We're as Smart as the Universe Gets

James Miles argues, among other things, that E.T. will be like Kim Kardashian, and that the real threat of advanced AI has been misunderstood.

- James Mile

In 1995 the English mathematical biologist John Maynard Smith published The Major Transitions in Evolution. Maynard Smith was a co-developer of gene-centred evolutionary biology in the 1960s and the founder of evolutionary game theory in the early 1970s, and what this book was quietly saying about high intelligence can be considered revolutionary, or at least, notably evolutionary. As a result of a paper I wrote about evolution in the journal Philosophy in 1998, I ended up friends for the last decade of his life with the other co-developer of gene-centred evolutionary biology, the American biologist George C. Williams. And like Maynard Smith and the early Darwinians (including Darwin), Williams was fascinated by the so-called ‘high intelligence paradox’ and the evolutionary problems it implies. One of the early Darwinians even turned to philosophy to try to solve the paradox.

Although evolution is predominantly gradual, theoretical biologists recognise a series of major transition events, which involved profound changes in the way information is stored and transmitted between generations. In his Major Transitions, Maynard Smith recognised eight of them across the four billion years of life on this planet, including the early move from an RNA world to DNA, the transition from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells, and the transition from asexual to sexual reproduction. His seventh major evolutionary transition was the genetic flip-switch that allowed some species to live in large colonies, curing Darwin’s headache about non-reproductive insect castes and sterile workers. High intelligence through language was