John Wilkins wrote:

John Harshman <jharshman.diespamdie@pacbell.net> wrote:

John Wilkins wrote:

Max <maxdwolf@gmail.com> wrote:

On Aug 16, 11:02 pm, j.wilki...@uq.edu.au (John Wilkins) wrote:

Sapient Fridge <use_reply_addr...@spamsights.org> wrote:

In message
<6aca6bc0-1c68-4916-ad98-32742cd69...@t54g2000hsg.googlegroups.com>,
Friar Broccoli <Elia...@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.
--

I'm not certain about that, but in any case it's the outliers that
we're looking for. The question is how often the distribution reaches
that far.

Twice: psitaccoformes and hominoids. Corvoids do well too.

How did you manage to come up with that? What counts as an outlier, and why?

Tool use and construction, and symbolic communication by use of words.
Corvids have the former, parrots the latter (some parrots, anyway). Some
hominids too.

Why does any of those count, and why, if so, shouldn't you also count termites, beavers, most other birds (for construction) and the Galapagos woodpecker finch (for tool use)? And of course none of these characteristics fossilize, so we have no idea whether they plateaued in the Triassic.