The likelihood of Evolution on a cosmic scale

I think it is reasonable to assume that humans are the most intelligent things to be created in the universe. The laws of physics are the same everywhere, and there is an abundance of many of the necessary elements that are needed to create and sustain life.

However, though the physical events that lead to a planet that can sustain life are likely in the universe as vast as we know it to be, the events that cause evolution to occur are in my opinion far less likely. The universe is about 13.7 billion years old. Our planet has been here for about 4.5 billion years, of which there has been life for about 3.5 billion years. Of that time, evolution has occurred mostly in short spurts, each explosion of new and varied organisms separated by millions of years of stagnant growth.

IF extraterrestrial life exists elsewhere in the universe, we do not know that it would be even similar to our own planet’s life forms. It could be that there, the beings do not go through a process of change, renewal, and variation as has happened on our planet through evolution.

I believe that the process of evolution is an act of creation that goes against all statistical odds, against the obvious chaos and entropy in our system, against all possibilities for destruction that could be compared to the possibility of an egg that was dropped and splattered reconstructing in exact physical form.

One event, an egg falling from some height and splattering against some lower surface, is infinitely more likely than its opposite, a splattered egg coming together to form an egg as it was originally. This is the nature of entropy. There are far more ways that the egg can splatter than there are that a splattered egg can be reconstructed.

This is very similar to the process that has created human beings (and many other beings of lesser intelligence) on earth. Life has occurred, and not simply life but incredibly complex life that is capable of self-awareness, with individuals directed by comprehensive, thinking brains. It is far more likely that this process be interrupted by the millions of possible factors that can cause life’s downfall.

This is why I think it is safe to bet that we are the most intelligent life form, and that there are other life forms in the universe of much lesser complexity.

Indeed, human beings have only been on the planet for a short period compared to the total time of life on earth, the earth’s existence, or that of the universe. So it is entirely possible, and in my opinion most probable that our race, and likely all life on earth, will fall off our precarious elevated height and splatter into a cosmic mess. Simply because it is so much more likely.

evolution, in the sense that we understand it as a biological force, doesnt really occur on a universal scale, at least not in a way that we can explain… evolution is just the adaptation of lifeforms to their environments, for the purpose of increasing their survival abilities. while of course the universe is always changing in the literal, thermodynamic sense, this change is “meaningless” with regard to adaptation or increased fitness. while this meaninglessness with regard to evolution exists for all inanimate matter, it is especially meaningless with regard to the universe as a whole; since the universe itself IS its environment in totality, it would make no sense for it to somehow “adapt to itself” or its own limitations.

inanimate matter is not seeking to “survive”; it cannot “die” in the sense that life can die by virtue of a sufficient deterioration or rupture of its specific physical organization.

as far as likelihood of humans being the most highly intelligent life in the universe, there is unfortunately no way for us to know or even speculate about this. the impossibility of knowing the likelihood or unlikelihood of other similar life’s chance evolution stems from our being unable to define the parameters required to form a probability about the issue. we would need to know (in at least a general approximation), and in mathematical terms, exactly how probably it is that the entire course of a species evolution, from its inception to its culmination as a thinking, reasoning, self-aware being, will occur, as well as the counter-probability that this process will be aborted for some reason… of course, there is no way for us to even form an estimate about this process, as this would require intimate knowledge of the intricacies of each small level of evolution, and on every progressively larger and lengthier scale, as well as detailed information about the environment in which the species exists.

in addition to this knowledge, which is required to determine the likelihood of a successful human-similar evolutionary process as compared to an unsuccessful process, we would also need broader knowledge of the universe itself, including an estimate of the number of life-possible planets that have existed throughout time, the probability of catastrophic natural disasters for those worlds, etc etc.

of course, instinctively i feel that if we are possible, and given the immense time and size of the universe, then there should be sufficiently-low areas of entropy throughout other regions of the universe as well; there is no way to prove or deduce this, but that is my “gut instinct”… to quote myself:

another possibility i think we should consider is life’s surprising resiliency and tendency to overcome threats to its survival… life as a whole, within a living interconnected system (such as the entire earth itself), once sufficiently developed, seems to gain the ability to adapt as a whole to almost ANY threat or disaster, even those of global magnitude (such as meteor strikes, global freezing of the entire planet, etc)… from this perspective, perhaps life is more adaptively-powerful once it entails millions and millions of interconnected and interdependent species, all working together indirectly to propogate the survival of the entire ecosystem itself…

As Dawkins explains in the essay “Selfish Genes and Selfish Memes”, evolution should be understood as a specific example of the more general proposition that stable states persist, and unstable ones do not. This is true on the atomic and molecular level, where electrons fall into certain energy bands and ions are attracted to oppositely charged ions; it’s true on a cosmic scale, where gases fall together to create stars, and planets orbit elliptically with just enough momentum not to fall into their parent star or be flung off into space; and it is true no a biological level, where species that eat enough to reproduce, but not too much to deplete their resources, survive and thrive.

Evolution is likely, viewed in this light. Throughout evolutionary history, numerous unstable systems collapsed into more stable formations, while a stable few continued on. From our perspective now, our existence seems unlikely. However, if we step outside of our context, and ask ourselves “if such a process of maintaining stable systems continued to the point where the was a system so good at adapting to its environment that it was self-aware, what would they see?”, we can see that their perspective on things is our perspective on things: from their limited view, they are highly unlikely to have arisen by a natural, unguided process, and yet we have already supposed that it is just such a process that created them. This is known as the anthropic principle.

Evolution does not violate entropy, both because numerous systems do collapse, and much heat is dissipated, and becasue entropy functions over the whole universe. The earth is an open system, and as such it is not a violation of increasing disorder for the earth to remain orderly.
Nor does evolution happen in fits and starts. Each creature that dies without reproducing while his sister survives is an example of selection. Certainly there are chance influences on this selection, but over a large number of instances, creatures that are slightly faster, slightly stronger, and slightly smarter will survive better. Sometimes, there will be significant selection pressure, or significant evolutionary niches will open, and the rate of change will increase. However, those are not the only times when evolution takes place, and they are well explained by an evolutionary process that is in general slow and methodical.

I’ve a feeling the likelihood is high bordering on inevitable.

A little cosmology:

Got that…? :smiley:

Basically there’s a crucial value for Lambda that drives ‘eternal expansion’ the value we have now btw. And it’s so crucial the odds against it are huge. Unless…

… There are bouncing, ever larger universes.

Short-lived “Bang-bang - Big crunch” universes occur because of two things, gravity, and a high value for lambda. Gravity eventually halts expansion and draws everything back together too quickly for life to have had time to develop, whilst a high Lambda means there is not enough repulsive force to counteract that gravity.

But each bounce gets bigger, the apex - and therefore the total volume - of each consecutive universe increasing - and Lambda decreasing until a bouncing universe of a size large enough for lambda’s anti-gravitic properties to produce eternal expansion occurs.

ie, though life still remains a bit of a long-shot, at least the situation in which it can occur seems to be a certainty.

Most reasoninig on evolution are all wrong from a philosophical point of view:

  1. What makes us special ? What makes any complex device or organization of matter, or the entire process of evolution remarkable or important or relevant ? We evaluate ourselves and evolution according to ourselves, we are not outside ourselves, we do not have a more general point of view than the universe has in order to be able to evaluate evolution. And then what makes even the most general point of view worthy of having the right to evaluate ? Why evaluate anyways ? The whole concept of evaluation is wrong. We have no scale, we only have our own made up and convenient scale of judging life, complexity, evolution “intelligence”, but this scale is meaningless, can be any other scale. And no scale at all, which is probably the closest to some fairy tale called “THE TRUTH”.

  2. If we didn’t perceive pain/pleasure, the only thing that makes us biased towards our environment, the only thing that makes us somehow a perceiving dynamic process playing out, there would be nothing.

  3. Intelligence doesn’t exist. This is the biggest logical error we make when dealing with life - evolution, thinking that our little signals in our brain and complex symbolic constructions are “special” or “important”, or are on some “higher” level compared to that ant or snake or fish. Totally wrong, not even wrong, totally meaningless, our mind - brain is nothing at all, just a quirk system of signals mixing and matching and reacting on the fly to what occurs in the environment. Intelligence doesn’t even exist, it is another total “logical error”.

“All is relative” theory teaches: the circumstances of the observer influences what is being observed. If you were an observer who lived only 10^-60 seconds, an unstable atom would appear to be stable for more time than the relative age of the universe as seen from that observer. If the observer lived for trillions of years, an entire civilization would be shorter than a relative nanosecond…

Nameta, I think you’re reading the value statements into evolution. Evolution proper needs only say that things change in favor of reproduction and survival. If you read that as “things get better”, you’re adding to it what you’re attacking it for.

Old, I don’t think that refutes the point. No matter the scale, relatively stable things tend to last longer, and there is a trend toward stability. That is a scale-independent claim.

good, intelligence doesnt exist and our brains are meaningless… so i get to disregard everything you just said.
:smiley: