“Intelligence is the only thing required to render oneself extinct.”

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

The innate human nature to explore, discover and understand the world around us. This thirst of knowledge, this curiosity stream leads to propagation of the human mind to the depths and heights of known boundaries. Searching through the life around us, we realise a unique difference of perspective of this curiosity in humans. No other life form has defined what we call intelligence. Being intelligent is relative as all things we study in physics. Imagine a time-frame with evolving humans, somewhere near homo-erectus. The key factor of life in such a time frame would be survival, getting food, staying alive. The human mind evolved to trade the lack of survival tools with innovation. This has led to beliefs that engrave “Survival is the mother of Innovation”. Intelligence is not a necessity when it comes to survival, hence when we find that throughout the fossil record of life, Intelligence appears to be unique to the human race. But this very intelligence leads to a curiosity which inturn leads to an urge to find the meaning of this intelligence. Science has always been the tool that fueled and facilitated the prospects of the thirst of knowledge. Looking for answers to questions of WHY, WHEN, WHERE and HOW, might end you in an endless loop of finding new questions for every answer that was once a question. 

“With the boon of Intelligence comes the bane of recognizing failure.”

When living to survive, failure leads to extinction. But human society has changed those meanings, when you don’t succeed to survive the risk of failure increases and thus increases the RISK of realisations of failure. But sciences have evolved to exact the same pinpoint problem and to learn from the failures. Science deals with failure as an opportunity to learn. Every failure is an endeavour to achieve greater wisdom, and better understanding of success. Experimental backbone of the subject of Science demands failures to strengthen itself to manifest the knowledge to impeccable extents. Experimental findings in sciences are to be obtained by failures, possibly by someone who wants to disprove the findings. Imagine and experiment where we desire to obtain knowledge about the existence of a tiger in Pench National Park, while setting up the experiment we define the null hypothesis to be as follows

H0: Satisfactory evidence was obtained to believe that there are no tigers inside the Pench National Park

H1: Satisfactory evidence was obtained to believe that there are tigers inside the Pench National Park

Here also the desired result is the alternative hypothesis, where the experiment focuses on proving the contrary, and then the failure to prove that is what presents to us as in Experimental finding.

“The Phoenix must burn to emerge, Truth is no different”

- Janet Fitch

An emergent truth is when different people, with different intentions, in different locations and under different conditions perform the same experiment and fail to disprove the experimental findings. So what does it take to know the truth ? 

Intelligence !! That depends on how you define the term Intelligent lifeform, The one that can communicate with its own kind, then Dolphins are Intelligent.

The one that can innovate to adapt to living conditions, then monkeys are intelligent.

The one that can understand the surroundings and build to survive, then octopus are intelligent.

Well I guess, there is only one way to define intelligence such that only humans are intelligent, that would be to quote Neil deGrasse Tyson “Intelligence is the only thing required to render oneself extinct.”

         - Vedant Patil    

                                MSc I (Statistics)  

                1 March 2023

       Article no. 1