Fermi’s Paradox, Stephen J. Gould’s Full House & The Approaching Singluarity
Enrico Fermi, contemplating the possibility of a galaxy teeming with intelligent civilizations during lunch with other atomic scientist colleagues said, “where is everybody”.
The point is that even if you take the most moderate of imperialistic technological cultures confined to mid-20th century technology, it would take at most 10 million years for such a culture to fully saturate the Milkyway Galaxy. So, if there is any other intelligent life out there, where are they?
The fact is that we have yet to detect any signs of any extraterrestrial civilization. There could be a myriad of explanations of why, but one that hit me rather hard was Stephen Jay Gould’s position that intelligent life is just a statistical fluke, as he espoused so fluently in Full House, published in 1997.
I’m a fan of Stephen Jay Gould not because of his science, but because of his command of English. I’m not a fan of Noam Chompsky either, but Noam has a command of English virtually unmatched and I like to read his books, not for his views, which I do not mind reading, but to watch a virtuoso performance. Norman Mailer is another writer who I will read just for the English lesson it provides.
In Full House, Guold’s position about the progress of evolution was that it was not progress at all, that there is no directionality in evolution towards intelligence, that the intelligence of humans is a statistical fluke and very unlikely to happen. We are thus here by the luckiest luck of the draw.
One of many statistical examples used by Gould to illustrate his point is the Drunkard’s Walk, in which a dunk walks down a sidewalk, bounded on one side by a wall. The drunk will stagger down the sidewalk but will occasionally veer towards the street and sometimes towards the wall. If he veers towards the wall he’ll bounce off the wall and veer back towards the street. There’s a limit to the directionality to the wall side. Veering towards the street has no limits and while the drunk’s staggers are random, 50% of the time that he staggers off the straight line of the sidewalk he’ll stagger towards the wall and 50% of the time he’ll stagger towards the street, and sometimes there may be merely by chance enough staggers in the direction of the street that the drunk will actually cross the street.
Bacteria are Gould’s favorite life form apparently, not for any appealing nature other than sheer mass, which trivializes any and all other living creatures and species. The bacteria is the path of the sidewalk along the wall for life forms simply cannot get any less complex or any smaller. Towards the street are the larger forms of life like blue whales and those with the most complexity, such as humans, and their unique ability to contemplate themselves and how they got here.
Gould’s hypothesis that intelligent life only happens by chance and that the chance is so small to be nearly impossible, is one answer to Fermi’s Paradox. That the reason we do not observe any other intelligent civilization in the galaxy is because we are unique in this galaxy, and perhaps so unique that intelligent life such as us may be so very rare that we may be alone in the universe.
While this may seem to most to make us special in our uniqueness, it Gould’s view it really trivializes us. Human kind is nothing more than a freak of nature, and that when we exterminate ourselves and are gone the universe will continue to unfold with vast evolutionary processes for life on countless planets, but with none likely to bear intelligence again.
For me, Stephen Jay Gould’s solution to the Fermi Paradox (though the Fermi Paradox was never mentioned in the book, Full House) spoke volumes. I guess my mind was convinced by his command of prose more than his command of evolutionary science. More recent readings have reinstilled my faith in evolution as the harbinger of not just intelligence and culture, but as a rampant escalator to more and more complex life forms.
Gould’s position that intelligent life is just a fluke is based on his erroneous belief that life evolves purely by adaptation to its environment. In this case the environment is changing weather and geographic differences, and that survival of the fittest is dependent purely upon random permutations, and equates these permutations to the repeated flipping of a 2-sided coin. A coin has no memory, but life does. DNA does have a memory, you might even say DNA is a type of memory, as it is a record of what is and what has come before.
Gould misses one other key point about life, the competitive bootstrapping that occurs between species. In effect, Gould’s arguments are weak but because what he has to say he says so well, it had me convinced for a long time. While Gould is undoubtedly in the camp that evolution is teleological, a process with a purpose, and while it may be that evolution is not teleological, it is the only thing I can think of that possesses such an adaptable vector towards increased complexity that is not teleological.
January 30th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
I still think that evolution goes for survival whether it be by intelligence or simply physiological efficiency. There are species in this world such as the crocodile that haven’t changed much for millions of years because they are simply efficient in surviving. On the other hand, there are those that evolve over time in order to become more efficient. Some species took the path of simplicity such as present day bacteria, others took the path of physical efficiency such as the cheetah, and others took the path of intelligence such as humans and perhaps even some apes.
It would therefore be unreasonable to say that human intelligence is an evolutionary fluke since that would be the same as saying that any other species is an evolutionary fluke as well. As a matter of fact, intelligence appears to be the better survival tool as proven by our present day world - humans dominating the world.