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JoshuaZ comments on Rationality Quotes September 2011 - Less Wrong
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-- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
(I know it's old and famous and classic, but this doesn't make it any less precious, does it?)
I would actually think evolution a particularly poor choice.
If you want to pick one question to ask (and if we leave aside the obvious criterion of easy detectability from space) then you would want to pick one strongly connected in the dependency graph. Heavier than air flight, digital computers, nuclear energy, the expansion of the universe, the genetic code, are all good candidates. You can't discover those without discovering a lot of other things first.
But Aristotle could in principle have figured out evolution. The prior probability of doing so at that early stage may be small, but I'll still bet evolution has a much larger variance in its discovery time than a lot of other things.
Genetic code might likely vary. While it isn't implausible that other life would use DNA for its genetic storage it doesn't seem to be that likely. It seems extremely unlikely that DNA would be organized in the same triplet codon system that life on Earth uses.
Heavier than air flight is also a function of what sort of planet you are on. If Earth had slightly weaker or stronger gravity the difficulty of this achievement would change a lot. Also if intelligent life had arose from winged species one could see this as impacting how much they study aerodynamics and the like. One could conceive of that going either way (say having a very intuitive understanding of how to fly but considering it to be incredibly difficult to make an Artificial Flyer, or the opposite, using that intuition to easily understand what would need to be done in some form.)
Other than that, your argument seems to be a good one.