How did intelligence arise?

Daniel and Kelly answer listener questions about how we measure and define intelligence, hypotheses for why it arises, and why flies are so dumb. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Daniel Whiteson?

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• 2:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  Why are some animals so much smarter than others? And in particular, what is it that makes humans so incredibly smart? Now, I love animals as much as anyone else. And yes, other animals do do things like use tools and communicate with each other. But humans are the only species we know of that fund complicated research programs to try to understand at a deep level why some animal species are more intelligent than others? And how would these differences come about? We humans ask questions like, why is it that crows have learned how to fashion sticks into tools that they can use to grab tasty bugs out of the nooks and crannies of trees? But I can't get my dumb chickens to stop eating the paint on the side of the chicken

• 2:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  coop. And what kind of conditions would you need to have on another planet in order to produce highly intelligent aliens? These kinds of questions keep me up at night and also seem to be keeping many of you up at night as well. Today, we're going to tackle three wonderful listener questions that we've received related to intelligence. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.

• 3:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I hope that humans are not the smartest folks in the galaxy.

• 3:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Wiener-Smith. I study parasites and space. And yeah, I guess I hope we're not the smartest, as long as they're nice and smart, then that would be great.

• 3:49Daniel Whiteson?

  I don't even really need to put that caveat on it. Like, if they're mean and smart, like, I'll take a little bit of meanness for some secrets of the universe.

• 3:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  What if they think we're delicious and they're smart? That's a bad combo, I think.

• 4:03Daniel Whiteson?

  I don't think I'm personally very tasty, so I'm not worried that I'm going to be, like, high on the list of humans to be consumed.

• 4:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  What would make you less tasty than other humans?

• 4:15Daniel Whiteson?

  This is getting personal now.

• 4:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  This is sprinkled with stinky sauce or something?

• 4:21Daniel Whiteson?

  I actually kind of am marbled through with the ribbons of fat, so maybe I would be quite tasty. I don't know. I try to stay fit, you know?

• 4:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  Marbling is a delicacy.

• 4:30Daniel Whiteson?

  I think we just set a record for how quickly we started talking about aliens and consumption of human flesh.

• 4:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  We'll have to see if by the end of the episode, we hit poop and then we'll have the trifecta, but we'll probably get there.

• 4:42Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So my question for you today, Kelly, is do you think that we will ever crack the barrier to communicating with our fellow intelligent earthlings? Like somehow is AI or future linguistics can help us understand the chirpings of prairie dogs and the whistling of whales?

• 5:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow. All right. So I recently read this really great book called Do Aliens Speak Physics?

• 5:15Daniel Whiteson?

  That is a great book. Wow. Thank you.

• 5:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's a fantastic book and it kind of convinced me that unless you can have two-way communication, it's really hard to get on the same page regarding language. You can like work with dolphins to try to figure stuff out. Maybe we could get some very preliminary, like, you know, I say hello to you, you say hello to me, we're on the same page there. But like, I guess I'm not super optimistic. What kind of communication do you need? Like, so my dog is really cute, but about as smart as a ton of bricks. And so I can't communicate too many complicated ideas to her, but you know, there are some border collies that are brilliant. So how much communication do you feel like you need?

• 5:55Daniel Whiteson?

  I just kind of want to know what's going on in there. Like, the whales are definitely talking to each other. What are they saying? The honeybees are wiggling to each other. There's definitely information. I just want to translate that information somehow to know what they think is interesting to talk about. And like you, I know that my dog understands a lot of stuff. Like, he picks up on pretty subtle patterns. He knows when he's getting a walk, you know, shoes on plus the leash means a walk, shoes on plus the backpack means Daniel's going to work, this kind of stuff. And he notices patterns through the day like he's definitely paying attention to patterns and understanding stuff. But I wish we could talk. I wish we could communicate more. I wish I could tell him like, hey, we're getting in the car. We're going to this thing, or we're not going to the vet, you know, this information I wish we could share

• 6:39Daniel Whiteson?

  with him. Like my dog, when we leave, he has no idea. Are we going on a three week trip? Are we gonna be back in an hour? He's cool as, and if I could talk to him, I could share that with him.

• 6:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  So first of all, I think it's very nice that you're worried about how your dog's gonna feel about how long you're gone. I think that's very sweet. So bees do this waggle dance, and you can tell by the way that they're dancing, sort of like the direction and the distance that they're telling their nestmates where the great source of pollen or nectar is. And so we can decipher that. But you know, I don't think that I could like dress up in a bee suit and shake my butt the right way and tell them like, hey, I just planted some flowers in the southern corner of the property. I mean, I think we can decode a lot of what animals say, but we have not yet figured out how to communicate back with them.

• 7:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Yep. Well, part of that depends on what's going on inside those animals' minds and what intelligence really means and where it comes from. So let's dig into the episode today. I'm dying to hear what you had to tell us.

• 7:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm super excited about today's episode. But now I've got myself wondering, like, could you make a little electronic bee that was like a bee size and like do the waggle dance and maybe get the bees to go to like your source of nectar? Anyway, surely there's gotta be funding for that. That sounds awesome. I find questions about animal intelligence to be absolutely fascinating. And this is actually a topic that we get a lot of questions from y'all about. And if you want to send us your questions, you can send us questions at questions at danielandkelly.org. And so today, we're going to tackle three of the questions that we've gotten from listeners about animal intelligence. And they sort of build on one another. And so we're gonna, you know, do a bit of an overview on animal intelligence today.

• 8:16Daniel Whiteson?

  This is super cool. It's like a new kind of episode. It's like a listener questions themes episode, almost like these listeners are working together to send us questions that click together so nicely.

• 8:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. Yeah. And these three click together very nicely. You know, we could have done something similar with our consciousness episode. But I think we got like 20 questions about consciousness before we were like, all right, we get it. We're gonna get an expert. Hopefully, we answered everyone's questions with that one. But today, we are going to start with a question from Tom. So let's go ahead and hear Tom's question.

• 8:46Speaker 07

  I'm reasonably confident that humans are the only Earth species that has ever built rockets and such. So why is this level of intelligence so rare? Life on Earth is incredibly diverse and the Earth has been teeming with it for billions of years. How does a species even develop rocket level intelligence? Is intelligence a biologically selectable property that improves the chances for a population to survive? Or is rocket level intelligence just dumb luck? After all, the fact that rocket level intelligence emerged on Earth has proved to be quite unlucky for many coexisting species and may yet still be unlucky for humans. Thanks.

• 9:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow, okay, so that is a great question, but it's a very specific question. So why is rocket level intelligence so rare? So we have an N of one, we know of one species that is able to build rockets and with such a small sample size, it can be really hard to know for sure. Bit of a spoiler here, we don't know. In general, science does not know exactly what it was that put humans on the trajectory that we went on to be able to build rockets and all the other amazing things that we can do. We will talk about some of the hypotheses today that we think were important, but first let's back up and ask the question, why can't all species build rockets? Why is this kind of intelligence so rare?

• 10:11Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, ants and termites can build impressive stuff, right? They definitely work together and we see other species doing cool stuffs. So why aren't they building rockets and getting off planet? What does that really require?

• 10:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  So again, the rocket thing is very specific and part of it is, you know, ants just might not have the right appendages to build a rocket. You know, maybe they've got rocket plans and if they just had hands, they'd be building rockets, but probably not.

• 10:35Daniel Whiteson?

  That's the kind of thing we could learn if we learned to speak ant and bee, you know, maybe they're desperate to fly into space and frustrated about their limitations.

• 10:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  We should be bringing them with us, just, you know, they might appreciate that.

• 10:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Or we should just have them on the podcast and ask them directly.

• 10:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Maybe in five or 10 years.

• 10:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  So if you ask yourself, why can't all species build rockets? You're essentially asking, well, why aren't all animals intelligent? What holds you back? And we think the answer has to do with how much energy it takes to be super smart. So our adult brains weigh about three pounds. So for a person who weighs 180 pounds, that's about 2% of your body weight. But by measuring oxygen consumption rates in different parts of our body, we estimate that our brain uses about 20% of all of the energy that we burn every single day. So this very small organ is using an outsized amount of energy. So brains are just energetically expensive. So if you are a species that doesn't need a super big, smart brain,

• 11:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  then there's probably not great selection pressure for you to be expending a bunch of energy on an energetically expensive organ that you are not using.

• 11:46Daniel Whiteson?

  So you're saying that this thing is expensive, right? That it costs us something. And then so if it doesn't pay for itself, it's definitely not going to survive. And because it hung around and used up a bunch of energy and didn't provide tangible benefits, then folks with big brains would die more often during famines and cold winters and stuff like that. That's the idea?

• 12:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, so this is more of a species level argument. But yeah, so species with big brains that didn't need them would have to spend more time foraging or, you know, get better, higher quality food because of their big brains. And if that's not happening, it's not worth having.

• 12:17Daniel Whiteson?

  I guess you could also imagine a population, right? Of a single species with smaller brains and bigger brains. And if the bigger brains aren't providing a benefit and they are providing a cost, then those big brain folks among us are not going to survive. There is a population level argument there also, right?

• 12:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, there is a population level argument. There's often more variables at play when you start thinking about a specific species. So for example, when human brains, if they were to get too big, you would start to have trouble getting those giant heads through the birth canal. And so there's limits on how big brains can be. And in general, there's not a ton of variability between the sizes of brains of adults. And now we can get into this whole different debate about, is it really about how big the brain is? So like blue whales have much bigger brains than we do, but they haven't created rockets to get them out of space. Maybe that's because it's just too expensive to send a giant blue whale to space. But yeah, so trying to figure out exactly what feature of the brain we should measure is difficult. But we know that brains are expensive energetically.

• 13:14Daniel Whiteson?

  Right. And I was actually reading a study about the size of the human brain that suggested that if you packed in the neurons more densely, you would add more noise. So making the neuron smaller and denser wouldn't actually improve your cognition because you'd be ending up adding noise. And so like, human brains are sort of at this sweet spot for how much you can squeeze them down to get cognition.

• 13:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think maybe one of these days, we should have a whole separate episode on exactly how you should measure brains to correlate it with intelligence. Because I read a paper that was arguing that actually, the reason we're so great is because we have denser neurons, and that it's not brain size, it's neuron density that really unlocks intelligence. I think in general, the field has not figured out exactly what we need to be measuring.

• 14:00Daniel Whiteson?

  That's such a nice way of saying that these folks don't know what they're doing.

• 14:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, you gotta start somewhere.

• 14:05Daniel Whiteson?

  The field is immature.

• 14:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, yes, brains are complicated, man.

• 14:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, they are. No, you're totally right. And great respect to folks who are studying the brain, because obviously, it's important. And just because we don't understand everything doesn't mean that early studies are not valuable. They are the ones that lay the foundation for future progress. Yes, absolutely. And so we shouldn't mock them. We're grateful for their pioneering work.

• 14:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, I studied a brain infecting parasite of fish, and I started getting into neuroanatomy and neurochemistry. And I was like, no, I'm sticking with parasitology. Brains are complicated. So anyway, but here, we're jumping in anyway.

• 14:38Daniel Whiteson?

  But I think also, Tom's question has this fascinating flavor to it, which is like, you can make the evolutionary argument, and I think you're going to get into this later, for why intelligence might be beneficial, right? It might even overcome the expense of the brain. But it's hard to understand why evolution would give us a brain that's capable of doing things that you didn't need to survive on the savanna, right? You didn't need to be able to think about 11 dimensional mathematics and build rockets and all sorts of other crazy stuff in order to survive evolutionarily. So why is it that evolution provided this tool, which has this crazy capability, clearly outstripping our needs?

• 15:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, well, you could ask a similar question like, why do peacocks have such big showy tails? And I think that, you know, natural selection doesn't just select for things that help us run faster to catch our food or help us garden more efficiently. It also selects for traits that make us more attractive mates in one way or another. So sometimes it makes, you know, you bigger and more muscly if that's what the females want. But, you know, there's also variability in what females of a species want. And some of us want super smart partners or partners with musical abilities. And I think humans are kind of weird in this respect that we really are interested in intellectual characteristics in addition to just physical characteristics. And I don't know exactly how that played into our evolution and made us unique.

• 15:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  But, you know, if you can do nine dimensional math, there's got to be a group of people who are into that.

• 16:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Since both of us are married to nerds, I think we may be an unrepresented subset of humanity. But I totally agree with you. Big brains are hot. Yes.

• 16:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Super hot, way more hot than muscles and being in good shape, I think.

• 16:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Could be biased. Okay. So the question was essentially about how do we get humans in particular? And the answer is, we don't know about how you get humans in particular. But we can get some hints by looking at other kinds of animals and trying to figure out what things selected for intelligence in other animals. And that might give us some insights into like, maybe, you know, we maxed out a particular, you know, trait. Or there was a particularly strong selective pressure for us. So we're going to start this conversation by talking about how we define intelligence outside of the ability to build rockets. And then some difficulties with measuring it. And towards the end of the episode, when we're answering other questions from other listeners, we'll talk about some of the leading hypotheses. So we're going to get to that.

• 17:03Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. I love when we start a hard conversation with, let's define what we're talking about. Because it makes me feel all philosophical and nerdy, but also it's really important. If somebody doesn't do that, then I feel like they're going to be sloppy with their arguments because they're not being precise with their words.

• 17:17Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, and I should say that while I was researching this topic, I came across a lot of different. Definitions and I decided to try to go with something a little bit more general that feels pretty good to all of us. So here's what I came up with. It's just the ability to solve lots of different kinds of problems because that's what they all seemed to narrow down to. But what do you think? How would you define intelligence?

• 17:41Daniel Whiteson?

  I definitely think the ability to solve problems is a component of it. It feels to me like also there should be a learning aspect, right? Discovering patterns, generalizing from them. You know, in machine learning, that's a big factor. We want to develop networks that are not just capable of solving the problems we've taught them, but solving a general class of problems, including examples they haven't seen before. You know, bringing together ideas, coming up with bigger picture solutions. So something about generalizing from the examples that you've learned feels to me like an important part of intelligence.

• 18:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. And I think that having the ability to solve lots of different kinds of problems does to some extent imply the ability to learn.

• 18:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay, yeah.

• 18:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or at least to experiment with your environment to try new things, which I think is like learning. So I think we're pretty much on the same page. What do you think?

• 18:30Daniel Whiteson?

  I think that's a good working definition.

• 18:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 18:32Daniel Whiteson?

  So then how do we measure this? Are we like giving tests to cats and dogs to see?

• 18:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 18:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Can you do 11 dimensional string theory?

• 18:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  We're not asking them about 11 dimensional string theory. We will talk about some experiments that we do. But first I wanted to tell a couple of stories about how we've thought we were measuring something, but it turns out we're measuring something different, just to highlight how difficult it is.

• 18:54Daniel Whiteson?

  Here comes wet blanket Kelly.

• 18:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Come on, of course we were gonna get to wet blanket Kelly. Okay, so Clever Hans is a horse in Germany at the end of the 19th century. And this horse became super famous because you could ask him questions about addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, including questions that involved fractions.

• 19:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 19:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  And he would stomp out answers. So he would like stomp and then when he was done answering the questions for the right numbers, like if the answer was five, he'd stomp five times and then he'd sort of do like a little circle thing with his hoof to be like, okay, I'm done.

• 19:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 19:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  And then you could also ask Clever Hans questions like, what is that woman holding in her hands? And using an alphabet that was on a board, each letter was separated into columns and rows, he could clomp out what letters he wanted to say, you know, umbrella, or hot dog, or something like that.

• 19:52Daniel Whiteson?

  That implies some ability to read, right? There's like spelling.

• 19:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Some experts came in and they were like, oh, my gosh, we totally agree because we can do the trick with clever Hans, too. We can ask clever Hans the same questions. It's not just his owner and he can answer it. And so they decided that clever Hans had the intelligence that was equivalent to about a 13 year old child. But then another set of experimenters came in and they started walling clever Hans off from the room where the questioner was asking.

• 20:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, nah.

• 20:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that's right. It turns out that clever Hans could only answer questions correctly if the experimenter knew the answer ahead of time and if Hans could see the experimenter.

• 20:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, man. This is just like those experiments with the Ouija boards, right?

• 20:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, right. Like something else is sort of happening behind the scenes that's unintended. So it turned out clever Hans isn't smart in terms of the ability to do like division, but clever Hans was very smart at reading human body language. So even if you put a new person in that clever Hans had never encountered before, clever Hans could tell that they were like holding their breath until he got to like the right number of stomps and that then something about their body would change. And then he'd know, okay, that was it. And so clever Hans was actually just queuing in on body language.

• 21:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow. So clever Hans could really read a human emotion and like understand what humans wanted him to do and then would do it.

• 21:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, right. But this points out, one of the first difficult things about studying animals is that sometimes it can be really hard to figure out what you're measuring or what it is that they're actually learning. And it's not always what you think that they're learning. So you have to be very careful about how you design experiments and you need to keep in mind that animals sense the world in different ways. So, you know, some animals echolocate, some can see polarized light, some explore their universe using electricity. And so you need to make sure that you're asking questions that make sense with their sensory systems.

• 21:54Daniel Whiteson?

  And not just for animals, right? Like humans also, it's very hard to measure intelligence among humans. A lot of these tests have cultural biases in them, for example.

• 22:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, absolutely. This is just really hard stuff. And then how do you compare, you know, intelligence in a pigeon where maybe the amazing thing is their ability to like orient and travel great distances and their great spatial memory? And then compare that to, you know, like, a really smart crow that can whittle a stick so that it can get at bugs in a tree? Or like, how do you compare intelligence between those two different organisms?

• 22:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Right, it seems like it's obviously not a single number. It's multidimensional, right? And anytime you try to boil something complex down to a single number, you're gonna lose a lot of nuance.

• 22:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, you are. And I want to tell one more quick story about when we thought that we had taught animals something and we had taught them something else. So there's this thing called perceptual categories, where essentially you're trying to figure out if animals can categorize things in ways similar to how humans can. So people showed pigeons a bunch of different pictures of things, and they trained the pigeons to peck a key and get a reward whenever a person was in the image. And so they actually got pretty good at this over time. They would peck the images, even if it was an image they had never seen before, if there was a person in it. And eventually, they were able to get these pigeons to pick out pictures with bodies of water, pictures with trees, pictures with fish. So it turns out they were actually really good at coming up with these categories if

• 23:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  you trained them. And then we did it with capuchin monkeys, and we trained them on a bunch of different photos of people. And they were doing pretty well, but the experimenters did something really clever. They looked at the mistakes the monkeys were making and tried to see if there was anything informative in those mistakes. And one mistake the monkeys made was they did not count, as a picture of a human, anything that was torso and higher. So like, you know, you think of your school pictures from when you were a kid, and it's like your torso and higher. The monkeys did not think that was a person.

• 23:54Daniel Whiteson?

  They're counting legs only, or what?

• 23:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  They didn't know exactly what they were counting, but they hadn't generalized to person. There was like a very particular, all has to be there. So they hadn't learned exactly the category we had in mind. And they counted as a person, an image of a jackal that was carrying a dead flamingo.

• 24:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  And the reason they ended up thinking that the monkeys were categorizing that as a person is because that image had red in it. And the only other images in the training set that had red were three of the pictures of people. And so maybe they hadn't actually learned what humans were, but they had learned something about the image set. And we have problems with this with AI training sets also.

• 24:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, there's a famous example of trying to teach an AI to tell the difference between wolves and dogs. And it was doing really, really well. And then they discovered that the pictures of wolves have snow in the background and the pictures of dogs don't. And so it was like learning to tell the difference between grass and snow, which is not that hard.

• 24:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Right, right. And this was an experiment that was designed by humans who apparently had tried to think this stuff through. It's just really hard. So now that we have a sense of how difficult it is to ask these kinds of questions, let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll move on to the next question, which will bring us to some of the hypotheses for what selects for intelligence.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  That sound? That's the National Squash League. Pro teams, the world's best players, and rallies so fast you'll forget to breathe. Season four is in full swing and every match streams free on YouTube. Big hits, bigger rivalries, and a front row seat from wherever you are. Watch every match for free on YouTube. Search National Squash League and hit subscribe or follow live updates on Instagram at NSL.Sport.

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• 26:16Speaker 09

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 26:31Speaker 10

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 26:41Speaker 09

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 26:47Speaker 11

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 26:53Speaker 09

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• 27:22Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay, we're back and we are tackling some very difficult but fascinating questions from listeners today about the nature of intelligence and why bees have not yet gone off planet. And we started with a really fun question from Tom about how you end up with rocket-level intelligence. And Kelly shed some light on how hard it is to even define and measure intelligence. And through a wet blanket, I'm basically the whole history of that field.

• 27:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  You win my thing.

• 27:48Daniel Whiteson?

  And so, slightly unusually, we're not going to give a complete and definite answer to Tom's question. Right now, we're going to keep digging into this by answering more questions from listeners and then hope at the end to come back and give you our best answer to all of your queries.

• 28:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so let's go ahead then and jump into question two from Mark.

• 28:06Speaker 12

  Hi, Daniel and Kelly. My question has to do with evolution and predation. Do you think it's possible for complex intelligent life to evolve without predation? Or do we think that predation is necessary for beings with human-level intelligence or higher intelligence to exist? If there are aliens capable of interstellar travel that have never known predation, I imagine they would find Earth to be a nightmare with billions of organisms being murdered and consumed by other organisms every day. Interested to know your thoughts. Thanks.

• 28:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, wow. All right. So when I first listened to this question, I was confused because I hadn't heard this hypothesis that predation is important for producing intelligent life. Had you heard this idea before, Daniel?

• 28:57Daniel Whiteson?

  I hadn't thought about it in terms of predation. I had thought about it in terms of like society and culture, that maybe an important component of intelligence is having a complex interaction between the individuals in the species, more than just like solitary folks. So I'm not sure how that connects to predation or being preyed on or preying on people, like how taking down a mammoth requires like 10 to 15 people. Is that the same sort of thing?

• 29:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  So that's the social intelligence hypothesis, which we're going to get to next. But so the idea behind this predation hypothesis is that you end up with an arms race between predators and prey. So what happens here? So you've got a predator that needs to be able to see the prey so that it can like find it in a tree or something, you know, if it's hiding in a tree, it kind of blends in. And so that selects for them to have better vision or a better memory for the kinds of behaviors that their prey typically engages in. So for example, if a certain kind of prey that's extra super delicious is only active at dusk and dawn, then maybe you focus your predation efforts at dusk and dawn because you've remembered that that's when the prey that's super tasty is active. And on the other hand, the prey might

• 30:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  remember that when I smell cat urine, that means that there's a cat in the area. And so anywhere I smell cat urine, I'm just not going to hang out anymore. And so you end up with this competition for sensory systems and the ability to sort of like think through risks and benefits that over time results in smarter and smarter brains.

• 30:26Daniel Whiteson?

  So is the argument just that smarter predators are more successful and smarter prey are more successful, that it's one element of success in this sort of predator versus prey environment?

• 30:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep, exactly.

• 30:38Daniel Whiteson?

  But there's lots of predator prey situations, and a lot of times, one or both of them are kind of dumb. Like deer, not that smart, for example, though they've been highly selected for because people like wolves have been gobbling up deer for many years. Is this just one possible way evolution can go? Or is the argument that prey and predation always leads to intelligence?

• 30:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, so first I'll note that it wouldn't surprise me to find out that deer have gotten more stupid over time because there's not tons of hunters out there and we've killed most of their predators on this continent. So they are perhaps a little bit relieved from the pressure of this arms race and maybe that explains their intelligence. But yeah, so I think to me, that's one of the issues with this hypothesis is that it's not, as far as I can tell, really clear about which sets of predators in prey or which kinds of predators should end up, you know, maxing out being super smart and which prey should end up being super smart. But it's sort of more of a like, well, this is why you end up with complex thought at all. And then it just sort of depends on how much complex

• 31:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  thought you need, depending on what kinds of races you find yourself in and with what kinds of organisms.

• 31:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Because it's not hard to think of other examples, you know, like spiders and flies, right? Flies are very good at evading spiders, but they're not using intelligence to just like have a crazy hair trigger and can jump out of the way in a millisecond.

• 32:00Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, that's pretty impressive as well. Like, you know, those crazy hair triggers could be because, you know, you have had selection for hairs that are particularly sensitive to, you know, spider webs, or maybe their visual systems are particularly good at seeing the way light reflects off of a spider web with some dew on it. But yes, I don't think of flies as being particularly brilliant, although, man, they outsmart me when I try to smack them. So maybe they're smarter than I give them credit for.

• 32:26Daniel Whiteson?

  They're definitely amazing biological engineering. I don't know if it counts as intelligence, but now we're back into that morass of what is smart anyway. But I wouldn't put flies near the top of the list.

• 32:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  I haven't read a lot of papers where flies were like solving complex problems. Although I do think that they keep track of their social structures because they fight with each other. And I think who they fight with depends on, you know, who they fought with in the past. So maybe there's a lot going on there that we can't see.

• 32:51Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. But you must have some fun examples of predator and prey who have developed some clever intelligence.

• 32:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  I am particularly excited about chimps and new Caledonian crows who have managed to like pull stems off of trees and in some cases even like remove leaves and stuff to make particularly good tools for going inside of like trees so that you can get bugs that are inside.

• 33:13Daniel Whiteson?

  That's tool use. That's clever. Yeah.

• 33:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. And you'll find stories about crows who will sometimes like if they have a metal implement, they'll bend it so that they can sort of hook something out. There have been stories of crows that are able to like drop rocks into containers of water so that the water can come up high enough so that they can drink it.

• 33:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, wow.

• 33:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Like, they do some pretty incredible things. Thinking about prey, there are octopus that do things like use halves of coconut shells. And instead of using them like in Monty Python to make the sound of a horse galloping.

• 33:44Daniel Whiteson?

  They have other uses?

• 33:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  I know. I know. I don't understand. They pick up the coconut shells, clean them out, get inside of them, and then carry them with them from place to place so that they've got a shelter to hide from anything that might want to harass or try to eat them.

• 33:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 33:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  So there are some amazing examples of animals that show a lot of intelligence to either avoid being eaten or get their food.

• 34:05Daniel Whiteson?

  Those are both definitely smarter than flies.

• 34:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, but again, you know, you're biased by what sounds important to you and what you can understand well. But yeah, I'll give you that. I hate flies. Dipdorids are the worst.

• 34:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  My daughter knows I hate dipdorids.

• 34:20Daniel Whiteson?

  What are dipdorids?

• 34:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  They're like flies and mosquitoes.

• 34:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, God, mosquitoes, absolutely the worst. If I could delete mosquitoes from the universe, I would totally would do it. I mostly love living creatures and I appreciate that everything contributes to the web of life. But mosquitoes, man, just delete those.

• 34:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  I know. You were telling us in another episode recently that you guys got some Chinese mosquitoes that are now all over the place and that you really hate them. And I feel for you.

• 34:45Daniel Whiteson?

  Nothing against the Chinese, nothing.

• 34:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, no, of course, of course. Yep. Nope. Didn't mean to imply that. But so another part of Mark's question was, would aliens find our planet appalling because of all of the killing? So if predation is important for intelligence and predation is like all over the place, could you end up with an intelligent alien species where there wasn't any predation? Is there some other selection pressure that produces intelligent aliens? And what would aliens think of all of the killing? And you know, I don't know, it might be appalling. There's an interesting book called The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, and I do not recommend this book to children. Maybe read the Wikipedia summary before you read it. It covers some intense topics, but it's an interesting look at how humans feel when

• 35:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  they go to an alien civilization and see how they deal with their predator-prey relationships. But would you tell us about Eric Kirschenbaum's book?

• 35:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, he's a biologist at Cambridge, and he wrote this book called The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens and Ourselves. And I'll be honest, when I first saw this book, I thought, oh, no, he scooped me because I was at the same time working on a book about what we can learn about aliens from examples here on Earth. But I was more focused on the physics side of it. And his book is really fascinating. It's essentially looking at examples of evolution on Earth and trying to draw conclusions about what might be universal and what might be local and unique to Earth. It's, of course, impossible to know for sure, but you know, when you see things pop up over and over again, you can argue that they might be more common. And when you see something that only happened once on Earth, you can argue that maybe it's

• 36:23Daniel Whiteson?

  rare and therefore might not be everywhere in the universe. And something he talked a lot about was predation.

• 36:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  And you provided me with a quote where he even says, "No ecosystem can exist for long without someone trying to take a bite out of somebody else."

• 36:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. He thinks it's essentially inevitable because you'll develop mobility, and then you'll start to consume, and then you'll start to consume other folks, and then other folks will try to get away from you. And so when you get big, you get noisy, and people develop ears, and then they use those to hunt. And so he thinks predation is totally inevitable. I remember asking him directly, like, do you think aliens eat each other? And he was like, oh, yeah, absolutely.

• 37:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay. So at least that argues that if aliens visit Earth, they shouldn't find us too appalling. Although maybe they'd be shocked that we eat lobsters, because gross.

• 37:16Daniel Whiteson?

  Lobsters are like just huge ocean cockroaches. I don't get it. Like, they look really gross to me.

• 37:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I'll pass. Sorry. I'm not into it. So, to be honest, when I was researching hypotheses for why intelligence pops up from time to time, I didn't come across this predation hypothesis often. The hypothesis that I came across the most often is what's called the social intelligence hypothesis. This is what Daniel was talking about earlier, which is that group living selects for intelligence, and you need group living to do things like track members of a group. So remember, like, you know, when I was cooperating with Beth, you know, I pulled some ticks off her back, and the next day she pulled some ticks off my back. So that's great. I'll keep working with her. But I pulled some ticks off Frank's back, and that jerk never returned the favor. So I'm not going to work again with Frank.

• 38:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so it helps you, like, keep track of individuals in your group and how you should react with each of them differently.

• 38:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Essentially, politics is complicated. It takes real intelligence. And in a society, politics are important for survival. You have to build coalitions. You have to worry about your enemies. You have to worry about being betrayed by your allies. It's complicated stuff.

• 38:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, and you need to communicate with each other so that if you're, you know, a bee, for example, you can waggle and tell everyone where the good food source is. Or you need to, if you're wolves, coordinate so you can take down the moose so that you can feed everyone. So social behavior requires a lot of intelligence to work out.

• 38:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Have you ever read the books about the wolves of Yellowstone?

• 38:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, have you?

• 38:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, there's a fascinating series of books written by a guy who spent like 40 years getting up at like 3:00 in the morning and just watching the wolves. And each have a number, and he just got to know them all and wrote these books about their politics. And it's like a soap opera, you know, betrayals and arguments and, you know, love affairs and all sorts of crazy stuff. And wolves going off to start their own packs and then coming back and fighting their parents. And like, it's dramatic stuff. And it leaves you with this sense of like, wow, this is a society. You know, these are intelligent creatures, and they have all the same kind of politics that we do. It really is a soap opera. It's fascinating reading.

• 39:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  Robert Sapolsky wrote a book about baboons called A Primates Memoir, which is sort of the same. It really becomes clear how they're a society that has a lot of similarities to how humans work. And also, he's a fantastic writer. I really enjoyed that memoir.

• 39:40Daniel Whiteson?

  So I really recommend these books. They're by Rick McIntyre. One of them is called, for example, The Rise of Wolf Eight. They're fantastic books, really. Couldn't recommend them higher. Anyway, go ahead. Tell us about other intelligent critters.

• 39:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes. In the 1990s, it was observed that there was this positive correlation between neocortex size. So this is like the outer part of our brain that's close to our skull, and it's thought to be sort of like a more recent mammalian thing. And so monkeys and apes that had bigger neocortexes were also thought to be smarter. And this part of the brain is used for things like language and sensory perception.

• 40:17Daniel Whiteson?

  Can I stop you right there and be a little skeptical?

• 40:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Sure.

• 40:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Anytime somebody says something like that, they're like, this part of the brain is used for XYZ. I'm like, we don't understand the brain. Isn't this some like correlational study using fMRI? It's like, well, there's more blood flow here when we showed them this picture of a baboon, and so therefore, right? It's all pretty fuzzy. I feel like there should be a huge asterisk anytime somebody says this part of the brain does X.

• 40:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  OMG, yes. Yeah. No, I totally agree with you. And so we'll move this point up a little bit. One of the issues with this field is that to try to support the hypothesis, they'll do things like look at relative brain size and correlate that with things that are related to social things. Like if you are a species that tends to live in groups of five rather than, you know, by yourself, they'll look to see, do you have a bigger brain if you live in groups of five, or if you're a species that lives in a group of just one? Does that make sense?

• 41:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Hmm.

• 41:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so there's a lot of these correlations, but there's a lot of argument about what you should be measuring in a brain to begin with. Like, what is the relevant part of the brain you should be measuring? Is it the whole brain? Is it the neocortex? Is it actually the density of neurons in a very particular part of the brain that matters? And additionally, you know, there are animals that can do similarly smart tasks that have very different kinds of brains. You know, how do you compare, for example, a primate brain and a bird brain? And so one of the big critiques in this field is that They do rely a lot on different measures of brains that have not necessarily been locked in as the correct thing to be measuring when you're interested in intelligence.

• 41:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Right. And we mentioned these as critiques of the field, not because we think these folks don't know what they're doing.

• 41:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 41:56Daniel Whiteson?

  They're following a glorious tradition in science, which is like tackling an impossibly hard question by doing the only things they know how to do. And often this leads to breakthroughs you didn't expect. It's better than just sitting on the couch and saying, well, it's impossible. Let's not do it. But another glorious tradition in science is being open about the critiques of what we really do know and what we don't know, and being careful about drawing too broad a conclusion.

• 42:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, exactly. There have been a lot of correlations where they have found that complicated social behaviors in insects and birds and mammals are correlated with either bigger brains or bigger brain parts. And that's at least suggestive. And again, it's really hard to compare between two different species. What is the right measurement for how intelligent they are? How do you rank them? You know, as you're sort of stumbling around in a dark room with no light on, you've got to start somewhere. And I feel like they have made some exciting progress and they're having these conversations about what is the right thing to be measuring? And, you know, where do we go from here? And we found something tantalizing here. How do we follow up and get like a better answer based on this sort

• 43:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  of tantalizing initial results? That's pretty much where we are right now. There's this interesting correlation, but we're still trying to figure out what to measure and how to measure it.

• 43:10Daniel Whiteson?

  So when you say correlation, you're saying there's a correlation between brain size and like social activity? And that suggests that bigger brains are smarter and social activity is connected to being smarter?

• 43:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, that if you've got a bigger brain, you are more able to, for example, live in a bigger social group where you presumably have more, you know, sort of peers or conspecifics that you need to keep track of so that you can remember their prior behaviors and you can, you know, tell the difference between them. And so more complicated social systems tend to be correlated with bigger brains relative to body size or bigger brain parts. Sometimes this falls apart. For example, little owls, which is Athena noctua, it's a species of owl that is super cute. They are not social like at all, but they got real big four brains. And so it's kind of surprising that they're like not super social, but they got big old brains. Why? We don't know.

• 44:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Maybe they're sitting there thinking about 11 dimensional string theory and maybe they know the answer.

• 44:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, my God, we have to learn to talk to the little owls.

• 44:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Tell me, little owl, what is the nature of the universe?

• 44:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, that should be a poem. Like, that sounds like the kind of poem you sing to a kid when they're going to bed.

• 44:21Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, let's write that children's book.

• 44:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. Okay, so now we're going to take a break. And when we get back, we're going to talk about one of the other hypotheses for the evolution of intelligence as we answer our third listener question.

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• 45:57Speaker 10

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• 46:08Speaker 09

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• 46:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay, we are back and we're talking about smartness across the animal and alien kingdom. Is intelligence inevitable? What can we learn from life on Earth? And the patterns of intelligence or deer and fly-like dumbness on Earth? Is there something we can tell about why humans ended up so dang smart?

• 47:08Speaker 14

  We, as humans, have long looked to the stars with wonder and awe, trying to figure out exactly what the universe is. What is it made of? What is our place in it? And ultimately, I guess, to try to answer the age-old question, are we alone in the universe? So if one of our Mars rovers or Europa Clipper found even microbial signs of life out there, it would, of course, be a game changer, a seismic event, to be sure. And while it would be scientifically exciting, I think it could also be somewhat disappointing. Because when most of us look to the stars in hopes of finding signs of life, I think we envision not just a bacterial colony, but an actual functioning civilization.

• 47:53Speaker 14

  So my question to you is this. As you look at life here on Earth, is there any indication at all that intelligence is inevitable? I mean, given enough time for evolution to do its thing, do you believe sentient beings would be the ultimate result? And to put a finer point on that, imagine if the asteroids that wiped out the dinosaurs had narrowly missed the Earth and that extinction event never occurred. Let's say mammals remained as nothing more than small furry little rodent-like creatures and did not lead to the rise of the human species. Under those circumstances, do you have any reason to believe that there might be an

• 48:33Speaker 14

  intelligent civilization developed by reptilian creatures instead of warm-blooded things like us? You think dinosaurs could be running the show these days? Anyway, uh, thank you for your consideration and answering this, and I look forward to hearing what you say. Love the show. Keep up the good work.

• 48:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  So Howard wanted to know if intelligence is inevitable. And man, I don't know the answer. And it probably depends on what the bar is for intelligence, but if you're asking about like human level intelligence, there's over 2 million described species on the planet, but only one, human. And so apparently you can have a lot of organisms without getting us, you know, rocket level smart species. You only get that once out of 2 million. So what do you think, Daniel? Would T-Rex have been coming up with Shakespearean-style prose if that asteroid missed Earth?

• 49:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Um, well, first I want to quibble with your claim that there's only one intelligent species.

• 49:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 49:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Right? I think that's a little bit definitional. Like, we think probably 50,000 years ago, there were multiple intelligent species. We just like killed, raped, or ate the other ones, right? And so in some sense, if you get smart enough, you're likely, I think, to just kill off all the other intelligent competition till it becomes part of your in-group. So you might inevitably just get to one, but it seems like the evidence suggests that there were multiple strands, at least of human-like intelligence on Earth, weren't there?

• 49:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  So usually when a listener asks the question, they mean like humans, like as smart as us, you know, creating rockets, nine-dimensional math. I don't know that even our ancestors were that smart, you know, 100,000 years ago. And so I'm not quite sure that there was, you know, songs were being sung by other species of humans. We might never know, but you're right. They probably were very smart relatively, relative to other organisms on the planet.

• 50:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, you're right that we don't know biologically, do they really have the same capacity? And Neanderthals, for example, or other variations, it's hard to know. And maybe they had a different kind of smartness, right? Maybe they would be like, hey, 11 dimensional string theory, that's the wrong way to go, man. You should be doing loop quantum gravity.

• 50:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. That's right.

• 50:43Daniel Whiteson?

  But yeah, the really deep question is like, is intelligence inevitable in some creature? Are you likely to have it no matter what happens? If the asteroid hadn't hit or if something else had gone different on Earth, would you have super intelligent spiders or whales dominating the planet or reptiles or something? And boy, I wish I knew the answer to that because that would tell us a lot about the nature of intelligence out there in the universe, right? Like whether it's likely when we land on alien planets to just find a bunch of fungi or something's going to be smart on those planets. And I think to answer that, we really need a better understanding of how intelligence arose on Earth. And as you could tell from this whole episode, we don't know the answer to that either.

• 51:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's true. And you mentioned super intelligent spiders. Have you read the Children of Time series?

• 51:28Daniel Whiteson?

  Of course I have. Yes, I love that book.

• 51:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, same.

• 51:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Fantastic. We had Adrian Chakovsky on the Daniel and Jorge podcast. Really fun conversation. You guys should check that out.

• 51:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Awesome. So as you've pointed out, the other theories are not exactly ironclad that we've talked about yet. There is one additional hypothesis for why you get intelligence that we haven't talked about yet, that I saved for now because it's possibly the one that's most relevant to space. It's a bit of a stretch, but you know, I try to have an answer for every question, no matter how confused I am. So, all right, here's my best shot. So. This hypothesis is called the cognitive buffer hypothesis. And the idea is that how variable your environment is determines whether or not you need to be intelligent to survive in it. So maybe more variable planets would be more likely to produce intelligent aliens.

• 52:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  But so let's dig in for a second and revisit that idea at the end. So one of the ideas is that seasonality is important. So if you live in an area where sometimes it's really hot and sometimes it's really cold, maybe you need to be smart to survive that transition between temperatures. So for example, migratory birds have two pretty smart solutions to this problem. Some of them migrate and have amazing long-term spatial memory relative to non-migratory ones. So they essentially figure out how to leave when it gets bad and then how to come back later. And that requires some incredible like brain abilities. And then there are other birds that don't leave, but they have amazing memories for where they've cached food.

• 53:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  So even when food is rare, they've hidden it when times are good and they remember where they can go to find it when times are bad. And so the idea here is that living in a super variable environment requires you to become intelligent so that you can survive. There was a study looking at 1,200 bird species that found that you get bigger brains in birds that live in environments that are more variable. So suggesting that if things change more, you got to be smarter to make it. What do you think, Daniel? Do you buy it?

• 53:33Daniel Whiteson?

  It makes some sense. It connects to the idea we were talking about earlier, that intelligence is about generalization, like being able to solve new problems you hadn't seen before. So if your environment is changing around you, ice ages are ending, climate is changing, something, you can't just rely on the techniques handed down to you by ancestors. You have to come up with new ideas to solve new problems and that requires intelligence. So it makes sense to me that a climate with a lot of variation or an environment with a lot of variability to it would require more intelligence in order to survive. On the other hand, I don't know that I consider like geese that smart. I mean, yes, they can do something amazing, which is like navigate the planet with their magnetic sense in their eyeballs. It's incredible.

• 54:16Daniel Whiteson?

  I couldn't do that, but I don't know if that makes them smart. They seem like hyper optimized to this one situation. Like if, for example, the planet changed, the magnetic field slipped, or where they need to migrate to changed, do you think geese would be able to adapt to that situation?

• 54:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  So the last time I was reading about birds and their ability to sense the magnetic fields, my understanding is that we don't actually understand that very well. And that a lot of animals that we suspect rely on magnetic fields also have other like memory cues that they rely on to get to where they're going.

• 54:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Did you read that study about how whales might be looking at the stars and navigating by the stars?

• 54:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  No!

• 54:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Amazing.

• 54:57Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, my God. Okay, we should talk about that in a future show because that's amazing. I'd love to read that.

• 55:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 55:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I guess that goes back to the question, how do you measure intelligence? And how do you make sure that you're not measuring intelligence in a too human centric way? Or maybe it doesn't matter because maybe if you're specifically interested in how did you get human intelligence, then maybe focusing on human intelligence is fine. But I get lost like going to the grocery store sometimes. Like I use my GPS in the town that I've been living in for half a decade all the time. And so.

• 55:26Daniel Whiteson?

  GPS, your goose positioning system?

• 55:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  So I'm impressed in these long distance migrants, no matter how they do it, because I would get lost. I'd be in a lake.

• 55:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Again, the same way like flies are impressive, they're very responsive, they're faster off the starting block than I am or probably Usain Bolt is, but I don't know that I call it smart. And so, but maybe you're right, maybe I'm being too humanistic there and looking for the kind of intelligence that I know. The same way like I see in my dog, a lot of the kind of intelligence I see in people. And that's what impresses me, the ability to see patterns and respond to them and understand the world around him and adapt to it.

• 56:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, and appear to be able to read like the emotions of people around them. Yeah, agreed. You've got this seasonality component, which is about like, you know, escaping extreme temperatures and stuff. Another component of this idea is resource availability. So for example, if you are a monkey species that eats fruits, fruits kind of ripen at different times. So they're available sometimes, not at other times. You need to remember where the fruit trees are. And so there's some evidence that monkeys that rely on fruit are smarter than monkeys that can eat leaves because leaves are just always available, they're easy to find, they're just much more reliable. So the idea is that if seasons are changing your environment or resources that you need are sort of popping in and out of existence, either of those things are important for

• 56:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  intelligence. But you know, when you read about any of these hypotheses, like the recent papers that I was reading. Everybody's got like their favorite hypothesis. They point out limitations of the other hypothesis. And at the end of the day, it could be some combination of things. You know, it could be if you're in a hyper variable environment and you've got a big social group. That's when you get the super smart individuals. Or maybe it's, you know, the three things we've talked about today. Those are all important. Plus a fourth thing that nobody's thought about yet. And so at the end of the day, we don't really have the answer.

• 57:20Daniel Whiteson?

  So what I like to think about sometimes is like fantasy data. Like if you had infinite resources and you've asked me these kinds of questions before, you could go all the way around the galaxy, whatever. Is there a way we could answer this question somewhat definitively with infinite scientific powers? You know, do you think actually seeing aliens and surveying intelligence across the galaxy would answer this question? Or would it just make it murky again?

• 57:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wouldn't surprise me that on a different planet, there could be some different thing that selects for intelligence relative to what we find here on Earth. You'd think that if you could find enough alien civilizations that had enough like equivalence of New Caledonian crows and Homo sapiens and, you know, enough different kinds of intelligence and enough variability in intelligence, you'd be able to find some patterns. But in terms of what you could do here on Earth, I think we're doing what you can do here on Earth. Like, I think we're doing the best we can right now.

• 58:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, I think the alien question is the fascinating one. And I think a lot of people feel like

• 58:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Of course you do.

• 58:23Daniel Whiteson?

  If we could visit those planets and see those, then we would know. And, you know, we'd get some answers like if we saw this alien life, we could be like, okay, very clearly, life is not as rare. But for intelligence, it's so much harder to define that unless we find alien life and it's intelligent in exactly the same way we are, which would tell us like, okay, this kind of intelligence is weirdly inevitable, that instead we're going to find like a huge variety of different kinds of intelligences. And we're going to get stuck in the same question, just now on a bigger scale. And it might be this question doesn't really have an answer.

• 58:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I mean, it could be that there's no one answer. I do feel like if you had thirty planets that intelligence arose on all of them, you'd probably be able to say like, okay, in every case where there's seasons, you find some animals that are intelligent in this way. Maybe it's like they're better at remembering where the good food was or something. I imagine that we'd find some common threads, but would we ever answer all of our questions? No, probably not. Probably we'd get a lot more questions from those twenty or thirty planets, but that would be exciting, too.

• 59:33Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, we can't even agree on this podcast about whether flies are intelligent. So I feel like what we're really asking is when we find aliens, are they going to have culture the way we have? Are they going to develop technology? Are they going to be scientific? Are they going to be exploring the universe? Are they going to be like us? So in the end, I think really what these questions deep down are asking is, is our experience universal? So I think it really is a human-like thing. We could find aliens are really super duper smart, but so different from us that we don't call it intelligence. We call it something else, schm- intelligence or something. I think really this is probing about human intelligence.

• 1:00:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. So first, I want to reiterate that I do feel like you should be in charge of naming new things in just about any field.

• 1:00:16Daniel Whiteson?

  I just add schm in front of it. That's all I do.

• 1:00:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  And I think that's great. Actually, my first blog was fungulous schmungulous, because I think schm is a great thing to add in front of other words. But, you know, we didn't even talk about all of the hypotheses today. So you mentioned culture. There's a cultural intelligence hypothesis that focuses in particular on learning and like learning in a cultural context and how that might be really important for things like humans. And so I agree with what you said. There's even more hypotheses we didn't get a chance to talk about today. So let's take a step back and see if we've answered all of the questions that we were asked today. And so, you know, Tom wanted to know what makes rocket level intelligence, and I threw up my arms and shrugged. I don't know.

• 1:00:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  But Tom wanted to know if there's things that select for intelligence. And we've talked about a couple of things that we think maybe select for intelligence.

• 1:01:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  And he pointed out that intelligence might yet be unlucky for us. And, you know, maybe we will all blow up because of our nuclear weapons. I hope not.

• 1:01:16Daniel Whiteson?

  I don't know why I'm laughing at that.

• 1:01:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  Sometimes you laugh or you cry. Laughing's better. And then we addressed Mark's question about whether or not predation is necessary. Some people think it's important, but, you know, we don't know if it's the only thing. Then we looked at Howard's question about whether or not intelligence is inevitable. And I yet again threw up my arms and shrugged. But, you know, we had fun imagining it.

• 1:01:38Daniel Whiteson?

  And I think that these are really fascinating questions and I love the folks ask them. Even if we don't have answers, I think it's exciting to think about what efforts people are making and tackling these really big, really deep questions. Because, you know, those first steps are the hardest ones. Like when you look back at what the Greeks did or what ancient civilizations have done to take the first steps towards science. They seem obvious in hindsight, maybe, but it's difficult to take those first steps when you're up against the abyss of our ignorance about these deep questions.

• 1:02:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah. And at the end of the day, I think it's amazing that there is a species on our planet that's asking these questions and are trying to muddle through. And, you know, I, when I looked at the neuroanatomy textbook, threw up my hands and said, I'm studying something else. Thank goodness there are people who are like, I'm going to spend my whole life banging my head against this problem and make a little bit of headway and move us all ahead. And so I lately feel like there's a lot of reasons to be down on our species, but it is pretty cool that we do this kind of stuff. And I find the science that we do super inspirational.

• 1:02:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, although I think we can agree that the smartest people on the planet are the folks who listen to this podcast, right?

• 1:02:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  Agreed. And that is the perfect note to end on.

• 1:02:50Daniel Whiteson?

  And so before we sign off, we were curious, did we answer Tom and Mark and Howard's questions? We sent this to them, and here's what they had to say.

• 1:02:59Speaker 15

  Thanks, Daniel and Kelly, for answering this question. You know, one of the reasons I love your podcast so much is because no matter how complete your answers are, you always offer a more beautiful question at the end. And I guess one of the reasons I was focused on rockets is because aliens were more likely to kind of discover alien technology than we are aliens first. And I imagine that rockets are pretty important in getting off planet. I'm not aware of any other way to do that. But yeah, I mean, I'm very satisfied with your discussion, and I look forward to finding out what this

• 1:03:44Speaker 15

  field is discovering about intelligence and different kinds of intelligences and what we might expect to find out there in the universe. Thank you.

• 1:03:56Speaker 16

  Hi, Daniel and Kelly. Yes, you answered my question. And while I was hoping the answer would be that there could be some world out there where all the creatures hold hands or tentacles or whatever, and sing kumbaya and are cool to each other, it sounds like the real answer is wherever there's life, whether it's intelligent or not, something is gonna sooner or later get the idea to eat something else. So thanks for taking my question, and thanks for the book suggestion. I will definitely check it out. And of course, thanks for the wonderful show.

• 1:04:35Speaker 14

  Thank you, Daniel and Kelly. This is Howard. And I want to thank you for taking on my question. I know it can be challenging when the question has no definitive answer. But I kind of knew that going in. But what I really appreciated was listening to your thought processes, how you break it down, how you would approach it, what similarities are there that might apply to it. And that was that was invigorating. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

• 1:05:07Daniel Whiteson?

  A quick non-science announcement. May 10th, 2025 is the Stamp Out Hunger Drive, organized in tandem with the U.S. Postal Service. It's very easy to help fill up your local food banks. Just leave non-perishable food at your mailbox, and your carrier will collect it for you. That's all you have to do. Leave non-perishable foods by your mailbox on May 10th, 2025 to help stamp out hunger.

• 1:05:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you.

• 1:05:44Daniel Whiteson?

  We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe.

• 1:05:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.

• 1:05:56Daniel Whiteson?

  We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at [email protected].

• 1:06:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D and K Universe.

• 1:06:12Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

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