I’ve been reading a fascinating new book by Professor Avi Loeb, the Baird Professor of Science and Institute director at Harvard University. In the book, called Interstellar, Loeb discusses the possibility of hearing from extraterrestrial civilizations. This morning, in the wee hours, I sent him this email:

Dear Doctor Loeb:

I’ve just started reading your wonderful new book (“Interstellar …”) and your discussion of extraterrestrial civilizations reminded me for
some reason of a description by Noam Chomsy of a debate between Carl Sagan and biologist Ernst Mayr. Mayr’s assertion that intelligence may be a lethal mutation is (to me) both shocking and somewhat compelling. (https://chomsky.info/20100930/) Here’s how Chomsky described the debate:

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“I’LL BEGIN with an interesting debate that took place some years ago between Carl Sagan, the well-known astrophysicist, and Ernst Mayr, the grand old man of American biology. They were debating the possibility of finding intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. And Sagan, speaking from the point of view of an astrophysicist, pointed out that there are innumerable planets just like ours. There is no reason they shouldn’t have developed intelligent life. Mayr, from the point of view of a biologist, argued that it’s very unlikely that we’ll find any. And his reason was, he said, we have exactly one example: Earth. So let’s take a look at Earth.

“And what he basically argued is that intelligence is a kind of lethal mutation. And he had a good argument. He pointed out that if you take a look at biological success, which is essentially measured by how many of us are there, the organisms that do quite well are those that mutate very quickly, like bacteria, or those that are stuck in a fixed ecological niche, like beetles. They do fine. And they may survive the environmental crisis. But as you go up the scale of what we call intelligence, they are less and less successful. By the time you get to mammals, there are very few of them as compared with, say, insects. By the time you get to humans, the origin of humans may be 100,000 years ago, there is a very small group. We are kind of misled now because there are a lot of humans around, but that’s a matter of a few thousand years, which is meaningless from an evolutionary point of view. His argument was, you’re just not going to find intelligent life elsewhere, and you probably won’t find it here for very long either
because it’s just a lethal mutation. He also added, a little bit
ominously, that the average life span of a species, of the billions
that have existed, is about 100,000 years, which is roughly the length of time that modern humans have existed.

“With the environmental crisis, we’re now in a situation where we can decide whether Mayr was right or not. If nothing significant is done about it, and pretty quickly, then he will have been correct: human intelligence is indeed a lethal mutation. Maybe some humans will survive, but it will be scattered and nothing like a decent existence, and we’ll take a lot of the rest of the living world along with us.”
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I have to admit that at age 81, I’m keenly aware of how close I am to the end of my life, and yet I fervently wish I could be here when some of the evidence you expect appears! Reading your book gives me hope.

I’d be interested to know whether Mayr’s point dampens your optimism at all?

Sincerely …

Professor Loeb replied to me a few hours laters, as follows:

Dear Don,