By Anil Ananthaswamy
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a controversial French paleontologist, priest, and theologian, died in April 1955, a few months before a group of eminent scientists — including, notably, Marvin Minsky and Claude Shannon — proposed a study of artificial intelligence at Dartmouth College on “the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine …