ORCAS DON'T NEED OPPOSABLE THUMBS

How common is technological life in the Milky Way Galaxy? What are the causal factors give rise to the evolution of technology? Beginning with occasional tool use in animals on this planet, we construct a theory of causation for tool use. Occasional tool use is always caused by environmental pressure that the animal is not well adapted to meet, given its built in toolkit.
We then examine why a species which was intelligent, but extremely weak and maladapted, would turn to tool use a full time survival strategy. Again, necessity is the key to encoding tool use as a full time strategy, but this time we need a crushing environmental pressure which threatens to destroy the species, and which, due to mutation or rapid environmental change, the organism again can not address with its built in toolkit.
In our ancestors, we see small bipedal, omnivores who were probably well adapted to their environment at one time. Like chimps today, they probably ate some fruit, and grabbed some protein when they could.
During periods of rapid climate oscillation, when wet periods were followed by lengthy mega-drought, the situation changed. Suddenly, these weak, bipedal apes had no fruit trees at all, and were so poorly adapted that they essentially had no way to make a living. Early humans turned to persistence hunting and stone tool use. Both strategies show a very desperate animal, on the edge of extinction.
Tool use became encoded as the central survival strategy in this strange little ape. But tool use stagnated for millions of years. Intelligence plus a simple feedback loop was not enough to produce advanced technology. Additional ingredients were required.
Finally, in modern humans, two key factors emerged. An irrational intelligence, capable of complex fictional mental simulations, produced a stream of quantum leaps in technology, starting with projectile weapons.
Modern humans also evolved hypersociality, which allowed these innovations to accumulate, and for humans to adopt specialized intellectual roles. With these additional causal factors, a technological species finally evolved on this planet.
The laws of physics and chemistry appear to be universal, based on our observations of distant stars, and distant galaxies. The laws of biology and evolution may also prove to be universal.
If so, then the same causal factors that led to the emergence of a technological species on our planet could recur. And in the absence of these causal factors, we would not expect a technological species to evolve.
This theory rejects the simple, common hypothesis that intelligence is a simple linear cause of tool use, and therefore, predicts that most intelligent life forms will never use technology. Tool use is not a very good intelligence test. In our world, the evidence clearly demonstrates that tool use is a function of need and morphological shortcomings, not intelligence.
However, the theory certainly does not predict that humans are unique. It is impossible to predict how an unknown alien species on a distant planet will act, or what they will look like, but if they are technologists, then like us, it will be because they are maladapted, and hypersocial, and fundamentally irrational. Otherwise, they will probably never make it off their own home planet. Weakness could come in many forms. Irrational imagination could run on a number of alien neural architectures. Hypersociality could also have many different possible permutations. But this expected variance does not change the requirements. All three ingredients are needed. This is the recipe for technological life.

Biologia / Não-ficção