At a symposium on Expanding Views on the Emergence of the Biosphere, held in Tokyo this week, British paleontologist Simon Conway Morris gave a talk on the connection between animals’ mental abilities and possible intelligent extraterrestrial life. Based on the abstract of his talk, I wish I’d been there, because he raises some provocative points.
Conway Morris is famous for, among other things, his 2003 book, Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe, which argued that evolution on other planets would come up with similar solutions to those we see on Earth, and that humanoids, or creatures functionally similar to them, are inevitable. He called this concept “convergent evolution.” His recent talk, however, makes a very different point, and seems to run counter to at least some of the suggestions in his earlier book.
The main point in the new talk is that animals are, to put it bluntly, rather dumb, and would never understand human reasoning or reach human mental abilities. Sure, certain animals, like crows and chimpanzees, can use tools to some degree, but there are limits to what they can do. Conway Morris maintains that they will never match human mental ability in terms of introspection and abstraction, nor will they understand jokes, irony, or complex numbers—all of which makes them unlikely to become intelligent space-faring aliens.
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