I draw a sharp distinction between intelligence and technology, just to avoid the problem of defining intelligence adequately. Whales may be super intelligent for all we know, though I doubt it. But they are without technology of any kind, and always will be. Whale intelligence is incapable of being detected in a SETI type search, which can detect only technological intelligence. So if we talk about "intelligence" colonizing the galaxy, it will never be whales.

As for animal intelligence, Mayr was quite aware of all the current evidence, but sees it quite differently, as do I. Intelligence in humans is distinguishable from intelligence in other animals through the medium of symbolic abstraction. It is not apparent that any other creature on earth can handle symbolic representation & abstraction the way humans do. And if whales, for instance, could, how would we know?

This line of reasoning is demonstrated in the book The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain by Terrence Deacon (W.W. Norton & Co., 1997; see publisher's review).

Deacon's point is that humans, because of the way our brains are organized, by the interaction of language & evolution, are able to think in a purely abstract form that we don't see in any other animals. Now, this may be because we don't know how to look for it, or because it really is not there. One of the projects I began to work on for NASA, before SETI was axed by Congress, was an attempt to create a dictionary of Dolphin sounds (maybe somebodyelse has done thoat by now, I don't know). We were going to use signal processing methods to characterize the elements of the Dolphin calls, compared to simultaneous videotaped activity, so we could correlate what they were doing with what they were "saying". It was supposed to be a part of the SETI project dsigned to define non-human intelligence in some objectgive way, with the ultimate goal of studying communication with alien intelligence. But it perished with the rest of SETI (and it was cheap too, all we needed was an old Mac IIfx and a signal processing card). The Dolphin research would have been done at U.C. Berkeley.

But for me the main issue of the moment is the distinction between "technology" & "intelligence". Any kind of intelligence which does not communicate through technology that we can detect, is by definition "undetectable" by us. Likewise, any kind of intelligence which does not also include both the ability & desire to colonize the galaxy, will never show up in Fermi's paradox. That's why I had (and have) not much respect for the Fermi paradox idea. It leaves out too much. There may still be technology without the drive to expand & colonize, and if we don't look for it, we won't see it.


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Tim Thompson on 2002-05-09 11:12 ]</font>