Paul J Gans wrote:

In talk.origins Friar Broccoli <EliasRK@gmail.com> wrote:

On Aug 14, 1:06 am, John Harshman <jharshman.diespam...@pacbell.net>
wrote:

Friar Broccoli wrote:

On Aug 13, 8:38 pm, John Harshman <jharshman.diespam...@pacbell.net>
wrote:

K_h wrote:

Fermi's paradox suggests that there are little or no other intelligent
civilizations within the Milky Way galaxy.  On the other hand, intelligent
life should exist on a substantial fraction of planets with life because
natural selection broadly increases intelligence with time.

.

Does it? News to me. What evidence do you have that this is the case?

.

There has been an increase in the intelligence of a broad range of
species on earth with time.

Has there? What broad range, exactly? And if natural selection
broadly increased intelligence with time, we would expect all
species to be undergoing this push, wouldn't we?

I don't see how this follows at all.  I would expect different
species to adopt widely differing strategies depending on
circumstances.  In plants, intelligence would be a complete
waste of resources.  Others like Starfish and Jellyfish have
used other strategies to ensure they can navigate and persist in
their environments without needing intelligence.

The definition of evolutionary success is reproduction. 

Not sufficient; the definition of evolutionary success is occupying and dominating an ecological niche.  A species can reproduce and yet become extinct if it is preyed on by another species.

Those Galapagos finches Darwin studied were successful NOT because they reproduced; that's the mechanism, not the goal.  Their success was that they *radiated* into all the available ecological niches on those islands.

Using
that paradigm I conclude that intelligence, however defined,
is totally useless for evolutionary success.

The value of intelligence is it gives the species the ability to quickly occupy new ecological niches without needing to evolve genetically. Humans became the top predator on Earth without taking millions more years to evolve bigger fangs and larger size and faster legs than saber-toothed cats and other existing predators.  We did it by outsmarting the saber-tooths and any other species vying for the top predator niche.

What intelligence did for humans was NOT to produce more offspring than beetles.  It enabled humans to become farmers (herbivores); hunters (carnivores); SCUBA divers (deep-sea swimmers); fliers; and most recently, outer space explorers.  We did all that without needing to wait millions of years to evolve wings, gills, carapaces, etc.  Thus humans colonized the entire planet, including the oceans and the air and soon outer space.  All ecological niches.  All by the same genetic humans.