Battison's Blog

>Look at every intelligent species in our planet’s history, from the dinosaurs to elephants and apes today. Most intelligent species grow in number, live a while, and then die off. Whereas less intelligent species like bacteria and viruses thrive, no matter what’s thrown at them.

The key reason is that intelligence requires complexity, and complexity means slower evolution. Single celled organisms evolve incredibly fast, because they reproduce very fast, and because they’re very simple so it’s easy for them to change. So in other words as we continue to evolve we’ll get more intelligent, but we’ll also become more complicated, or so the theory goes, and we’ll therefore evolve less quickly.

Two interesting questions arise out of this:

1. Will we one day (or are we already) be so slow in adapting to changing environments that any radical change will wipe out our entire species?
2. Just as Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity stops us travelling too fast and too far, does evolution imply that the laws of science prevent evolution beyond a certain point?