The timing of evolutionary transitions suggests intelligent life is rare
I love stuff like this, in the past I spent a good amount of time wondering about what were the key milestones in the development of intelligent life. Multicellularity is a good example. From my (admittedly outsider) perspective, a lot of that seems lost on the popular approaches to AI, which seem to focus too heavily on the late-stage result (the brain) and not everything that led up to it. Evolutionary algorithms have been out of vogue for some time, Artifical Life is an under-explored backwater.<p>One thing that I am surprised has been left out of this analysis is extinction events. In the intro it seems to dismiss “models that appeal to rare chance events” (paraphrasing). But the  Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction in particular was a chance event that had an absolutely massive...impact...on the evolution of intelligence. Dinosaurs dominated for a couple hundred million years with no signs of moving toward primate-style intelligence, and then suddenly a whole new set of conditions created an environment where scavenger  mammals developed rapidly.