Michael Shermer and Richard Dawkins duked it out recently regarding whether or not an intelligent ET would look like us. You can read the post here. Shermer's position, anyway. To put it succinctly, Shermer thinks it's a virtual uncertainty they'd look like us and Dawkins thinks it's merely wildly unlikely. Both of them miss the mark, in my opinion.
The question always comes back to the nature of "intelligence". If we define such a thing as equivalent to us, then the probabilities go one way. If we broaden the definition to include evidences of similarity, then we have to include evidence such as Pepperberger's work with parrots (definitely not mammalian) and the work with cephalopods. While they are not building cities and running cars, they are using tools to a limited extent and have quite a bit of "intelligence"-- the story about the octopus determining when the staff was gone and carefully sneaking over to an adjacent tank and eating the fish, then returning to his own tank is pretty smart.
My own feeling is that while bipedal may not be the only way to go, a body plan that allows manipulation of the environment seems surely a necessity to achieve anything like human level technological abilities. Similarly, the ability to store information external to the geonome in an easily accessible location (read here, "culture") is probably also a necessity. Both of these, together, have only struck paydirt in the primates. (My own hobby horse on this subject is neoteny. Without that, the rest of the evolutionary process leading to man would never have had a chance.)
What is needed is a circumstance where intelligence can in fact be selected for. Such circumstances appear to be rare.
It's also important to note that once these two components came together, intelligence did evolve more than once: Neanderthals, hobbits, man, etc. While the others didn't reach our heights, to dismiss them out of hand is pure arrogance. Neanderthals didn't change their use of tools much. But for a long time neither did we. But we both did use tools. We both had culture.
If humans ever managed to travel to a distant star and found something as smart as Neanderthal, we'd be quite pleased. Heck, we'd be thrilled if we found something as smart as a magpie.
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Links of InterestThe question always comes back to the nature of "intelligence". If we define such a thing as equivalent to us, then the probabilities go one way. If we broaden the definition to include evidences of similarity, then we have to include evidence such as Pepperberger's work with parrots (definitely not mammalian) and the work with cephalopods. While they are not building cities and running cars, they are using tools to a limited extent and have quite a bit of "intelligence"-- the story about the octopus determining when the staff was gone and carefully sneaking over to an adjacent tank and eating the fish, then returning to his own tank is pretty smart.
My own feeling is that while bipedal may not be the only way to go, a body plan that allows manipulation of the environment seems surely a necessity to achieve anything like human level technological abilities. Similarly, the ability to store information external to the geonome in an easily accessible location (read here, "culture") is probably also a necessity. Both of these, together, have only struck paydirt in the primates. (My own hobby horse on this subject is neoteny. Without that, the rest of the evolutionary process leading to man would never have had a chance.)
What is needed is a circumstance where intelligence can in fact be selected for. Such circumstances appear to be rare.
It's also important to note that once these two components came together, intelligence did evolve more than once: Neanderthals, hobbits, man, etc. While the others didn't reach our heights, to dismiss them out of hand is pure arrogance. Neanderthals didn't change their use of tools much. But for a long time neither did we. But we both did use tools. We both had culture.
If humans ever managed to travel to a distant star and found something as smart as Neanderthal, we'd be quite pleased. Heck, we'd be thrilled if we found something as smart as a magpie.
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