“Just because evolution led to intelligence in our case, we shouldn’t assume that intelligence is an inevitable consequence of Darwinian natural selection. It is not clear that intelligence confers a long-term survival advantage. Bacteria and insects will survive quite happily even if our so-called intelligence leads us to destroy ourselves.”
Stephen Hawking, in Cosmos. (From Super Hamburger America, who titled this post “Macrointellectual humility”).