I've recently been debating the resolution to the Fermi paradox with Milan Cirkovic; I present one solution to it in my novel Permanence. (Fermi's paradox is merely the question, if life is common in the universe, why haven't we been seen signs of intelligent aliens by now?) Grandin's work would tend to support my side of the argument, namely that humans are not that qualitatively different from other creatures, and it is our technology and not us that is aberrant. The question is whether you see us as the apex of a pyramid of sentience, or as just one point in a broad distribution of types. Unquestionably, we have an advantage over our neighbours here on Earth. Would it necessarily always be the case that an intelligence like ours would beat out other forms of intelligence that were not so rapaciously technological? That's a bit harder to say, especially when you look at Grandin's thesis that many animals are "super-performers" in certain areas of cognitive speciality.

Grandin's most startling assertion is that many animals are smarter than us in the ways that count for them. We're simply not equipped to perceive their intelligence, any more than they are equipped to understand what we're doing when we speak to one another. But Grandin sees it all the time--and she herself perceives and reasons differently than an ordinary human, which is the root of her success in her professional life. She literally sees things other humans don't, and claims that animals do too.

If that's the case, then human beings have always lived immersed in a vast congress of reasoning, perceptive, communicating beings. Members of any one species don't perceive the intelligence of other species any more than we do; we're all isolated in some sense. But overlaid, in parallel, on this planet are numerous strands of sentience that have to be judged not in comparison to us but according to their ultimate impact on the animals that use them.

Intelligence, language, consciousness and tool-making therefore have to be considered not as values in their own right, but as strategies; their value lies in how well they fit a particular species' needs. They fit ours very well, as it turns out. Why then do we share the ability for structured verbal language with prairie dogs? As Grandin points out, this sort of language appears to be most beneficial for creatures that are utterly defenseless. Prairie dogs are food for everybody on the grasslands--they're the very bottom of the predator/prey pyramid. Big, soft and helpless as we are, maybe we developed language for the same reasons. If the faculties we are so proud of turn out to be compensating strategies to make up for profound disadvantages, then we have a simple explanation for why we're unique, on this world and apparently in the galaxy: we may embody all the last-chance, when-all-else-fails behaviours that other animals don't need. Does a bear need tools? No. Does a lion need to speak? No.

I'm not suggesting that our accomplishments are valueless--quite the contrary. What may have happened here was that we climbed a particularly difficult adaptive hill--a slope of maladaptive behaviours that, if you can get past it, opens out into the richest potential that any organism has ever seen. Maybe--I'm not convinced that tool-making isn't useful in and of itself, or that there's a necessary trade-off between having it and having other skills. Once again, these behaviours have to be judged in terms of the particular species that use them.

That said, Grandin's work implies that the fitness landscape of intelligence is considerably more complicated than we've thought. A solution to Fermi's paradox may lie there. Meanwhile, her work demands greater respect for the beings we live with--especially those that have adapted to us, the most complicated and unpredictable force the planet has ever seen.

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