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Dr Arik Kershenbaum, Department of Zoology, Girton College, University of Cambridge

Host: Dr Adriano Reis E Lameira

Universal intelligence – what the evolution of animal communication on Earth can tell us about intelligent aliens.

Arguments over the nature and diversity of animal intelligence have raged for millennia, still with little consensus over how much and what kind of intelligence non-human animals possess. Besides the obvious ethical and philosophical importance of these questions, there is another dimension of the debate which will likely assume even greater importance in the next century. The pace of discovery of habitable exoplanets is increasing so rapidly that the discovery of life outside of Earth seems highly likely. If not a “pinnacle of creation”, humans are certainly quite exceptional on this planet – but what does this say about the nature and status of life on other planets? Are aliens likely to be as intelligent as us, or more intelligent than us? Or is alien intelligence – when we discover it – going to be utterly unfathomable, impossible to compare to human intelligence, and possibly even unrecognisable?

Animal communication can give us insight into these questions. As human language is the only trait distinguishing our technological civilisation from the other species on our planet, so it is likely to be on alien worlds too. The evolutionary trajectories of the communication systems of different species illustrate the different cognitive demands placed on those species, and the development of intelligence in response to those demands. A diversity of sub-linguistic abilities is likely to be found in every ecosystem in the universe, but the particular requirements of substantial technological achievements (such as building a spaceship to come visit Earth) imply tight constraints from the kinds of communicative systems that are available on that planet.

I will discuss the evolutionary constraints on language evolution, and with it the constraints on the evolution of intelligence, as they apply both on Earth and on other planets. Together with this, I will ask, what are the communicative abilities necessary for the evolution of a technological and space-faring species? Can we be sure that non-human animals on Earth are not able to build a spaceship? And if we discover alien life, would we be able to identify intelligence – “our” kind of intelligence – from their alien communication?

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