Sapient Fridge <use_reply_address@spamsights.org> wrote:

In message 
<6aca6bc0-1c68-4916-ad98-32742cd69806@t54g2000hsg.googlegroups.com>, 
Friar Broccoli <EliasRK@gmail.com> writes

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.

More accurately, a few isolated branches of metazoans have shown 
increases in intelligence in the last 500 million years.

The majority of metazoans show little change in intelligence in that 
time and the vast majority of biomass on the planet lacks a nervous 
systems.

I think that we hit the plateau for intelligence sometime in the
Triassic and everything since then has been much the same, except for a
couple of outliers.
-- 
John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Philosophy
University of Queensland - Blog: scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts
"He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor, 
bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious."