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Is the rise of intelligent life inevitable?
Just thinking about this. I read the other day that human sociability may have driven the evolution of intelligence. Social animals are able to accomplish things as a group that they could never achieve individually. The individual then benefits from division of labor and the efforts as a whole. Case in point - none of us could grow/hunt our own food from scratch, let alone make a smartphone.
So the sociability of animals is a survival strategy that began with the nurturing of the young by parents (which evolved at some point in our evolution from single celled organisms to complex multicellular life) and finds its apex in humans' incredibly complex webs of social interactions.
So if sociability evolves because it empowers the individual with greater resources, and this is, in turn, is a driver for intelligence, then intelligent life is inevitable, given enough time, right?
Just a thought.
-Markus
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