In short, I find this trope to be a fallacy. I’d expect an advanced civilisation to have a greater, not lesser, understanding of how intelligence works, its limitations, and failure modes in general.
But what reason do we have to expect them to pick evolution, as opposed to the concept of money, or of extensive governments (governments governing more than 10,000 people at once), or of written language, or of the internet, or of radio communication, or of fillangerisation, as their obvious sign of advancement?
Just because humans picked up on evolution far later than we should have, doesn’t mean that evolution is what they’ll expect to be the late discovery. They might equally expect that the internet wouldn’t be invented until the equivalent tech level of 2150. Or they might consider moveable type to be the symbol of a masterful race.
Just because they’ll likely be able to understand why we were late to it, doesn’t mean it would occur to them before looking at us. It’s easy to explain why we came to it when we did, once you know that that’s what happened, but if you were from a society that realised evolution [not necessarily common descent] existed as they were domesticating animals; would you really think of understanding evolution as a sign of advancement?
EDIT: IOW: I’ve upvoted your disagreement with the “advanced people can’t understand the simpler ways” trope; but I stand by my original point: they wouldn’t EXPECT evolution to be undiscovered.
I suspect that the intent of the original quote is that they’ll assess us by our curiosity towards, and effectiveness in discovering, our origins. As Dawkins is a biologist, he is implying that evolution by natural selection is an important part of it, which of course is true. An astronomer or cosmologist might consider a theory on the origins of the universe itself to be more important, a biochemist might consider abiogenesis to be the key, and so on.
Personally, I can see where he’s coming from, though I can’t say I feel like I know enough about the evolution of intelligence to come up with a valid argument as to whether an alien species would consider this to be a good metric to evaluate us with. One could argue that interest in oneself is an important aspect of intelligence, and scientific enquiry important to the development of space travel, and so a species capable of travelling to us would have those qualities and look for them in the creatures they found.
This is my time posting here, so I’m probably not quite up to the standards of the rest of you just yet. Sorry if I said something stupid.
I wouldn’t consider anything you’ve said here stupid, in fact I would agree with it.
I, personally, see it as a failure of imagination on the part of Dawkin’s, that he considers the issue he personally finds most important to be that which alien intelligences will find most important, but you are right to point out what his likely reasoning is.
I think you’re interpreting the quote too literally, it’s not a statement about some alien intelligences but an allegory to communicate just how important the science of evolution is.
Another chain of reasoning I have seen people use to reach similar conclusions is that the aliens are looking for species that have outgrown their sense of their own special importance to the universe. Aliens checking for that would be likely to ask about evolution, or possibly about cosmologies that don’t have the home planet at the center of the universe. However, I don’t think a sense of specialness is one of the main things aliens will care about.
But what reason do we have to expect them to pick evolution, as opposed to the concept of money, or of extensive governments (governments governing more than 10,000 people at once), or of written language, or of the internet, or of radio communication, or of fillangerisation, as their obvious sign of advancement?
Just because humans picked up on evolution far later than we should have, doesn’t mean that evolution is what they’ll expect to be the late discovery. They might equally expect that the internet wouldn’t be invented until the equivalent tech level of 2150. Or they might consider moveable type to be the symbol of a masterful race.
Just because they’ll likely be able to understand why we were late to it, doesn’t mean it would occur to them before looking at us. It’s easy to explain why we came to it when we did, once you know that that’s what happened, but if you were from a society that realised evolution [not necessarily common descent] existed as they were domesticating animals; would you really think of understanding evolution as a sign of advancement?
EDIT: IOW: I’ve upvoted your disagreement with the “advanced people can’t understand the simpler ways” trope; but I stand by my original point: they wouldn’t EXPECT evolution to be undiscovered.
I suspect that the intent of the original quote is that they’ll assess us by our curiosity towards, and effectiveness in discovering, our origins. As Dawkins is a biologist, he is implying that evolution by natural selection is an important part of it, which of course is true. An astronomer or cosmologist might consider a theory on the origins of the universe itself to be more important, a biochemist might consider abiogenesis to be the key, and so on.
Personally, I can see where he’s coming from, though I can’t say I feel like I know enough about the evolution of intelligence to come up with a valid argument as to whether an alien species would consider this to be a good metric to evaluate us with. One could argue that interest in oneself is an important aspect of intelligence, and scientific enquiry important to the development of space travel, and so a species capable of travelling to us would have those qualities and look for them in the creatures they found.
This is my time posting here, so I’m probably not quite up to the standards of the rest of you just yet. Sorry if I said something stupid.
Welcome to lesswrong.
I wouldn’t consider anything you’ve said here stupid, in fact I would agree with it.
I, personally, see it as a failure of imagination on the part of Dawkin’s, that he considers the issue he personally finds most important to be that which alien intelligences will find most important, but you are right to point out what his likely reasoning is.
I think you’re interpreting the quote too literally, it’s not a statement about some alien intelligences but an allegory to communicate just how important the science of evolution is.
Another chain of reasoning I have seen people use to reach similar conclusions is that the aliens are looking for species that have outgrown their sense of their own special importance to the universe. Aliens checking for that would be likely to ask about evolution, or possibly about cosmologies that don’t have the home planet at the center of the universe. However, I don’t think a sense of specialness is one of the main things aliens will care about.