simplistic, if we take a social insect colony,
the bandwidth in the sum of all the chemical communications
exceeds the conversation bit rate of two people talking.
What's important here is that evolution doesn't stand still.
There are many insect species on this planet, 300,000 species of beetle alone.
And what we might wonder is how natural selection will sculpt their behavior
given sufficient time.
What will these social creatures evolve to in their capabilities?
Or what might they have evolved to if they developed on other planets?
Moving up to more familiar creatures, the corvid family, which includes crows and
ravens and their close cousins, the parrots, have shown signs of significant
intelligence, not only being able to learn the rudiments of human language and
a significant vocabulary, but in some cases even abstract concepts or
the ability to construct words from individual pieces.
People who work with small mammals, rodents for example, understand that
rats have distinct personalities, can anticipate punishment and reward.
They have the ability for metacognition, and this is quite a high-level
behavior for any creature, the ability to think about your own thinking process.
We think we're special in the realm of intelligence.
But in terms of brain mass relative to body mass, we're not off the charts smart.
We're on a continuum with other creatures on the planet.
And in fact, our brains are actually smaller than some of the marine mammals.
Also, brain mass itself is a poor guide to complexity.
It's the level of cortical folding and complexity in the structure of the brain
that really dictates these results in intelligence.
In this situation, all you need to know is that the Caledonian crow called Betty
had never been in this situation before.
Crows in the wild do poke sticks into holes in trees to get bugs and
ants for food.
But in this situation, the crow is confronted with a cylinder containing
one of its favorite objects, meat, in a small basket with no way to get the meat.
The crow also had a wire and had never encountered a wire before.
There was a slot in the base of the jar holding the meat, and
you can see what happens.
Crows, and other animals like otters, display tool use, something that
humans developed, that epitomizes them as the most advanced species on the planet.
What about the comparison to orcas, or killer whales,
which people who work with them will say are highly sophisticated animals?