“It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.”

—  Stephen Hawking

From the lecture Life in the Universe http://hawking.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=65 (1996)

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Stephen Hawking photo
Stephen Hawking 122
British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author 1942–2018

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Context: It has certainly been true in the past that what we call intelligence and scientific discovery have conveyed a survival advantage. It is not so clear that this is still the case: our scientific discoveries may well destroy us all, and even if they don’t, a complete unified theory may not make much difference to our chances of survival. However, provided the universe has evolved in a regular way, we might expect that the reasoning abilities that natural selection has given us would be valid also in our search for a complete unified theory, and so would not lead us to the wrong conclusions.

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