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[Jude]

- Intelligence is not evolutionary advantageous.

- We are first.

The first is definitely true in the sense that "evolutionarily advantageous" is totally dependent on the rest of the life on the planet. Human intelligence evolved under a whole crapload of pre-conditions; it never would have happened during any previous geological era. There are so many factors that contributed that all of them coming together again is incredibly unlikely.

The second is probably true, because of the first.

[¿]

- Intelligence is not evolutionary advantageous.

We have single handedly sidestepped evolution because of our intelligence. How is that not an advantage? We are the top of the food chain, and we will not allow ourselves to die out, and we will probably end up artificially evolving ourselves at a rate far greater than that of natural evolution.

- We are first.

probably true.

Statistically unlikely in my own opinion, but right now there's really no way to prove that.

[Jude]

- Intelligence is not evolutionary advantageous.

We have single handedly sidestepped evolution because of our intelligence. How is that not an advantage? We are the top of the food chain, and we will not allow ourselves to die out, and we will probably end up artificially evolving ourselves at a rate far greater than that of natural evolution.

1. You can't sidestep evolution. You can change the selection pressures, which we've certainly done, but so does every other species, simply by existing, and there are many types of organisms where you could make the case they've altered the world more drastically than we have (microorganisms, for a start)
2. There's no reason at all to say that we "won't let ourselves die out." To the contrary, one thing that IS unique to us is the ability to very efficiently and intentionally do things that contradict the desires of our genes (which are what count in evolution) - from birth control, all the way up to the nuclear holocaust that is almost statistically inevitable in the next century or two. Or just to alter the environment so rapidly and drastically that conditions make our adaptations useless, and we all (or mostly all) die out.
In any case, the ability to "improve ourselves" through artificial selection has nothing to do with sidestepping, subverting, or speeding up evolution. Evolution isn't in the business of making "good" or "improved" organisms, it's just a natural process that applies to replicators - in this case, genes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_centered_view_of_evolution

- We are first.

probably true.

Statistically unlikely in my own opinion, but right now there's really no way to prove that.
[/quote]

I'd say it's statistically extremely likely. On this planet, almost certainly. On other planets? The odds of there being life at all are miniscule, the odds of it getting to the complexity that it is on earth miniscule, the odds of it developing a complex set of adaptations that look anything like our intelligence, miniscule compared even to those.

[¿]

By "sidestep" and "won't let ourselves die out" I mean sort of the same thing. We won't let people die that should die, and by doing so we are sidestepping natural evolution. It still exists in other ways, but death is only a ghost of the factor it once was. Breeding is still a factor.

I'd say our intelligence also allows us to adapt rapidly, but with little or no selection. It's still an advantage there.

it's just a natural process

Is there a special term for artificial creation of genes then?

I'd say it's statistically extremely likely.

And yet there are no actual statistics for this kind of thing. You look out at the universe, see how far it goes, and you have to realize there must be something else out there.

[Yanlin]

When people refer to statistics about alien life, there's just a FUCKLOAD of planets out there. There's a billion galaxies containing a 100 billion stars. Note: Rough estimates I am picking from memory.

Now if even 0.01% of those stars have planets and a further 0.01% of those planets are earthlike, there's still thousands of planets with life out there.

Of course, there may be far less.

It's like "A million to 1 chance." for life to NOT exist there. That's the common metaphor. Even tough it's more like a 1 in a billion chance.

[PTTG??]

         While we do have computers and airplanes and spaceflight, if you take a pack of humans and a pack of tigers and drop them in the Savannah with only what they can make, even though the humans might be able to make clubs and plan strategy, they will likely loose to the tigers. Even more so if we had humans fighting apes, who, forgoing brain development, are much larger and stronger than we are. Sure, we have guns and huge cultures, but that did not help intelligence evolve in the first place.  Sharks, while having been virtually unchanged for the entire history of mammals, are dumber than bricks. The same is true of cockroaches and alge; yet these species are evolutionarily successful.  It could be that nearly every time a gang of extra-terrestrial Squidbirds mutate and devote a significant amount of energy to growing larger neurocluster polyps, they end up getting eaten by faster, stronger, stupider LandSharkAnemones.
  It's just that on this one particular planet, a group a scavenger apes happened to grow larger brains at just the right time so that while the species around them where freezing in an ice age, they where saying, "hey, let's take the fur off of THOSE guys. By the time the ice age was over,  those early years of relative weakness had vanished because the initial inherent weaknesses of intelligence (long childhood and huge food requirements, for instance) had been overcome by the advantages of group hunting and society.  In fact, MXE could be essential to the development of intelegece by ensuring that complex life goes through occasional diversity explosions instead of stagnating in stable and simple ecologies.  Oh, I should also say that we might not be first, but if we adjust for light speed, a civilization 1000 lightyears away will need to have developed radio a thousand years ago, and perhaps they only did 800 years ago. This naturally scales, so by around 10,000,000 LY away, there might be cultures with interstellar empires that are already extinct and we just haven't seen them yet.  Oh, and ¿; I think what Jude is saying is that even if humans modify genetic code, it is still part of evolution- this may be true in a sense. I think it's debatable myself. I'd go on balance and say that artificial selection and engineering are both specialized forms of evolutionary processes.

PS: Yanlin, I believe that the number of planets with stars is closer to ~100%, and the don't go by "earth-like" go by chemically active worlds where replicating compounds can form, even if they use sulfur-silicon bonds and hydrochloric acid. I'd say there are at least five worlds like that orbiting Sol (Venus, Earth, Io, Europa, Titan), that number being perhaps ~20% of rocky "planets". Go with annother 20% of those generating life (of course, this could be as high as 40 or 60% depending on what we find.).

[Sean Mirrsen]

For us to have been able to detect the alien races using radio, they would need to be still using radio some egregious amount of years ago. Or, specifically, if we see a planet in a telescope, the inhabitants of that planet would need to be using the radios right then. Basically, if NOW we can identify a planet in a faraway star system as possibly life-supporting, it's very possible that the life in question has long since abandoned radio communications. It's also entirely possible that common-frequency radiowaves are subject to entropy and gradually deteriorate (to draw a far-fetched parallel, think how it takes high voltage to transmit power over long wires) - since distance between even "nearby" stars is enormous, we could well be simply unable to hear anyone from other stars. Radio emissions from pulsars and the like are different, primarily because the pulsars are freakin' star-sized radio transmitters, so comparing average radio or TV broadcast stations to them is... wrong, at best.

[Rysith]

  It's just that on this one particular planet, a group a scavenger apes happened to grow larger brains at just the right time so that while the species around them where freezing in an ice age, they where saying, "hey, let's take the fur off of THOSE guys. By the time the ice age was over,  those early years of relative weakness had vanished because the initial inherent weaknesses of intelligence (long childhood and huge food requirements, for instance) had been overcome by the advantages of group hunting and society.

But group hunting and society are incrementally beneficial. You don't need a high degree of intelligence to benefit from them, there is a whole scale from fish schools through bird colonies, dog packs, and apes to humans. The big advantage of intelligence is environment manipulation and planning, both of which are big wins in terms of survival. Look at (for example) octopi, which are quite intelligent and solitary, but they do fine for themselves. They've also bypassed the long childhood and food that you bring up.

Rather, I think that humans today would lose to tigers (and have huge food requirements and long childhoods) because they can. They don't have to worry about being dropped into the savanna to face tigers without tools, and we can afford to eat a lot and spend a long time raising children (and derive benefits from those, mostly in the form of increased environmental manipulation abilities). Higher intelligence allows more environmental manipulation, which allows more resources to devote towards intelligence, which loops back around and reinforces itself. The same way that the tigers are moving towards the optimal hunter for their environment, we are moving towards never having to be hunted by them in their environment.

Those environment-manipulation skills were extremely useful because they let us use things like clothing and tools that let us compete in areas that we hadn't adapted to, and thus meta-optimize. It wasn't that we needed the ice age to survive, it was that the ice age gave us a bunch of opportunities because rather than the slow process of changing ourselves to suit the environment, we could quickly change the environment to suit the way we were.

[PTTG??]

I largely agree with you, Rysith, I'm just saying that I think it may be possible that many alien ecologies consist mostly of sharks, algae, and cockroaches; attempting to evolve intelligence won't be a great advantage.
 
  While intelligence is a self-reinforcing cycle, it may be that some ecologies enter a long-term stasis. Thus, perhaps intelligence takes longer to emerge on many worlds, making it more plausible that earth was "lucky" enough to get it, or form ecologies where intelligence is beneficial.
 

[Tormy]

When people refer to statistics about alien life, there's just a FUCKLOAD of planets out there. There's a billion galaxies containing a 100 billion stars. Note: Rough estimates I am picking from memory.

Now if even 0.01% of those stars have planets and a further 0.01% of those planets are earthlike, there's still thousands of planets with life out there.

Of course, there may be far less.

It's like "A million to 1 chance." for life to NOT exist there. That's the common metaphor. Even tough it's more like a 1 in a billion chance.

Here you go. 
To sum it up again:
Number of stars in the visible universe = 30 billion trillion  (3x10²²)
Even if there was only a one in a million chance of any given star system containing life, that means millions upon millions of alien life forms/civilizations out there.

[DJ]

         While we do have computers and airplanes and spaceflight, if you take a pack of humans and a pack of tigers and drop them in the Savannah with only what they can make, even though the humans might be able to make clubs and plan strategy, they will likely loose to the tigers.

I disagree. A dozen humans armed with spears are more than a match for any land animal, provided they have good leadership. Add fire to their arsenal, and it's just not fair any more.

[Yanlin]

Aye. We had even less time to evolve than those fancy ass tigers. If they are allowed to use the best means they have, so are we. They're trained killers. We got trained killers.

Hell, us humans are the mightiest of beasts.

We can move at speeds of over 100 KM/h. Regularly. Our top speed so far is somewhere above 30k KM/h I think.

We can lift THOUSANDS OF TONS.

We can construct mighty shelters.

We have agriculture.

Etc.

[Sean Mirrsen]

All that technology has left us physically weak though. We almost stopped evolving physically when we started using tools. That allowed us to improve our brains though, so it's not all bad, but sometimes I think it's a good idea to forget human rights for a second and dump several million people in a very inhospitable place to live for a few (hundred) generations.
Hell, if aliens wanted to invade the Earth, all they'd need is detonate an EMP charge of a few yottawatts' power near our planet and we'll be done for.
Humans are born philosophers, not killers. They can take down a tiger without tools, if they use their brains and are not afraid of it, but unless you pick the strongest and most trained people it's still going to take at least three people to one tiger. And at least one will die. Versus a hungry shark, average humans have no chance. Five may be sufficient to take one down, but only if one of them makes the shark pause for long enough for others to tear its gills out.

[Jude]

We're a social species; it's our ability to think and cooperate that makes us strong. In evolutionary terms, that's just as good as having big teeth and claws.

[DJ]

Three people to one tiger is still favourable odds for people. You have to take into account the resources it takes to sustain an animal, and for our food requirements we sure pack a lot of punch.

And you shouldn't base your calculations on first world citizens, as they aren't accustomed to such scenarios, unlike wild tigers. To make it a fair comparison, you need either tigers born and raised in captivity, or humans that regularly deal with wild animals (Bushmen or some Amazonian tribesmen).