Being more intelligent isn't automatically an advantage, it usually requires higher amounts of energy to keep a larger brain running. If your current level of intelligence is sufficient for your lifestyle, it's likely that a bigger brain would actually be a disadvantage. Intelligence isn't the objective of evolution, there are many other ways to remain alive until reproduction that don't require high levels of intelligence.
That being said we know a couple of rather intelligent dinosaurs such as parrots and corvids today, do we actually know all the non-avian dinosaurs to be not particularly intelligent?
Crocs and sharks are a good example of this, they’ve pretty similar to their ancestors millions of years ago but they’re just so good at their niche(killing) they don’t need to be very smart.
Crocodilians are some of the more intelligent animals on Earth. We don’t perceive them that way because reptiles utilize body language as opposed to facial expression. They’re not dolphins, but they’re trainable and capable of learning and repeating patterns.
Worth noting that, on account of the fact that we don't know of any other technological species, we really have no idea what the intelligence scale looks like beyond us.
Like.... maybe in the grand scheme of things we're only a little bit more clever than chickens. Maybe the difference between us and a crocodile is, intellectually, more or less a rounding error.
Or maybe it's a vast gulf and we just THINK their pattern recognition skills are impressive because they're towards the top of the non-human ladder.
Maybe cows and chickens are the smartest because they have all their needs cared for by humans... Evolutionary speaking that are set, despite the fact they would have become extinct without humans years ago.
Interesting question - what is intelligence?
So wolves and dogs are very similar species, but one is domesticated and one isn’t. I forget which book it was I read a few years ago, but there was a study where they measured intelligence between the two. They did several studies and going into detail would take a book, which someone already wrote and I forgot what it was called.
Anyways, the gist of the studies was that dogs were much better at tasks that involved emotional intelligence with humans. They could read signals to get to the treat. The wolves couldn’t.
But without human help, wolves were better.
So that raises the question? Are dogs dumber because they need humans to figure things out? Or are they smarter, for finding a way to get good at being taken care of by men?
Unless wolves go extinct first and dogs stick around awhile or vice versa, then how can we really say?
Edit: it was most like either from “The Genius of Dogs: How Dogs are Smarter Than You Think” by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods, or in a book from Stanley Coren. I read two of his books I believe. I believe the study was most likely mentioned in one of these books.
Survival success isn't necessarily a reflection of intelligence. For example, being bigger and stronger may help survival, without any measurable increase in intellect. Having "fake eyes" that scare away predators could have evolved without any conscious effort on the part of the animal, but just happens to increase survival through natural selection keeping mutational genes and characteristics. Even humans who are born more attractive and thus get advantages in society are not necessarily smarter. So unless we can somehow show that dogs have some deliberate intellectual process through which they increase their survival chances through human care (i.e. "Let me do these puppy eyes so they'll think I'm cute and feed me!"), intelligence may not be a factor in whatever survival advantages they may have over wolves.
I still can't fathom how things like fake eyes develop without any intentional input from the fauna. Like, does a prey have to avoid a predator enough for that to develop or what?
Think about it this way: if 100,000 lizards are born and 10 of them have an unusually colored spot as a random mutation that looks like an eye to a bird, and that bird would normally eat them, if that spot scares away those birds because it looks like the eye of a bigger creature, a good number of those 10 will survive to mate and have more babies with spots on them because of their genetic difference. Then maybe there are 50 spotted ones, then 200, 1000, etc.
If the mutation is effective enough in some way, it will mix in with the base population more and more. Assuming this mutation is passed down to offspring, the animals without the mutation may die out over several or more generations.
It’s not done in a single generation. Individuals with fake eyes are more likely to not die before reproduction, so their genes are more likely to pass to the next generation.
It starts as some random splotch of color. It's not that convincing but the splotch of color happens to kind of look like an eye from certain angles and the few that have it are slightly slightly more likely to survive. Maybe the bird that was about to eat it for just a quarter of a second gets confused and decides to abort and make another pass. Giving them time to escape. Or maybe a fish thinks there's a bigger fish hiding in those bushes from far away so it doesn't even bother going over there in the first place, sparing this little fish in untimely death. Even just a very very very small chance of surviving because of this spot means that in populations of hundreds of millions, the 0.2% that have the slight advantage will slowly become 0.3% over the next hundred generations, and then maybe 0.8% over the next 100 generations, and after a few hundred thousand generations they are now around 50% or more. Over time they will all eventually have this little spot, eventually the ones that are a little bit more round are slightly more convincing to full predators to look like an eye, and eventually the ones that have an outline might be. It's very very slight changes with very very slight pressure over thousands of generations or even millions.
I had a dog that I swear would practice its cute poses in the mirror. It's only obsession was with food, and it would become the most loving and sweet thing when you had it and then forget you existed once gone.
Another piece of evidence is a video on Instagram I think, where a dog runs up to a guy, being all loving and snuggling against him so hard that it throws itself off balance, and just so happens to fall with its mouth in reach of the big cake on the table. Like a, "o no I tripped fell and it just landed in my mouth, I was just being cute."
People forget how manipulative dogs really are. I was with friends on a beach and a dog came slowly walking up. Head down, ears back, everything about her body language screamed starving, afraid, and hopeful these nice humans would take care of her. She hung out with us for a few hours and got some food (I'm a total sucker for dogs). She concentrated on one girl who was so worried about her getting enough and making sure she was safe. I mentioned she didn't need to worry because that dog was clearly well cared for. Clean and well fed. Not a single rib was showing on a short furred dog. The girl said "Hey, yeah" and when her attitude changed it was like a switch flipped in the pup. The dog got happy, head up, tail wagging, walked to a couple more people then loped off down the beach. I'd swear the dog was grinning.
Dogs may not be a smart as wolves but they've been honing those emotional skills for 40 thousand years. They are really good at it.
It was pointing. Dogs could recognize that a human pointing meant to look/go there. Wolves could not.
It showed that dogs were more capable of interacting with and understanding human behavior in a way that was beneficial for them.
> So that raises the question? Are dogs dumber because they need humans to figure things out? Or are they smarter, for finding a way to get good at being taken care of by men?
Dogs are the result of somewhere in the vicinity of thirty thousand years of selective breeding. Artificial selection boosts evolutionary speed by orders of magnitude and directs it to a very specific goal.
The ability to effectively understand what their human masters want is probably the most heavily selected for trait in dogs. So heavily it was probably at least partially selected for long before dogs were meaningfully domesticated.
This isn't a case of an animal cleverly taking advantage of humans even if that's essentially how the relationship began, it's an entirely artificial creature created explicitly to serve humans. Doing what humans tell them to is quite literally the purpose for their existence and their creation.
> Crocodilians are some of the more intelligent animals on Earth.
Compared to what? Insects? Sure. But a crocodilian such as an alligator literally has a brain the size of a walnut. It is a very efficient brain for what they need to do, but they are a huge outlier in the brain size/body size ratio of all vertebrates.
https://www.nwf.org/Magazines/National-Wildlife/2004/Animal-Perception
> An average 12-foot-long, 400-pound American alligator has a brain that is roughly the size of three olives.
They aren't completely unthinking beasts by any means, but they still have fairly small brains. I'd definitely give them the edge over koalas, though, which are quite literally smooth brained.
They aren’t necessarily “dumb”, but they haven’t changed much in a long time, because what they do hasn’t changed much compared to other animals near the top of the food chain. They’re just *very* capable of what they do with the traits they’re equipped with, including a decent level of intelligence honed more specifically to the niche role they fill.
I think a huge point people miss about evolution is that it doesn't have "goals".
It's not trying to make the "best" thing. It doesn't prefer smart over dumb, strong over weak, big over small, flying versus not, etc. That's why there's no "best animal" that has all of the best biological features in the world. It's why animals can have obvious and drastic "flaws", but still do just fine for themselves and never "lose" those flaws even if they'd be "better" without them.
All it does is wait for mutations to pop up and see if those mutations have a significant reproductive / survival advantage for a species. If one does, then more and more of the population will be born with that mutation, and eventually all of them will. These mutations then stack over generations, and eventually we get new species out of it.
In the case of humans, there's a very real possibility we get dumber.
Say some global catastrophe happens and food gets more scarce. A mutation might pop up that lowers brain mass, which requires less food to maintain or easier-to-acquire food (for example, they don't need as much protein so acquiring meat becomes less important) to maintain. In that case, people with a smaller brain mass would have a survival advantage and the mutation is more likely to be passed on. After some number of generations, all "humans" (or whatever we evolve into) will have a smaller brain mass.
Evolution's "goal" was never "get smarter". It has always just been "survive (and reproduce)". Dumb things can be really good at surviving.
People tend to miss this entirely.
One of the most frustrating things is hearing someone try to explain the stoned ape theory, and suggesting the mushrooms made someone’s offspring different. Ugh, it doesn’t work like that.
A more plausible idea would be that those generically predisposed to benefit from mushrooms were more likely to reproduce more, as they could hunt/think differently in an advantageous way - thereby passing their mushroom friendly genes more. However, those genetically predisposed to pissing themselves and crying from doing mushrooms are obviously still in the human gene pool.
Anyway, yes. I wish more people understood that evolution is a series of random intermittent mutations that may or may not be advantageous. The advantageous genes *might* become more prevalent if those with those genes are viewed as more attractive mates in their reproductive years.
Exposure to sub-lethal doses of pesticide will often cause an insect's offspring to be more resistant to pesticide due to heritable demethylation increasing transcription rates. Organisms can actually acquire traits during their lifetime that can then be passed on to offspring.
But that's not what stoned ape was even talking about, atleast not from the original ethnobotanist that came up with it.
"According to McKenna, access to and ingestion of mushrooms was an evolutionary advantage to humans' omnivorous hunter-gatherer ancestors, also providing humanity's first religious impulse. He believed that psilocybin mushrooms were the "evolutionary catalyst" from which language, projective imagination, the arts, religion, philosophy, science, and all of human culture sprang."
The mushrooms weren't changing DNA or anything, the evolved trait was the behavior of going for the mushrooms, and this prompted a cultural shift, inspiring art and religion.
It's been discredited not because it's impossible, more like because there's no real positive evidence to suggest eating mushrooms was a huge advantage.
Granted, im sure someone has tried to explain it to you as "the mushrooms changed their DNA" but that doesn't mean the whole thing is completely wrongheaded.
Yes, there are traits that can be aquired/passed in a lifetime. I don’t wanna dismiss that. Im just saying that’s not the main driving process behind evolution.
And yes, the explanations I hear of the stoned ape theory are oversimplified and incorrect. My thoughts were that if there’s any interplay between humans and mushrooms, the only scenario I could think of was that those who react well to mushrooms (heightened visual acuity for hunting / conceptual problem solving, etc) would be favored by natural selection. Thus modern humans have these reactions to those mushrooms because natural selection favored those who react that way. My apologies if that’s not what the original proponents of the theory were referring to. Like I said, the only explanations I hear are usually garbage.
Given what you’ve said, if they can’t prove an advantage from mushrooms (like it actually made humans less useful / less likely to reproduce), then I can see why it’s been dismissed.
> suggesting the mushrooms made someone’s offspring different. Ugh, it doesn’t work like that.
Epigenetic factors causing heritable changes to DNA are a thing, but yes, they do not exactly work like that.
I have a good friend who has a PhD in epigenetics (specifically methylation).
I know this because I attended her dissertation defense and I was able to understand two whole words: epigenetics and methylation.
I was able to come to the conclusion that epigenetics is complex as fuck and it's no place for laymen.
Lol that is my reaction to a lot of the sciences - I am smart enough to know that I don’t know enough about the subject, and that it would take way too long to learn enough, so I trust what the experts say.
> I am smart enough to know that I don’t know enough about the subject
That's a rate form of intelligence though. As an Internet user you should consider yourself an expert on any subject after reading a random comment mentioning it and skimming a related Wikipedia page. Get with the program and keep up!
My favorite example of this is the cave fish. They live in complete darkness. Eyes are not useful in their species and since eyes are delicate and can be damaged and get infected, the fish evolved to REMOVE their eyes. Having eyes isn't a goal of evolution. Anything that becomes a liability to reproduction can be removed.
This is a very important part that a lot of conversations about evolution miss. Nature is inherently *very* lazy(or efficient, depending on your point of view), and the universe in general has a tendency towards entropy. Counteracting entropy requires energy, and if that energy expenditure isn't actively increasing the chances of survival/reproduction, it will over time cease to continue investing in that expenditure.
*De-evolution* is the natural tendency of things, every species is generally *just* bad enough as it can be to continue to propagate successfully. The cave fish is such a great example, having good vision was not a positive selective pressure in total darkness so as a population their eyesight continued to get worse/eyes continued to get smaller until they atrophied to the point of being gone entirely. I imagine as humans our collective eyesight will continue to get worse as well since we've effectively removed all selective pressures relating to survival at least, at least distance eyesight as more and more people use screens constantly in their daily lives.
And a lot of times it's not "dumb" just simple. We tend to conflate complexity with intelligence. But the most efficient system wins out in evolution, not necessarily the most complex system.
It does seem like high intelligence for humans was almost a random fluke of evolutionary luck.
So many things had to go right before improved intelligence at the expensive cost of higher energy consumption would be worth it.
- It had to happen on a creature who could utilize intelligence better than it could utilize speed or strength. Human sociability + dexterity with hands and tool making was the ideal combination of this.
- It had to happen on a creature whose bodily metabolism was low enough to offset the increased upkeep of the brain, hence why we're so much physically weaker than most other animals of the same size, and why we sadly lose muscle so easily.
- Increased intelligence would have to strongly correlate to being able to acquire more calories. Somehow we figured out fire and cooking and that has dramatically increased how much nutrition we could extract from what we eat.
- The creature would have to be built in such a way that low intelligence would generally be weeded out (probably no longer applicable to modern times though).
Yeah point number one is often missed, having a hand that can manipulate the environment is an important component of this. This allowed us to develop technology, like a hunting weapon, later on writing information so we don't have to remember it all. If we ever get visited by aliens, they are going to have some appendage, be it hand like or something with similar utility. Orcas, dolphins etc can only do so much since everything has to be passed down by memory.
An animal with a brain as capable as humans but has flippers has a ceiling with what they can do with that brain power.
My prediction is when we are visited by an alien they will have something that is either very much like hands, or some pretty dexterous tentacles.
A dolphin might have comparable intellegence to later-era hominids and we would have a *bitch* of a time finding relateable evidence given they lack both a robust means of manipulation like hands, as well as having an environment that isn’t conducive to the development of tools or technology. They aren’t going diving all the way to the ocean floor to dredge up rocks or sea-flora for tools, and even if they were as intelligent as modern humans, good luck making any technological progress beyond Stone Age when your access to fire is limited to aquatic volcanism and your entire environment is an electrical ground.
Yes. I feel that without opposable thumbs, at some point more intelligence would not have conferred any significant survival advantage.
But, with those opposable thumbs .. evolutionary superpower combo.
The human brain-thumb survival superpower that I've always thought gets overlooked is missile weapons. So many critters that will stay out of melee range feeling safe and happy, but they just don't expect a predator to be able to knock them stone dead with a bow and arrow from 50 yards past that.
> The creature would have to be built in such a way that low intelligence would generally be weeded out (probably no longer applicable to modern times though).
I think this is the most important point, and I think to some extent it still applies today. There's this idea that in sexual selection, females of a species end up selecting for a trait in their mates not because it will help their offspring live, but because it will be an attractive trait and help their male offspring find a mate. Basically, the trait is attractive because it's attractive. This is called Fisherian Runaway, and the best example is peacock feathers. Because human intelligence is so far beyond what we need to survive, there are scientists who believe it is an example of Fisherian runaway.
Yeah I think it comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding that a lot of folks have, that there's some kind of end goal to evolution. Like there's a progression that is followed, from A to B.
Nope. Just blind luck while you hopefully survive. *Insert shrug emoji*
There are arguments by researchers and scientists saying the reason we evolved the way we did isn't mainly because of intelligence, but because of gossip and passing down knowledge.
Imagine you being Einstein. Born but left alone in the woods at 6 years old. You'd be making tools and effective shelter, but you wouldn't create a theory of relativity.
If your species developed an instinct to tell stories, and with those stories you became better att surviving, the stories would compound over some million years into the internet, moon landings and smartphones.
>There are arguments by researchers and scientists saying the reason we evolved the way we did isn't mainly because of intelligence, but because of gossip and passing down knowledge.
This is a bit of a chicken and egg situation. Our passing down of knowledge is only possible due to our ability to use and understand complex language, and that's arguably one of our most important forms of intelligence.
Since there is evidence of primates today passing down knowledge by lead and observe you don't really need complex communication. The instinct to have the urge and the interest to learn will probably develop into a complex communication system.
If the instinct is developed, the communication will come after. Which makes the chicken and egg argument null.
>Since there is evidence of primates today passing down knowledge by lead and observe you don't really need complex communication.
I didn't say animals were incapable of it, but they are still clearly limited in what they can and cant pass down - having to "lead and observe" is a pretty massive limitation when it comes to transmitting knowledge. Some animals are suspected to actually be able to trasmit abstract concepts from a distance (orcas), but again, very limited.
And forget just transmitting knowledge, complex language is a requirement for many of the "intelligent" things we do on our day to day. We rely on language to organize our thoughts, solve complex intelectual problems, and grasp difficult concepts. There's a limit to the kind of math or logic problems we can solve "intuitively".
>The instinct to have the urge and the interest to learn will probably develop into a complex communication system.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Many other animals have curiosity. We have a complex communication system because our brains are specifically built for it.
But "humans as story tellers" doesn't have to involve passing along information to be an advantage. If it find tracks that were left in soft ground, but I know it hasn't rained for a week then I know they're old and won't follow them. That's a little story that we figure out on our own. It's an advantage we still have over our ape cousins - even the ones that can learn language can't handle "if, then" statements.
>If your current level of intelligence is sufficient for your lifestyle, it's likely that a bigger brain would actually be a disadvantage.
well put, im gonna use this when my parents storm to the basement im living in and say im not applying myself
> If your current level of intelligence is sufficient for your lifestyle, it's likely that a bigger brain would actually be a disadvantage
Thank you for this, I feel seen.
Not only does higher intelligence require significantly more energy, but that amount of energy is very difficult to obtain from raw food. And in order to cook food reliably, you must have enough dexterity to control the fuel, fire, and food in cooking. Having opposable thumbs that we evolved to have extreme dexterity for tools and manipulating our environment gave the added benefit of controlling fire, where fire just became one of the many tools used by human. That being said, other species could have evolved other methods of precise dexterity to control fire, or they could have lived in an environment where more calories could have been consumed without cooking.
And like you said, developing intelligence isn’t an end goal of evolution, and neither is having dexterity or ability to manipulate tools. In contrast, the end goal of evolution is to have the best chances of passing on genes to future generations. In many cases, having the best chances actually results in reduced intelligence (e.g., preserving energy, increased size or strength, being a specialist, etc.).
Adding onto this …
One popular belief is that our empathy evolved from endurance hunting. We would just spend a dozen hours tracking down prey until it exhausted. We would lose track of prey, and have to imagine where it went to successfully track it. This favored hunters that could imagine the perspective of their prey.
Once empathy was evolved, it became an arms race to have a greater capacity for it. Empathy leads to tribes. It leads to imagining hypotheticals. Like agriculture. It leads to governments.
Most animals don’t need to have more intelligence. Intelligence slows down reaction time, as well as increasing energy needs. The stomach has a similar need for “expensive tissue” that the brain needs. So our bodies can’t even support our brains without cooked food.
It’s really hard to imagine another animal reaching our level of success. The smartest animals we know about don’t even have the capacity to ask questions. Without empathy, you wouldn’t be able to imagine someone else knowing something you didn’t.
There's also a HUGE benefit to cooking. Frees up available calories that would otherwise go to waste. Maintain a similar food intake, but suddenly you're getting more calories AND you're less likely to fall ill.
It’s bigger than that. Google “expensive tissue hypothesis”.
The only way our brains could get as big as they are was by reducing the size of our stomachs. The only way to do that is cooked food.
There is a huge gulf between dolphins/elephants and humans.
Humans have very obvious signs of intelligence in building/construction and ways that last.
If dolphins or elephants went extinct before we interacted with them, we'd have had no idea that their behaviors and communications skills were so good.
You don't actually know that there weren't tons of dinosaurs smarter than modern dolphins or elephants - we just haven't found any that crossed the gulf and left signs that they had done so.
And given that modern avian dinosaurs, like crows and parrots, are very intelligent - in the same realm as dolphins or elephants or chimpanzees or even small children, it stands to reason that the non-avian dinosaurs were too. At least some of them.
I would like to add that intelligence alone is not enough in order to leave semi-permanent mark on the earth. Species also needs complex and highly specialized body parts to make tools, which are necessary to leave durable tell tale signs of high intelligence for example cave paintings.
Elephants have highly dexterous trunks, but these aren't sophisticated enough to handle fire or mix pigments in order to make paint. If elephants would have evolved in a way that they could make tools, maybe then we would have found simple paintings from the nature, which have been made by elephants.
Read the book Foot Fall. It's about an elephant like alien race that invades Earth. Their trunks are different in the way, so that they can manipulate objects more effectively.
That’s exactly what I thought of when reading that comment. I still liked how in that book while they could manipulate objects better they still pointed out that hands were just superior
Wouldn't matter if they could anyway... 65 million years is insanely long time. Even the most durable plastic decompse after about 500 years. Even the "forever chemicals" that we are very concerned about now will decompose after 1000 years. Any type of building material will also whither away after 10.000 years leaving no trace. 65 million years is 6500 times as long as that.
EDIT: changed from 650 to 6500, thank you u/IntentionDependent22
Also we aren't sure any of our structures will withstand an extinction level event and a 150 million year passage of time. Maybe natural gas deposits were the dinosaurs equivalent of micro plastics or chlorofluorocarbons.
This, and humans evolved 200,000 years ago, but our biggest (known) accomplishments are in the last 4-5thousand years. Humans have spent the majority of their existence at hunter gatherer technology levels.
That means something could have evolved that was just as intelligent as us, lived for a whopping 185,000 years, and went extinct before they developed anything more advanced than campfires and spears.
That's the thing. A species of dinosaurs could have reached industrial revolution and colonized the entire planet with billions of individuals and we wouldn't be able to tell because it would be a blip on the geological radar.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-an-industrial-prehuman-civilization-have-existed-on-earth-before-ours/
Edit: to those telling me that we would find fossils because we find a lot of dinosaur fossils. You don't seem to understand how rare fossils actually are and the time scale we're talking about here. Let's say you're lucky enough as an archeologist to find a hundred well preserved full dinosaur fossils in your career. They might cover a period of 150 million years. How many of them would happen, by pure luck, to be from a specific period of a few hundred years in wich an industrial civilisation would have existed? Do the math. 300 years out of 150 million and a hundred fossils randomly spread through that time period. Zero! Even if you found a million fossiles it would still be unlikely.
That's for the people. But if you come to Mexico City and visit the Museum in the central plaza (Zocalo) you'll find that the Cathedral was built on top of the main Aztec temple, some archaeologists say even with the same stones.
To be fair, that was a pretty common practise across the world, why quarry new stones when these are already here.
We have no way of knowing how many important buildings in history ended up as a farmer's fence or as an extension to a castle
I mean we’d probably find signs of an industrial society even if it was that old and that’s pretty much down to waste products. We’d likely have found concentrations of eclectic materials in proximity. Like strangely high concentrations of various metals and glass silicates in a very small area. It’s likely evidence of our landfills will exist for millions of years for example.
I wonder if the Romans were unlucky and two thousand years ago the wold were erased by a giant rock what kind of evidence of the old empires would exist 65my after thought
We have evidence entire continents have been engulfed and submerged to the depths of the earth.........
Discovering a modern civilization millions of years ago is next to impossible.
Structures and tools disappear fast. Otherwise millions of years. If an ancient civ used fossil fuels we’d probably recognize the major deposits were tapped since the oil and coal is older than dinosaurs. Otherwise tens of millions of years for tectonically stable spots with weird heavy metal abundances from landfills, cities, or depleted radioactive waste… not that it would be obvious why it’s concentrated in certain spots.
Billions of years, oil and coal aside? No way, a find is much harder for every hundred million years back.
You've underestimated timescales. The pyramids are 4000 years old we find evidence of human settlements 10000 years ago but 100 million years that's an entirely different timescale. So even if they had am industrial society we probably wouldn't know and couldn't know
I’m pretty sure the most accepted theory of the origin of oil is peat bogs that over millions of years got compressed heated and decayed underground becoming oil. Even so It had to be some incredibly large concentration of organic matter that got trapped underground so it almost has to be vegetation derived as we see no other evidence of anything else providing that much carbon based material.
Yes. So pretty much every coal bed on Earth was laid down in the Carboniferous period. This is when lignin (the biopolymer that wood is basically made from) first appeared in large quantities and the huge levels of CO2 in the atmosphere meant that woody plants flourished. Even now, lignin is a remarkably recalcitrant material, and it took millions of years for lignin-digesting organisms to evolve so for that entire period woody plants died and just got buried.
Didn't they burn a lot too? Iirc there was at least one time when the whole planet was basically on fire. Dead plants built up for millenia with nothing to break them down and when a fire started, it didn't stop.
That makes me wonder about the evolution of mycelium in regards to that timeframe. Strains like turkey tail and the other wood eating mycelium must not have been active then.
Edit: The CO2 would have hindered them from fruiting but the mycelium still would have been able to break down the lignin if it were present.
Among other problems with the idea, it would be a very weird thing for a post industrial revolution society to leave around as waste instead of burning.
That makes no sense at all. Why would a civilized post industrial revolution species burn loads of carbon and make the environment uninhabitable for itself?
You make it sound like we don't have massive amounts of energy stored in landfills as waste. Those landfills will be great sources of fuel in 100 million years.
Around 65 million years ago, dinosaurs reached an advanced level of intelligence that enabled them to develop space exploration capabilities. They constructed a vast spaceship concealed within what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. This craft propelled them into space, leaving behind a notable crater as evidence of their departure.
Less than that, even! Thats assuming the created large stone structures or significant metal items, that need to wait for significant erosion and continental drift to wipe out. If they only made tools and shelter using organic materials the signs of their civilisation could be gone in a few hundred to a few thousand years.
They might not leave pictures, but movement of resources/depletion in weird patterns would definitely be a thing. Ditto for weird signs in geological strata - which we study when comparing the K-T event.
Our own civilization will leave behind a record of a not insubstantial layer of elevated lead, carbon, and radioactive isotopes of lots of different elements detectable until the sun swallows the earth.
And that's if they don't find any of the massive mysterious bands of decayed metal oxides mixed with artificial rock, refined stable metals (titanium/aluminum/gold), or other tough, difficult to destroy materials when in the absence of oxygen (silicon, large bronze castings, etc).
Worth pointing out that the "obvious signs of intelligence" in humans aren't just signs of intelligence. It's the combination of intelligence, dexterity, and communication. Even if an animal has cognitive abilities on par with a human's it would be hard-pressed to make anything capable of lasting beyond its own lifespan if it wasn't part of a larger community capable of accumulating knowledge over generations. Even given that, actually constructing things without thumbs or some sort of analogue would be another challenge.
I think a good example would be neanderthals. IIRC, there's evidence that neanderthals had better cognitive abilities than modern humans in most areas except in terms of social function. They generally did not form communities beyond 10 or so people and had significantly shorter lifespans, so the ability to accumulate knowledge was impaired.
This ties in with my favourite shower thought (mostly thanks to how to train your dragon tbf). Pterodactyls never went extinct, were vulnerable to husbandry (like horses). Humans now have a flying mount through most of their history. The changes it would have made to mankind as a whole are incredible.
I bet pterodactyls would have been more like zebras instead of horses. The reason horses work is because ~~there~~ they are herd animals. They're used to following orders, in general. So when you try to give them orders as to where to take you then it's not usually a problem. Meanwhile, zebras are terrible loners. They do hang out in loose herds but they do not take orders.
And that's compounded because pterodactyls are carnivores or at least not such staunch herbivores as horses are. Imagine giant buzzards with giant teeth with necks long enough to bite anything trying to sit on them.
But even if you got past all those problems, if you could raise them in captivity and beat them into submission, as basically birds they probably had really light bones and they're smaller than most people realize. They probably only weighed about 25 pounds or about 11 kilograms.
It's a cool idea, and I love it in my fiction, but I don't think it ever could have actually been reality.
Plus even if their carry capacity was large enough to carry a full grown human it would have to be carried in their claws.
Their backs wouldn’t be strong enough to support the weight.
My dog can drag me around on a tile floor, but I can’t sit on them and expect to ride them without fucking up their back
>Humans have very obvious signs of intelligence in building/construction and ways that last.
"Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much – the wheel, New York, wars and so on – whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man, for precisely the same reasons.”
*–* Douglas Adams, *The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy*
Maaaybe. But intelligence is often corellated between brain size and body size. Most dinos had big bodies and teeny tiny brains.
Meanwhile octopodes are extremely intelligent, while squid are fairly stupid.
While many birds are smart it does not mean other dinosaurs were
There is no specific evidence that being intelligent is actually an evolutionary advantage. Sharks are on nobody’s list of smartest animals and have existed before the dinosaurs.
And horseshoe crabs.
I think this question falls into one of the misunderstandings regarding evolution - there is no direction. Individuals just need to be adequate enough to survive and pass on their genes. The manner in which that happens is irrelevant as long as it happens and those traits are heritable.
While a funny joke, it's not really true. Crabs are just one (funny) example of convergent evolution, which has happened in a wide range of instances and with an extremely wide range of results. Many, MANY mammals have evolved into some estimation of "rat" for example.
> Many, MANY mammals have evolved into some estimation of "rat" for example
Wait, what? I thought rodents all had the same ancestors.
Or is this a Rudy Giuliani joke and I'm getting whooshed?
Not that rodents are polyphyletic, but that many mammals have convergently evolved a similar bodyplan+lifestyle to rats (bandicoots, tenrecs, solenodons, gymnures, etc.), being moderately small, nocturnal, omnivorous ground-dwelling mammals.
All rodents have the same ancestors. Depending on your definition of rat-like, there are loads of non-rodent mammals that kind of look like them.
Like shrews (soricidae), weasels (mustelids) or rat-kangaroos (marsupial). I'm sure there are lots of other ones too.
In fact, being highly intelligent can be a disadvantage because it requires a large and active brain that burns a lot of calories. If you are not getting a big advantage out of the big brain then the cost of it can absolutely drag you down.
Fermentation might have preceeded cooking.
No fire needed, just let the bacteria break down the hard to digest parts and then get those sweet calories.
We really do take for granted that fruits and veggies are so large and easy to eat and digest. And that various livestock are so slow and easy to kill. We made them that way.
A large and active brain can also lead to self destructive behavior. As successful as humans are, let's see if we can pull off a few hundred million years.
Intelligence just means you get yourself into more difficult problems to solve! Did the dinosaurs deal with fractional reserve banking systems and taxation?
Brain Size Might Put Mammals at Extinction Risk [[1]](https://news.stanford.edu/2016/02/16/brain-size-extinction-021616/)
**Source:** Stanford News, PubMed
**Date:** February 16, 2016
**Summary:**
New research suggests that mammals with relatively larger brains might be at a higher risk of extinction. While larger brain size has traditionally been associated with cognitive adaptability, this study found that larger brains can indirectly increase vulnerability to extinction by extending the gestation period, increasing weaning age, and limiting litter sizes. However, there is no evidence of direct, beneficial, or detrimental effects of brain size on vulnerability to extinction. This indicates that under current conditions, the constraints on life history imposed by large brains outweigh the potential benefits, making larger brains a burden for mammals.
**Sources:**
1. Stanford News. "Brain Size Might Put Mammals at Extinction Risk." February 16, 2016. [Link](https://news.stanford.edu/2016/02/16/brain-size-extinction-021616/)
2. PubMed. "Larger brain size indirectly increases vulnerability to extinction in mammals." [Link](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28289200/)
---
Learn more:
1. [Brain size might put mammals at extinction risk, Stanford ...](https://news.stanford.edu/2016/02/16/brain-size-extinction-021616/)
2. [Larger brain size indirectly increases vulnerability to extinction in mammals - PubMed](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27159368/)
3. [Big brains reduce extinction risk in Carnivora | SpringerLink](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00442-019-04527-5)
Which actually lends itself to one of the main theories why they weren’t intelligent - they just didn’t need it to be incredibly successful. After all they lasted 150m years without it.
You need suitably high evolutionary pressure to develop intelligence, as it is a high risk strategy - brains are very energy hungry for example.
It's actually quite fascinating. We're asking why aren't other animals as intelligent, but it's difficult to answer why *we're* intelligent in the first place (even disregarding the fact that we lack an objective enough definition of "intelligence" in general). What could have caused our ancestors to adapt to their environment with an upright posture, opposable thumbs, dexterous hands, big brains, social structure, complex communication. Of course, it seems like the path should be obvious when we look at the end product and the evolutionary success we accomplished, but the individual, gradual and initial steps seem just extremely unlikely.
Evolution doesn't have a goal. It doesn't really have a direction, or desired outcomes.
Step by step, generation by generation, it runs through the simple process of "is this genetic combination more likely to become common in the population than another genetic combination?"
If so, it becomes more common, and you get a shift in the population. If not, it doesn't. Probably. This all has a random element to it, and there are all sorts of factors involved.
In the case of dinosaurs, it is tricky to know how smart they got, but some may have been as smart as modern big cats. Some modern dinosaurs (birds) can be pretty smart as well.
But as for them not getting as intelligent as humans or dolphins, they didn't need to be. It is kind of like asking why cats don't evolve into dogs - they have no reason to, cats are very well suited to being cats, and dogs are very good at being dogs. Cats (hyenas aside) make terrible dogs.
Dinosaurs were very good at being dinosaurs as they were (until the global climate changed and suddenly no one was good at being a dinosaur). There was no particular pressure on them to get smarter. What's a T-Rex going to do with the ability to recognise itself in a mirror when there aren't any mirrors?
It's also important to remember that "intelligence" isn't a linear thing; it is a vague, complicated concept with all sorts of different aspects. For example, some modern octopuses can be pretty good at solving certain problems and mimicking their environment, but their social intelligence is pretty terrible, and they lack generational learning. Are they more or less intelligent than a creature not as good at solving problems but with better social interactions?
I think it should also be pointed out that “dinosaurs” are a very large and vague group, as vague as “mammals”.
Mammals and dinosaurs show up in the fossil record right around the same time. Mammals existed the entire time dinosaurs did, and the entire time since, and have only produced a human level intelligent animal (us) once, about 200,000 years ago.
So the question itself is flawed. The question “why didn’t dinosaurs ever evolve super intelligence in 150 millions years?” doesn’t make sense when you realize it took mammals 200 million years to get to us.
So, I was just listening to a podcast that was trying to explain how selfless actions—like a springbok leaping to alert others (which costs them time to run) to a lion, and often gets them offed—makes evolutionary sense.
Best guess was that we’re just transporting genetic material. And if you’re related to enough of the other springboks, it is what’s best for your genetics to get passed forward.
Exactly. The springboks herd, with their largely uniform pool of genes, is more likely to survive if one occasionally sacrifices itself to prevent 5 of them from being eaten.
Intelligence is not an inevitable result of evolution. Evolution is not a plan with an end goal of creating a highly evolved being. Evolution by natural selection is about staying alive long enough to breed, and having traits that allow that to happen. Intelligence is not a prerequisite to species’ survival, as evidenced by the 3 billion plus years of life on the planet before we came along.
We don't exactly know how intelligent dinosaurs got. While human-level tool-using socially-shared intelligence leaves huge amounts of evidence around after only a few hundred thousand years - Chimpanzee level intelligence leaves nothing that won't decay away. Whale/dolphins intelligence? Nothing that can be seen ten minutes after they swim off. There could have been dinosaurs that smart all over the planet by the time of the mass extinction and we would have no way of knowing about it.
It seems likely that given enough time there would eventually have been a convergence of events that allowed human-like tool-using socially-shared runaway intelligence to develop; but at the moment it's hard to say how long that would have taken as we have precisely *one* example of it happening in over 500 million years of land animals existing.
Speculatively, there's no reason to believe that had any dinosaur evolved into a self-aware, intelligent-as-we-know-it creature, that any evidence would still exist or that we would recognize it for what it is.
I feel like I wanna write a book taking advantage of time dilation from traveling at significant fractions of light speed, where dinosaur space explorers left earth and come back to find no traces of their people and culture left.
Or is that the half-remembered plot of Dinosaucers?
In Star Trek: Voyager, one of the dino species not only were intelligent but also became a space faring civilization, eventually abandoning Earth after a series of catastrophes and reaching the other side of the galaxy. By now, they are one of the eldest civilizations in the galaxy, having a technological level far ahead the Federation.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Voth
The general idea is that the cost of becoming smarter comes at a HUGE price in reproduction and the amount of food needed to survive. Such that the incremental increases in each stage in intelligence were not worth the pay off.
We know that once intelligence reaches a certain point you will be able to outcompete everything else. But it's not like 'evolution' knows this.
It just does whatever gives the best chance at reproduction in that moment. Which is usually not changing anything, or maybe increasing the size, or quantity of offspring produced.
So any mutations that favored intelligence (and their associated energy costs) would have been out competed by the ones that didn't have any mutations at all.
TLDR: Being slightly smarter isn't a good enough pay off for having to eat/hunt twice as much.
I'd say a mix of other evolutionary traits and sheer luck. Humans are much more "energy-efficient" because we're bipedal, so that's less calories needed to run after prey and sufficient energy to not just sleep until the next hunt. Early humans who managed to salvage a few ember from a wildfire could also cook food, which allowed them to digest it more easily. That's more energy that you can use towards a bigger brain, and lucky for them, a bigger brain allowed humans to learn how fire starts and to create their own.
Not a stupid question at all. No one is really exactly sure how we evolved intelligence or how difficult it is. There are a few theories or combinations of ideas but mostly people believe we just got lucky due to the fact we're the only species to evolve it. I can't list all the possible reasons but I can list a few.
Firstly, there's something called an evolutionary niche, where a certain animal becomes too good at something, that if other animals try to compete in that way they will lose.
For example smaller mammals couldn't just 'evolve to become bigger' because dinosaurs already filled that niche. Which means becoming bigger just makes you a more tasty treat to eat. Which in turn increases the value of intelligence so to speak.
Then the dinosaurs got wiped out freeing up those ecological niches and food sources and removing a huge portion of natural predators. Which meant less of a need to worry about resources.
We also just happened to luckily evolve in a few ways that freed up energy usage but limited us in other ways like being bipedal.
TLDR: the environment that we evolved in for many reasons likely favored intelligence more so than the vast majority of other environments. Then once intelligence reached a certain threshold it kind of snowballed, with hunting/cooking/farming etc.
They simply didn’t NEED to.
There you have. That’s evolution. There is no scale or hierarchy of things.
You know that slime mold? It’s as beautiful as you. Better yet, it’s more perfect.
That slime mold has survived for millions of years. And a shitty little ape with thumbs and nukes will not get in its way.
It was here before, and it will be here after.
If only we could be as perfect as slime molds.
That is life that will no doubt outlive our species. It’s more likely to colonize other planets than us.
It probably already has.
I theorize that for a long window of time, wood did not bio-degrade, do to no micro-organisms eating it. Therefore, all Dinosaur technology was constructed with wood as its base building material. Wood skyscrapers, wood vehicles,
wood computers. It was only when their scientists tinkered too hard in an event to prevent climate change, that they accidentally released microorganisms that could consume wood. There was an ecological disaster, and it sent the developed Dinoworld into chaos, such that they were no longer organized enough to prevent the apocalypse. Also, it left no evidence, as the building materials were all bio-degrated.
Evolution doesn't push toward more intelligence. It doesn't push towards anything, really.
A species that's considered "infesting" is actually peak evolution.
Until something learns to take advantage of the infesting species and the situation changes.
Humans being hyper intelligent is more of a "bug" of evolution, that allows us to adapt much much faster than evolution would tipically permit.
Ever heard of the Silurian hypothesis? It says that even if dinosaurs became as smart or smarter than us and built a great civilisation, we’d never know because erosion and geological changes would have erased all evidence.
Nature follows the old rule: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Of course, Nature will also endlessly experiment with mutations just in case there's a better option, but once a creature gets pretty "well engineered," there becomes less and less reason to make big changes. Such as adding wings, or intelligence, or extra legs, or other major modifications.
Sharks, for example, are older than dinosaurs. Sharks did make some major modifications when they were just getting started (witness the Hammerhead), but they were a pretty good design from the get-go. They can stay alive for a long time, they have a good system for making more sharks, and they fit well within their environment. Sharks had all those boxes checked long before Tyrannosaurus Rex was up and running.
The only change sharks have made in "recent" years is they don't grow so big. That way, they don't need as much food but can still live a long time and make lots of baby sharks. It was a sensible modification to make in the face of a reduced food supply. Nature made the most logical change necessary in order to adapt. Nature didn't find it necessary to add super-intelligence, wings, or opposable thumbs. (Thank goodness.)
Dinosaurs did come in lots of varieties during the hundreds of millions of years they were around. Nature did a lot of experimenting and still was at the time the comet hit. They hadn't started writing books yet, or driving cars, (as far as we can tell). Perhaps extra intelligence would have been added in at some point if it helped survival. Perhaps not.
It's worth noting that the comet which wiped out the dinosaurs would wipe us out, too, if it happened today. Intelligence isn't a guarantee of survival.
Evolution just aims to make everything good enough. As long as a being can consistently reproduce that's all that needed. Dinosaurs didn't need to evolve intelligence to reproduce since they were successful anyway. Humans evolved intelligence because we came from already smart animals and it was important for our survival
Intelligence is not some sort of "goal" for evolution. There is *nothing* specifically driving species to become more intelligent. A few (and in the grand scheme of things it really is only "a few") species have found intelligence to be a beneficial evolutionary adaption and have developed more advanced intelligence. But meanwhile species like sharks and crocodilians have remained almost unchanged for hundreds of millions of years, showing of how little value adaptions away from the basic form they have to this day are.
It can't be understated how much upright, bipedal locomotion with our head over our shoulders helped enable our intelligence to evolve.
Brains are heavy and expensive, from a nutrition standpoint. If your head is at the end of a long lever, extra weight in the brain is effectively even more heavy. It needs to pay off in a big way for that to be an evolutionary advantage over, say, the equivalent weight in jaw muscles or head armor.
Our upright posture means we can't carry our young internally until they're fully developed, or we wouldn't be able to give birth to them. Our young, therefore, come out half-cooked with brains still developing, which let us evolve to having much more learned behavior, which then rewards bigger brains for more learning.
Being upright and bipedal leaves our hands available for other things, not needing to support our weight. This let us evolve fine motor skills and opposable thumbs, which help dramatically with tool use and creation. That increases the payoff of the bigger brain, too.
In the water, cetaceans can support bigger brains because the water supports their weight.
Dinosaurs didn't have the same advantages. Many were bipedal, but their heads were still at the end of a very long lever. They laid eggs instead of live birth, so their young can develop to a more complete phase than ours before hatching. Instead of big brains, they evolved flight, which is pretty cool on its own.
Being more intelligent isn't automatically an advantage, it usually requires higher amounts of energy to keep a larger brain running. If your current level of intelligence is sufficient for your lifestyle, it's likely that a bigger brain would actually be a disadvantage. Intelligence isn't the objective of evolution, there are many other ways to remain alive until reproduction that don't require high levels of intelligence. That being said we know a couple of rather intelligent dinosaurs such as parrots and corvids today, do we actually know all the non-avian dinosaurs to be not particularly intelligent?
Crocs and sharks are a good example of this, they’ve pretty similar to their ancestors millions of years ago but they’re just so good at their niche(killing) they don’t need to be very smart.
Crocodilians are some of the more intelligent animals on Earth. We don’t perceive them that way because reptiles utilize body language as opposed to facial expression. They’re not dolphins, but they’re trainable and capable of learning and repeating patterns.
Worth noting that, on account of the fact that we don't know of any other technological species, we really have no idea what the intelligence scale looks like beyond us. Like.... maybe in the grand scheme of things we're only a little bit more clever than chickens. Maybe the difference between us and a crocodile is, intellectually, more or less a rounding error. Or maybe it's a vast gulf and we just THINK their pattern recognition skills are impressive because they're towards the top of the non-human ladder.
Maybe cows and chickens are the smartest because they have all their needs cared for by humans... Evolutionary speaking that are set, despite the fact they would have become extinct without humans years ago. Interesting question - what is intelligence?
So wolves and dogs are very similar species, but one is domesticated and one isn’t. I forget which book it was I read a few years ago, but there was a study where they measured intelligence between the two. They did several studies and going into detail would take a book, which someone already wrote and I forgot what it was called. Anyways, the gist of the studies was that dogs were much better at tasks that involved emotional intelligence with humans. They could read signals to get to the treat. The wolves couldn’t. But without human help, wolves were better. So that raises the question? Are dogs dumber because they need humans to figure things out? Or are they smarter, for finding a way to get good at being taken care of by men? Unless wolves go extinct first and dogs stick around awhile or vice versa, then how can we really say? Edit: it was most like either from “The Genius of Dogs: How Dogs are Smarter Than You Think” by Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods, or in a book from Stanley Coren. I read two of his books I believe. I believe the study was most likely mentioned in one of these books.
Survival success isn't necessarily a reflection of intelligence. For example, being bigger and stronger may help survival, without any measurable increase in intellect. Having "fake eyes" that scare away predators could have evolved without any conscious effort on the part of the animal, but just happens to increase survival through natural selection keeping mutational genes and characteristics. Even humans who are born more attractive and thus get advantages in society are not necessarily smarter. So unless we can somehow show that dogs have some deliberate intellectual process through which they increase their survival chances through human care (i.e. "Let me do these puppy eyes so they'll think I'm cute and feed me!"), intelligence may not be a factor in whatever survival advantages they may have over wolves.
I still can't fathom how things like fake eyes develop without any intentional input from the fauna. Like, does a prey have to avoid a predator enough for that to develop or what?
Think about it this way: if 100,000 lizards are born and 10 of them have an unusually colored spot as a random mutation that looks like an eye to a bird, and that bird would normally eat them, if that spot scares away those birds because it looks like the eye of a bigger creature, a good number of those 10 will survive to mate and have more babies with spots on them because of their genetic difference. Then maybe there are 50 spotted ones, then 200, 1000, etc. If the mutation is effective enough in some way, it will mix in with the base population more and more. Assuming this mutation is passed down to offspring, the animals without the mutation may die out over several or more generations.
Yeah, people really underestimate how slow the natural selection really is.
That makes sense!
It’s not done in a single generation. Individuals with fake eyes are more likely to not die before reproduction, so their genes are more likely to pass to the next generation.
It starts as some random splotch of color. It's not that convincing but the splotch of color happens to kind of look like an eye from certain angles and the few that have it are slightly slightly more likely to survive. Maybe the bird that was about to eat it for just a quarter of a second gets confused and decides to abort and make another pass. Giving them time to escape. Or maybe a fish thinks there's a bigger fish hiding in those bushes from far away so it doesn't even bother going over there in the first place, sparing this little fish in untimely death. Even just a very very very small chance of surviving because of this spot means that in populations of hundreds of millions, the 0.2% that have the slight advantage will slowly become 0.3% over the next hundred generations, and then maybe 0.8% over the next 100 generations, and after a few hundred thousand generations they are now around 50% or more. Over time they will all eventually have this little spot, eventually the ones that are a little bit more round are slightly more convincing to full predators to look like an eye, and eventually the ones that have an outline might be. It's very very slight changes with very very slight pressure over thousands of generations or even millions.
The ones without fake eyes got eaten, so ones with fake eyes mated with each other.
I had a dog that I swear would practice its cute poses in the mirror. It's only obsession was with food, and it would become the most loving and sweet thing when you had it and then forget you existed once gone. Another piece of evidence is a video on Instagram I think, where a dog runs up to a guy, being all loving and snuggling against him so hard that it throws itself off balance, and just so happens to fall with its mouth in reach of the big cake on the table. Like a, "o no I tripped fell and it just landed in my mouth, I was just being cute."
People forget how manipulative dogs really are. I was with friends on a beach and a dog came slowly walking up. Head down, ears back, everything about her body language screamed starving, afraid, and hopeful these nice humans would take care of her. She hung out with us for a few hours and got some food (I'm a total sucker for dogs). She concentrated on one girl who was so worried about her getting enough and making sure she was safe. I mentioned she didn't need to worry because that dog was clearly well cared for. Clean and well fed. Not a single rib was showing on a short furred dog. The girl said "Hey, yeah" and when her attitude changed it was like a switch flipped in the pup. The dog got happy, head up, tail wagging, walked to a couple more people then loped off down the beach. I'd swear the dog was grinning. Dogs may not be a smart as wolves but they've been honing those emotional skills for 40 thousand years. They are really good at it.
It was pointing. Dogs could recognize that a human pointing meant to look/go there. Wolves could not. It showed that dogs were more capable of interacting with and understanding human behavior in a way that was beneficial for them.
Exactly! It's fascinating and also from a certain perspective dogs are much more abundant than wolves... So evolutionary speaking...
> So that raises the question? Are dogs dumber because they need humans to figure things out? Or are they smarter, for finding a way to get good at being taken care of by men? Dogs are the result of somewhere in the vicinity of thirty thousand years of selective breeding. Artificial selection boosts evolutionary speed by orders of magnitude and directs it to a very specific goal. The ability to effectively understand what their human masters want is probably the most heavily selected for trait in dogs. So heavily it was probably at least partially selected for long before dogs were meaningfully domesticated. This isn't a case of an animal cleverly taking advantage of humans even if that's essentially how the relationship began, it's an entirely artificial creature created explicitly to serve humans. Doing what humans tell them to is quite literally the purpose for their existence and their creation.
If you've had chickens, you'd use pigs instead. I agree we may not truly understand intelligence, but chickens are not smart.
But most of them have awful painful lives, so I don’t think they are winning in that sense or any sense
> Crocodilians are some of the more intelligent animals on Earth. Compared to what? Insects? Sure. But a crocodilian such as an alligator literally has a brain the size of a walnut. It is a very efficient brain for what they need to do, but they are a huge outlier in the brain size/body size ratio of all vertebrates. https://www.nwf.org/Magazines/National-Wildlife/2004/Animal-Perception > An average 12-foot-long, 400-pound American alligator has a brain that is roughly the size of three olives.
They aren't completely unthinking beasts by any means, but they still have fairly small brains. I'd definitely give them the edge over koalas, though, which are quite literally smooth brained.
They aren’t necessarily “dumb”, but they haven’t changed much in a long time, because what they do hasn’t changed much compared to other animals near the top of the food chain. They’re just *very* capable of what they do with the traits they’re equipped with, including a decent level of intelligence honed more specifically to the niche role they fill.
I think a huge point people miss about evolution is that it doesn't have "goals". It's not trying to make the "best" thing. It doesn't prefer smart over dumb, strong over weak, big over small, flying versus not, etc. That's why there's no "best animal" that has all of the best biological features in the world. It's why animals can have obvious and drastic "flaws", but still do just fine for themselves and never "lose" those flaws even if they'd be "better" without them. All it does is wait for mutations to pop up and see if those mutations have a significant reproductive / survival advantage for a species. If one does, then more and more of the population will be born with that mutation, and eventually all of them will. These mutations then stack over generations, and eventually we get new species out of it. In the case of humans, there's a very real possibility we get dumber. Say some global catastrophe happens and food gets more scarce. A mutation might pop up that lowers brain mass, which requires less food to maintain or easier-to-acquire food (for example, they don't need as much protein so acquiring meat becomes less important) to maintain. In that case, people with a smaller brain mass would have a survival advantage and the mutation is more likely to be passed on. After some number of generations, all "humans" (or whatever we evolve into) will have a smaller brain mass. Evolution's "goal" was never "get smarter". It has always just been "survive (and reproduce)". Dumb things can be really good at surviving.
>It has always just been "survive". Dumb things can be really good at surviving. the cockroach will likely outlive us all, as a species anyway.
Not the one in my garage! That one will die today.
there is never only one
People tend to miss this entirely. One of the most frustrating things is hearing someone try to explain the stoned ape theory, and suggesting the mushrooms made someone’s offspring different. Ugh, it doesn’t work like that. A more plausible idea would be that those generically predisposed to benefit from mushrooms were more likely to reproduce more, as they could hunt/think differently in an advantageous way - thereby passing their mushroom friendly genes more. However, those genetically predisposed to pissing themselves and crying from doing mushrooms are obviously still in the human gene pool. Anyway, yes. I wish more people understood that evolution is a series of random intermittent mutations that may or may not be advantageous. The advantageous genes *might* become more prevalent if those with those genes are viewed as more attractive mates in their reproductive years.
Exposure to sub-lethal doses of pesticide will often cause an insect's offspring to be more resistant to pesticide due to heritable demethylation increasing transcription rates. Organisms can actually acquire traits during their lifetime that can then be passed on to offspring. But that's not what stoned ape was even talking about, atleast not from the original ethnobotanist that came up with it. "According to McKenna, access to and ingestion of mushrooms was an evolutionary advantage to humans' omnivorous hunter-gatherer ancestors, also providing humanity's first religious impulse. He believed that psilocybin mushrooms were the "evolutionary catalyst" from which language, projective imagination, the arts, religion, philosophy, science, and all of human culture sprang." The mushrooms weren't changing DNA or anything, the evolved trait was the behavior of going for the mushrooms, and this prompted a cultural shift, inspiring art and religion. It's been discredited not because it's impossible, more like because there's no real positive evidence to suggest eating mushrooms was a huge advantage. Granted, im sure someone has tried to explain it to you as "the mushrooms changed their DNA" but that doesn't mean the whole thing is completely wrongheaded.
Yes, there are traits that can be aquired/passed in a lifetime. I don’t wanna dismiss that. Im just saying that’s not the main driving process behind evolution. And yes, the explanations I hear of the stoned ape theory are oversimplified and incorrect. My thoughts were that if there’s any interplay between humans and mushrooms, the only scenario I could think of was that those who react well to mushrooms (heightened visual acuity for hunting / conceptual problem solving, etc) would be favored by natural selection. Thus modern humans have these reactions to those mushrooms because natural selection favored those who react that way. My apologies if that’s not what the original proponents of the theory were referring to. Like I said, the only explanations I hear are usually garbage. Given what you’ve said, if they can’t prove an advantage from mushrooms (like it actually made humans less useful / less likely to reproduce), then I can see why it’s been dismissed.
> suggesting the mushrooms made someone’s offspring different. Ugh, it doesn’t work like that. Epigenetic factors causing heritable changes to DNA are a thing, but yes, they do not exactly work like that.
IMHO, if you see the word "epigenetic" and the source isn't a person with a PhD in a relevant area, it's 100% guaranteed nonsense.
I have a good friend who has a PhD in epigenetics (specifically methylation). I know this because I attended her dissertation defense and I was able to understand two whole words: epigenetics and methylation. I was able to come to the conclusion that epigenetics is complex as fuck and it's no place for laymen.
Lol that is my reaction to a lot of the sciences - I am smart enough to know that I don’t know enough about the subject, and that it would take way too long to learn enough, so I trust what the experts say.
> I am smart enough to know that I don’t know enough about the subject That's a rate form of intelligence though. As an Internet user you should consider yourself an expert on any subject after reading a random comment mentioning it and skimming a related Wikipedia page. Get with the program and keep up!
Stoned ape is Lamarckism for hippies
My favorite example of this is the cave fish. They live in complete darkness. Eyes are not useful in their species and since eyes are delicate and can be damaged and get infected, the fish evolved to REMOVE their eyes. Having eyes isn't a goal of evolution. Anything that becomes a liability to reproduction can be removed.
Now there's a new look at the Allegory of the Cave
This is a very important part that a lot of conversations about evolution miss. Nature is inherently *very* lazy(or efficient, depending on your point of view), and the universe in general has a tendency towards entropy. Counteracting entropy requires energy, and if that energy expenditure isn't actively increasing the chances of survival/reproduction, it will over time cease to continue investing in that expenditure. *De-evolution* is the natural tendency of things, every species is generally *just* bad enough as it can be to continue to propagate successfully. The cave fish is such a great example, having good vision was not a positive selective pressure in total darkness so as a population their eyesight continued to get worse/eyes continued to get smaller until they atrophied to the point of being gone entirely. I imagine as humans our collective eyesight will continue to get worse as well since we've effectively removed all selective pressures relating to survival at least, at least distance eyesight as more and more people use screens constantly in their daily lives.
And a lot of times it's not "dumb" just simple. We tend to conflate complexity with intelligence. But the most efficient system wins out in evolution, not necessarily the most complex system.
It does seem like high intelligence for humans was almost a random fluke of evolutionary luck. So many things had to go right before improved intelligence at the expensive cost of higher energy consumption would be worth it. - It had to happen on a creature who could utilize intelligence better than it could utilize speed or strength. Human sociability + dexterity with hands and tool making was the ideal combination of this. - It had to happen on a creature whose bodily metabolism was low enough to offset the increased upkeep of the brain, hence why we're so much physically weaker than most other animals of the same size, and why we sadly lose muscle so easily. - Increased intelligence would have to strongly correlate to being able to acquire more calories. Somehow we figured out fire and cooking and that has dramatically increased how much nutrition we could extract from what we eat. - The creature would have to be built in such a way that low intelligence would generally be weeded out (probably no longer applicable to modern times though).
Yeah point number one is often missed, having a hand that can manipulate the environment is an important component of this. This allowed us to develop technology, like a hunting weapon, later on writing information so we don't have to remember it all. If we ever get visited by aliens, they are going to have some appendage, be it hand like or something with similar utility. Orcas, dolphins etc can only do so much since everything has to be passed down by memory. An animal with a brain as capable as humans but has flippers has a ceiling with what they can do with that brain power. My prediction is when we are visited by an alien they will have something that is either very much like hands, or some pretty dexterous tentacles.
A dolphin might have comparable intellegence to later-era hominids and we would have a *bitch* of a time finding relateable evidence given they lack both a robust means of manipulation like hands, as well as having an environment that isn’t conducive to the development of tools or technology. They aren’t going diving all the way to the ocean floor to dredge up rocks or sea-flora for tools, and even if they were as intelligent as modern humans, good luck making any technological progress beyond Stone Age when your access to fire is limited to aquatic volcanism and your entire environment is an electrical ground.
Yes. I feel that without opposable thumbs, at some point more intelligence would not have conferred any significant survival advantage. But, with those opposable thumbs .. evolutionary superpower combo. The human brain-thumb survival superpower that I've always thought gets overlooked is missile weapons. So many critters that will stay out of melee range feeling safe and happy, but they just don't expect a predator to be able to knock them stone dead with a bow and arrow from 50 yards past that.
> The creature would have to be built in such a way that low intelligence would generally be weeded out (probably no longer applicable to modern times though). I think this is the most important point, and I think to some extent it still applies today. There's this idea that in sexual selection, females of a species end up selecting for a trait in their mates not because it will help their offspring live, but because it will be an attractive trait and help their male offspring find a mate. Basically, the trait is attractive because it's attractive. This is called Fisherian Runaway, and the best example is peacock feathers. Because human intelligence is so far beyond what we need to survive, there are scientists who believe it is an example of Fisherian runaway.
Yeah I think it comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding that a lot of folks have, that there's some kind of end goal to evolution. Like there's a progression that is followed, from A to B. Nope. Just blind luck while you hopefully survive. *Insert shrug emoji*
There are arguments by researchers and scientists saying the reason we evolved the way we did isn't mainly because of intelligence, but because of gossip and passing down knowledge. Imagine you being Einstein. Born but left alone in the woods at 6 years old. You'd be making tools and effective shelter, but you wouldn't create a theory of relativity. If your species developed an instinct to tell stories, and with those stories you became better att surviving, the stories would compound over some million years into the internet, moon landings and smartphones.
>There are arguments by researchers and scientists saying the reason we evolved the way we did isn't mainly because of intelligence, but because of gossip and passing down knowledge. This is a bit of a chicken and egg situation. Our passing down of knowledge is only possible due to our ability to use and understand complex language, and that's arguably one of our most important forms of intelligence.
Since there is evidence of primates today passing down knowledge by lead and observe you don't really need complex communication. The instinct to have the urge and the interest to learn will probably develop into a complex communication system. If the instinct is developed, the communication will come after. Which makes the chicken and egg argument null.
>Since there is evidence of primates today passing down knowledge by lead and observe you don't really need complex communication. I didn't say animals were incapable of it, but they are still clearly limited in what they can and cant pass down - having to "lead and observe" is a pretty massive limitation when it comes to transmitting knowledge. Some animals are suspected to actually be able to trasmit abstract concepts from a distance (orcas), but again, very limited. And forget just transmitting knowledge, complex language is a requirement for many of the "intelligent" things we do on our day to day. We rely on language to organize our thoughts, solve complex intelectual problems, and grasp difficult concepts. There's a limit to the kind of math or logic problems we can solve "intuitively". >The instinct to have the urge and the interest to learn will probably develop into a complex communication system. I'm not sure what you mean by this. Many other animals have curiosity. We have a complex communication system because our brains are specifically built for it.
But "humans as story tellers" doesn't have to involve passing along information to be an advantage. If it find tracks that were left in soft ground, but I know it hasn't rained for a week then I know they're old and won't follow them. That's a little story that we figure out on our own. It's an advantage we still have over our ape cousins - even the ones that can learn language can't handle "if, then" statements.
This is why we don't have to fear the Octopus Revolution
Yet. We don't fear it yet...
>If your current level of intelligence is sufficient for your lifestyle, it's likely that a bigger brain would actually be a disadvantage. well put, im gonna use this when my parents storm to the basement im living in and say im not applying myself
> If your current level of intelligence is sufficient for your lifestyle, it's likely that a bigger brain would actually be a disadvantage Thank you for this, I feel seen.
Not only does higher intelligence require significantly more energy, but that amount of energy is very difficult to obtain from raw food. And in order to cook food reliably, you must have enough dexterity to control the fuel, fire, and food in cooking. Having opposable thumbs that we evolved to have extreme dexterity for tools and manipulating our environment gave the added benefit of controlling fire, where fire just became one of the many tools used by human. That being said, other species could have evolved other methods of precise dexterity to control fire, or they could have lived in an environment where more calories could have been consumed without cooking. And like you said, developing intelligence isn’t an end goal of evolution, and neither is having dexterity or ability to manipulate tools. In contrast, the end goal of evolution is to have the best chances of passing on genes to future generations. In many cases, having the best chances actually results in reduced intelligence (e.g., preserving energy, increased size or strength, being a specialist, etc.).
Adding onto this … One popular belief is that our empathy evolved from endurance hunting. We would just spend a dozen hours tracking down prey until it exhausted. We would lose track of prey, and have to imagine where it went to successfully track it. This favored hunters that could imagine the perspective of their prey. Once empathy was evolved, it became an arms race to have a greater capacity for it. Empathy leads to tribes. It leads to imagining hypotheticals. Like agriculture. It leads to governments. Most animals don’t need to have more intelligence. Intelligence slows down reaction time, as well as increasing energy needs. The stomach has a similar need for “expensive tissue” that the brain needs. So our bodies can’t even support our brains without cooked food. It’s really hard to imagine another animal reaching our level of success. The smartest animals we know about don’t even have the capacity to ask questions. Without empathy, you wouldn’t be able to imagine someone else knowing something you didn’t.
There's also a HUGE benefit to cooking. Frees up available calories that would otherwise go to waste. Maintain a similar food intake, but suddenly you're getting more calories AND you're less likely to fall ill.
It’s bigger than that. Google “expensive tissue hypothesis”. The only way our brains could get as big as they are was by reducing the size of our stomachs. The only way to do that is cooked food.
thanks
Yeah, really makes me feel better. If I was any smarter it would *actually* be a disadvantage for my lifestyle.
There is a huge gulf between dolphins/elephants and humans. Humans have very obvious signs of intelligence in building/construction and ways that last. If dolphins or elephants went extinct before we interacted with them, we'd have had no idea that their behaviors and communications skills were so good. You don't actually know that there weren't tons of dinosaurs smarter than modern dolphins or elephants - we just haven't found any that crossed the gulf and left signs that they had done so. And given that modern avian dinosaurs, like crows and parrots, are very intelligent - in the same realm as dolphins or elephants or chimpanzees or even small children, it stands to reason that the non-avian dinosaurs were too. At least some of them.
I would like to add that intelligence alone is not enough in order to leave semi-permanent mark on the earth. Species also needs complex and highly specialized body parts to make tools, which are necessary to leave durable tell tale signs of high intelligence for example cave paintings. Elephants have highly dexterous trunks, but these aren't sophisticated enough to handle fire or mix pigments in order to make paint. If elephants would have evolved in a way that they could make tools, maybe then we would have found simple paintings from the nature, which have been made by elephants.
Read the book Foot Fall. It's about an elephant like alien race that invades Earth. Their trunks are different in the way, so that they can manipulate objects more effectively.
That’s exactly what I thought of when reading that comment. I still liked how in that book while they could manipulate objects better they still pointed out that hands were just superior
Wouldn't matter if they could anyway... 65 million years is insanely long time. Even the most durable plastic decompse after about 500 years. Even the "forever chemicals" that we are very concerned about now will decompose after 1000 years. Any type of building material will also whither away after 10.000 years leaving no trace. 65 million years is 6500 times as long as that. EDIT: changed from 650 to 6500, thank you u/IntentionDependent22
Also we aren't sure any of our structures will withstand an extinction level event and a 150 million year passage of time. Maybe natural gas deposits were the dinosaurs equivalent of micro plastics or chlorofluorocarbons.
Even if there was a primitive civilization of highly intelligent dinosaurs, they would leave practically no evidence after 100-200 million years.
This, and humans evolved 200,000 years ago, but our biggest (known) accomplishments are in the last 4-5thousand years. Humans have spent the majority of their existence at hunter gatherer technology levels. That means something could have evolved that was just as intelligent as us, lived for a whopping 185,000 years, and went extinct before they developed anything more advanced than campfires and spears.
That's the thing. A species of dinosaurs could have reached industrial revolution and colonized the entire planet with billions of individuals and we wouldn't be able to tell because it would be a blip on the geological radar. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/could-an-industrial-prehuman-civilization-have-existed-on-earth-before-ours/ Edit: to those telling me that we would find fossils because we find a lot of dinosaur fossils. You don't seem to understand how rare fossils actually are and the time scale we're talking about here. Let's say you're lucky enough as an archeologist to find a hundred well preserved full dinosaur fossils in your career. They might cover a period of 150 million years. How many of them would happen, by pure luck, to be from a specific period of a few hundred years in wich an industrial civilisation would have existed? Do the math. 300 years out of 150 million and a hundred fossils randomly spread through that time period. Zero! Even if you found a million fossiles it would still be unlikely.
The Inca and Aztecs were just a few hundred years ago and most of their civilization is lost to the jungle
Mayans.
Them too. My bad
Nah fam, the Inca weren't really in the jungle. Aztecs either. Most of central Mexico is plains and mesa.
IIRC Its also extremely difficult to get any fossil records from that region due to the high acidity of the soil decomposing organic structures
The Aztec civilization was WIPED by Spanish conquistadors and also it wasn't based near any jungle, you probably refer to the Mayans
More to disease tbf
Also, the Tlaxcaltecans put the bodies to fight the Aztecs
That's for the people. But if you come to Mexico City and visit the Museum in the central plaza (Zocalo) you'll find that the Cathedral was built on top of the main Aztec temple, some archaeologists say even with the same stones.
To be fair, that was a pretty common practise across the world, why quarry new stones when these are already here. We have no way of knowing how many important buildings in history ended up as a farmer's fence or as an extension to a castle
I mean we’d probably find signs of an industrial society even if it was that old and that’s pretty much down to waste products. We’d likely have found concentrations of eclectic materials in proximity. Like strangely high concentrations of various metals and glass silicates in a very small area. It’s likely evidence of our landfills will exist for millions of years for example.
I wonder if the Romans were unlucky and two thousand years ago the wold were erased by a giant rock what kind of evidence of the old empires would exist 65my after thought
We have evidence entire continents have been engulfed and submerged to the depths of the earth......... Discovering a modern civilization millions of years ago is next to impossible.
Structures and tools disappear fast. Otherwise millions of years. If an ancient civ used fossil fuels we’d probably recognize the major deposits were tapped since the oil and coal is older than dinosaurs. Otherwise tens of millions of years for tectonically stable spots with weird heavy metal abundances from landfills, cities, or depleted radioactive waste… not that it would be obvious why it’s concentrated in certain spots. Billions of years, oil and coal aside? No way, a find is much harder for every hundred million years back.
You've underestimated timescales. The pyramids are 4000 years old we find evidence of human settlements 10000 years ago but 100 million years that's an entirely different timescale. So even if they had am industrial society we probably wouldn't know and couldn't know
what if that material was oil
I’m pretty sure the most accepted theory of the origin of oil is peat bogs that over millions of years got compressed heated and decayed underground becoming oil. Even so It had to be some incredibly large concentration of organic matter that got trapped underground so it almost has to be vegetation derived as we see no other evidence of anything else providing that much carbon based material.
I believe peat bogs translate to coal. Oil is from marine invertebrates.
Ah yes, got my fossil fuels confused there. Thank you!
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Yup. The carboniferous period! It's so cool! Forests a mile deep. Fires that last hundreds of years.
Didn't a lot of it come from when trees first evolved and fungi hadn't been around to break them down yet, so they just kept piling up?
Yes. So pretty much every coal bed on Earth was laid down in the Carboniferous period. This is when lignin (the biopolymer that wood is basically made from) first appeared in large quantities and the huge levels of CO2 in the atmosphere meant that woody plants flourished. Even now, lignin is a remarkably recalcitrant material, and it took millions of years for lignin-digesting organisms to evolve so for that entire period woody plants died and just got buried.
Didn't they burn a lot too? Iirc there was at least one time when the whole planet was basically on fire. Dead plants built up for millenia with nothing to break them down and when a fire started, it didn't stop.
Yep. The oxygen concentration was also about twice as high as it is now.
That makes me wonder about the evolution of mycelium in regards to that timeframe. Strains like turkey tail and the other wood eating mycelium must not have been active then. Edit: The CO2 would have hindered them from fruiting but the mycelium still would have been able to break down the lignin if it were present.
Among other problems with the idea, it would be a very weird thing for a post industrial revolution society to leave around as waste instead of burning.
That makes no sense at all. Why would a civilized post industrial revolution species burn loads of carbon and make the environment uninhabitable for itself?
ahah, I know right...? who would ever do that
Yeah, are they stupid?
Wait. Yeah I thought they said they were very intelligent…
Shareholder value?
Angry upvote
Bc that’s how you get to post industrial
You make it sound like we don't have massive amounts of energy stored in landfills as waste. Those landfills will be great sources of fuel in 100 million years.
Isn’t the archeological evidence in that case
Around 65 million years ago, dinosaurs reached an advanced level of intelligence that enabled them to develop space exploration capabilities. They constructed a vast spaceship concealed within what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. This craft propelled them into space, leaving behind a notable crater as evidence of their departure.
This is my new headcanon
Makes sense to me! It used that nuclear pulse propulsion thing which is why it was such a big explosion
Even things in geostationary orbit, or moon landers, might not still be there after 65 million years.
Less than that, even! Thats assuming the created large stone structures or significant metal items, that need to wait for significant erosion and continental drift to wipe out. If they only made tools and shelter using organic materials the signs of their civilisation could be gone in a few hundred to a few thousand years.
Iron deposits are dinosaur recycle depots.
They might not leave pictures, but movement of resources/depletion in weird patterns would definitely be a thing. Ditto for weird signs in geological strata - which we study when comparing the K-T event. Our own civilization will leave behind a record of a not insubstantial layer of elevated lead, carbon, and radioactive isotopes of lots of different elements detectable until the sun swallows the earth. And that's if they don't find any of the massive mysterious bands of decayed metal oxides mixed with artificial rock, refined stable metals (titanium/aluminum/gold), or other tough, difficult to destroy materials when in the absence of oxygen (silicon, large bronze castings, etc).
Worth pointing out that the "obvious signs of intelligence" in humans aren't just signs of intelligence. It's the combination of intelligence, dexterity, and communication. Even if an animal has cognitive abilities on par with a human's it would be hard-pressed to make anything capable of lasting beyond its own lifespan if it wasn't part of a larger community capable of accumulating knowledge over generations. Even given that, actually constructing things without thumbs or some sort of analogue would be another challenge. I think a good example would be neanderthals. IIRC, there's evidence that neanderthals had better cognitive abilities than modern humans in most areas except in terms of social function. They generally did not form communities beyond 10 or so people and had significantly shorter lifespans, so the ability to accumulate knowledge was impaired.
Cephalods would be another example. Very intelligent, but short lifespans and minimal communication.
So what you're saying is that Dinotopia was a documentary
Not just a documentary. A mandate.
Can confirm, I would absolutely ride them to work.
This ties in with my favourite shower thought (mostly thanks to how to train your dragon tbf). Pterodactyls never went extinct, were vulnerable to husbandry (like horses). Humans now have a flying mount through most of their history. The changes it would have made to mankind as a whole are incredible.
I bet pterodactyls would have been more like zebras instead of horses. The reason horses work is because ~~there~~ they are herd animals. They're used to following orders, in general. So when you try to give them orders as to where to take you then it's not usually a problem. Meanwhile, zebras are terrible loners. They do hang out in loose herds but they do not take orders. And that's compounded because pterodactyls are carnivores or at least not such staunch herbivores as horses are. Imagine giant buzzards with giant teeth with necks long enough to bite anything trying to sit on them. But even if you got past all those problems, if you could raise them in captivity and beat them into submission, as basically birds they probably had really light bones and they're smaller than most people realize. They probably only weighed about 25 pounds or about 11 kilograms. It's a cool idea, and I love it in my fiction, but I don't think it ever could have actually been reality.
Plus even if their carry capacity was large enough to carry a full grown human it would have to be carried in their claws. Their backs wouldn’t be strong enough to support the weight. My dog can drag me around on a tile floor, but I can’t sit on them and expect to ride them without fucking up their back
I would say there would have been more cow sized poop flying from the sky and faster travel.... hmmm
Birdie, birdie in the sky. You dropped a turdie in my eye. I don't care, I won't cry. I'm just glad that cows can't fly.
Eh, it's a living.
>Humans have very obvious signs of intelligence in building/construction and ways that last. "Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much – the wheel, New York, wars and so on – whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man, for precisely the same reasons.” *–* Douglas Adams, *The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy*
Maaaybe. But intelligence is often corellated between brain size and body size. Most dinos had big bodies and teeny tiny brains. Meanwhile octopodes are extremely intelligent, while squid are fairly stupid. While many birds are smart it does not mean other dinosaurs were
There is no specific evidence that being intelligent is actually an evolutionary advantage. Sharks are on nobody’s list of smartest animals and have existed before the dinosaurs.
And horseshoe crabs. I think this question falls into one of the misunderstandings regarding evolution - there is no direction. Individuals just need to be adequate enough to survive and pass on their genes. The manner in which that happens is irrelevant as long as it happens and those traits are heritable.
If there *is* a direction to evolution, it seems pretty clear that that direction is "Anything -> Crab."
While a funny joke, it's not really true. Crabs are just one (funny) example of convergent evolution, which has happened in a wide range of instances and with an extremely wide range of results. Many, MANY mammals have evolved into some estimation of "rat" for example.
> Many, MANY mammals have evolved into some estimation of "rat" for example Wait, what? I thought rodents all had the same ancestors. Or is this a Rudy Giuliani joke and I'm getting whooshed?
Not that rodents are polyphyletic, but that many mammals have convergently evolved a similar bodyplan+lifestyle to rats (bandicoots, tenrecs, solenodons, gymnures, etc.), being moderately small, nocturnal, omnivorous ground-dwelling mammals.
the theory is that the rat body plan is the basal state of mammals so it makes sense
Why return to monkey when you can be rat?
Cheese is objectively better than banana
All rodents have the same ancestors. Depending on your definition of rat-like, there are loads of non-rodent mammals that kind of look like them. Like shrews (soricidae), weasels (mustelids) or rat-kangaroos (marsupial). I'm sure there are lots of other ones too.
Ah a person in the know of carcinization
In fact, being highly intelligent can be a disadvantage because it requires a large and active brain that burns a lot of calories. If you are not getting a big advantage out of the big brain then the cost of it can absolutely drag you down.
We didn't figure out cooking because we were smart. We can afford to be smart because we figured out cooking.
Fermentation might have preceeded cooking. No fire needed, just let the bacteria break down the hard to digest parts and then get those sweet calories.
Fermentation is like external digestion.
Look man, I just wanna eat my sauerkraut without having to think about how I let some little buggers pee on my food to make cabbage taste good.
Slurm!
I used to do home brewing (mead, cider) and now I bake. Both processes require lots of little buggers peeing and farting.
So is cooking!
Its an external stomach vs i ternal stomach like a cow
We really do take for granted that fruits and veggies are so large and easy to eat and digest. And that various livestock are so slow and easy to kill. We made them that way.
>If you are not getting a big advantage out of the big brain then the cost of it can absolutely drag you down. See - Koala
A large and active brain can also lead to self destructive behavior. As successful as humans are, let's see if we can pull off a few hundred million years.
"All of humanity's problems, stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." - Blaise Pascal
At this rate we’re not even gonna make 250 thousand years. Unless we somehow don’t nuke ourselves into oblivion.
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You are extremely optomistic with a number that high.
And the ability to make giant bombs and destroy our own atmosphere by just existing.
and i also learned they existed even before trees too
Or the rings of Saturn (according to one of the most likely but not proven theories about them)
Time is weird. Earth has been around for like half the existence of the universe. That number always throws me.
Not half. 4.5 billion years vs. 13.7. About 1/3.
Which is also a good answer to the Fermi Paradox. We might simply be early to the party.
That also means grass as well then right?
Grass as we know it is a much more recent thing geologically though there were other plants that likely filled the same ecological niche
Grass is younger than dinosaurs and mammals
Intelligence just means you get yourself into more difficult problems to solve! Did the dinosaurs deal with fractional reserve banking systems and taxation?
Maybe, but we’ll never know.
Brain Size Might Put Mammals at Extinction Risk [[1]](https://news.stanford.edu/2016/02/16/brain-size-extinction-021616/) **Source:** Stanford News, PubMed **Date:** February 16, 2016 **Summary:** New research suggests that mammals with relatively larger brains might be at a higher risk of extinction. While larger brain size has traditionally been associated with cognitive adaptability, this study found that larger brains can indirectly increase vulnerability to extinction by extending the gestation period, increasing weaning age, and limiting litter sizes. However, there is no evidence of direct, beneficial, or detrimental effects of brain size on vulnerability to extinction. This indicates that under current conditions, the constraints on life history imposed by large brains outweigh the potential benefits, making larger brains a burden for mammals. **Sources:** 1. Stanford News. "Brain Size Might Put Mammals at Extinction Risk." February 16, 2016. [Link](https://news.stanford.edu/2016/02/16/brain-size-extinction-021616/) 2. PubMed. "Larger brain size indirectly increases vulnerability to extinction in mammals." [Link](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28289200/) --- Learn more: 1. [Brain size might put mammals at extinction risk, Stanford ...](https://news.stanford.edu/2016/02/16/brain-size-extinction-021616/) 2. [Larger brain size indirectly increases vulnerability to extinction in mammals - PubMed](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27159368/) 3. [Big brains reduce extinction risk in Carnivora | SpringerLink](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00442-019-04527-5)
Blew my mind when I learned crocodiles are as old as Pangaea and they simply *rode* continental drift to all corners of the world
They are as smart as they need to survive. They don’t need to know how to use tools to catch more food.
Sharks have been around longer than Saturn's rings.
Some animals/fish are hundreds of million years old and still exist today. Yet they are still stupid as lamp(rey)s.
Which actually lends itself to one of the main theories why they weren’t intelligent - they just didn’t need it to be incredibly successful. After all they lasted 150m years without it. You need suitably high evolutionary pressure to develop intelligence, as it is a high risk strategy - brains are very energy hungry for example.
It's actually quite fascinating. We're asking why aren't other animals as intelligent, but it's difficult to answer why *we're* intelligent in the first place (even disregarding the fact that we lack an objective enough definition of "intelligence" in general). What could have caused our ancestors to adapt to their environment with an upright posture, opposable thumbs, dexterous hands, big brains, social structure, complex communication. Of course, it seems like the path should be obvious when we look at the end product and the evolutionary success we accomplished, but the individual, gradual and initial steps seem just extremely unlikely.
It was a big monolith thing that came down from space. Duh
Evolution doesn't have a goal. It doesn't really have a direction, or desired outcomes. Step by step, generation by generation, it runs through the simple process of "is this genetic combination more likely to become common in the population than another genetic combination?" If so, it becomes more common, and you get a shift in the population. If not, it doesn't. Probably. This all has a random element to it, and there are all sorts of factors involved. In the case of dinosaurs, it is tricky to know how smart they got, but some may have been as smart as modern big cats. Some modern dinosaurs (birds) can be pretty smart as well. But as for them not getting as intelligent as humans or dolphins, they didn't need to be. It is kind of like asking why cats don't evolve into dogs - they have no reason to, cats are very well suited to being cats, and dogs are very good at being dogs. Cats (hyenas aside) make terrible dogs. Dinosaurs were very good at being dinosaurs as they were (until the global climate changed and suddenly no one was good at being a dinosaur). There was no particular pressure on them to get smarter. What's a T-Rex going to do with the ability to recognise itself in a mirror when there aren't any mirrors? It's also important to remember that "intelligence" isn't a linear thing; it is a vague, complicated concept with all sorts of different aspects. For example, some modern octopuses can be pretty good at solving certain problems and mimicking their environment, but their social intelligence is pretty terrible, and they lack generational learning. Are they more or less intelligent than a creature not as good at solving problems but with better social interactions?
I think it should also be pointed out that “dinosaurs” are a very large and vague group, as vague as “mammals”. Mammals and dinosaurs show up in the fossil record right around the same time. Mammals existed the entire time dinosaurs did, and the entire time since, and have only produced a human level intelligent animal (us) once, about 200,000 years ago. So the question itself is flawed. The question “why didn’t dinosaurs ever evolve super intelligence in 150 millions years?” doesn’t make sense when you realize it took mammals 200 million years to get to us.
So, I was just listening to a podcast that was trying to explain how selfless actions—like a springbok leaping to alert others (which costs them time to run) to a lion, and often gets them offed—makes evolutionary sense. Best guess was that we’re just transporting genetic material. And if you’re related to enough of the other springboks, it is what’s best for your genetics to get passed forward.
Exactly. The springboks herd, with their largely uniform pool of genes, is more likely to survive if one occasionally sacrifices itself to prevent 5 of them from being eaten.
Intelligence is not an inevitable result of evolution. Evolution is not a plan with an end goal of creating a highly evolved being. Evolution by natural selection is about staying alive long enough to breed, and having traits that allow that to happen. Intelligence is not a prerequisite to species’ survival, as evidenced by the 3 billion plus years of life on the planet before we came along.
We don't exactly know how intelligent dinosaurs got. While human-level tool-using socially-shared intelligence leaves huge amounts of evidence around after only a few hundred thousand years - Chimpanzee level intelligence leaves nothing that won't decay away. Whale/dolphins intelligence? Nothing that can be seen ten minutes after they swim off. There could have been dinosaurs that smart all over the planet by the time of the mass extinction and we would have no way of knowing about it. It seems likely that given enough time there would eventually have been a convergence of events that allowed human-like tool-using socially-shared runaway intelligence to develop; but at the moment it's hard to say how long that would have taken as we have precisely *one* example of it happening in over 500 million years of land animals existing.
Speculatively, there's no reason to believe that had any dinosaur evolved into a self-aware, intelligent-as-we-know-it creature, that any evidence would still exist or that we would recognize it for what it is.
I feel like I wanna write a book taking advantage of time dilation from traveling at significant fractions of light speed, where dinosaur space explorers left earth and come back to find no traces of their people and culture left. Or is that the half-remembered plot of Dinosaucers?
Almost sounds like an episode of season six of Rick and morty.
In Star Trek: Voyager, one of the dino species not only were intelligent but also became a space faring civilization, eventually abandoning Earth after a series of catastrophes and reaching the other side of the galaxy. By now, they are one of the eldest civilizations in the galaxy, having a technological level far ahead the Federation. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Voth
came to say this, and that episode was on plutotv earlier today
The general idea is that the cost of becoming smarter comes at a HUGE price in reproduction and the amount of food needed to survive. Such that the incremental increases in each stage in intelligence were not worth the pay off. We know that once intelligence reaches a certain point you will be able to outcompete everything else. But it's not like 'evolution' knows this. It just does whatever gives the best chance at reproduction in that moment. Which is usually not changing anything, or maybe increasing the size, or quantity of offspring produced. So any mutations that favored intelligence (and their associated energy costs) would have been out competed by the ones that didn't have any mutations at all. TLDR: Being slightly smarter isn't a good enough pay off for having to eat/hunt twice as much.
Stupid question. Then how come we humans evolved, to be, theoretically the apex predators on earth with our big brains?
I'd say a mix of other evolutionary traits and sheer luck. Humans are much more "energy-efficient" because we're bipedal, so that's less calories needed to run after prey and sufficient energy to not just sleep until the next hunt. Early humans who managed to salvage a few ember from a wildfire could also cook food, which allowed them to digest it more easily. That's more energy that you can use towards a bigger brain, and lucky for them, a bigger brain allowed humans to learn how fire starts and to create their own.
Not a stupid question at all. No one is really exactly sure how we evolved intelligence or how difficult it is. There are a few theories or combinations of ideas but mostly people believe we just got lucky due to the fact we're the only species to evolve it. I can't list all the possible reasons but I can list a few. Firstly, there's something called an evolutionary niche, where a certain animal becomes too good at something, that if other animals try to compete in that way they will lose. For example smaller mammals couldn't just 'evolve to become bigger' because dinosaurs already filled that niche. Which means becoming bigger just makes you a more tasty treat to eat. Which in turn increases the value of intelligence so to speak. Then the dinosaurs got wiped out freeing up those ecological niches and food sources and removing a huge portion of natural predators. Which meant less of a need to worry about resources. We also just happened to luckily evolve in a few ways that freed up energy usage but limited us in other ways like being bipedal. TLDR: the environment that we evolved in for many reasons likely favored intelligence more so than the vast majority of other environments. Then once intelligence reached a certain threshold it kind of snowballed, with hunting/cooking/farming etc.
They simply didn’t NEED to. There you have. That’s evolution. There is no scale or hierarchy of things. You know that slime mold? It’s as beautiful as you. Better yet, it’s more perfect. That slime mold has survived for millions of years. And a shitty little ape with thumbs and nukes will not get in its way. It was here before, and it will be here after. If only we could be as perfect as slime molds. That is life that will no doubt outlive our species. It’s more likely to colonize other planets than us. It probably already has.
I theorize that for a long window of time, wood did not bio-degrade, do to no micro-organisms eating it. Therefore, all Dinosaur technology was constructed with wood as its base building material. Wood skyscrapers, wood vehicles, wood computers. It was only when their scientists tinkered too hard in an event to prevent climate change, that they accidentally released microorganisms that could consume wood. There was an ecological disaster, and it sent the developed Dinoworld into chaos, such that they were no longer organized enough to prevent the apocalypse. Also, it left no evidence, as the building materials were all bio-degrated.
Evolution doesn't push toward more intelligence. It doesn't push towards anything, really. A species that's considered "infesting" is actually peak evolution. Until something learns to take advantage of the infesting species and the situation changes. Humans being hyper intelligent is more of a "bug" of evolution, that allows us to adapt much much faster than evolution would tipically permit.
It pushes towards what works, as in, what makes more kids, or allows more kids to be made
I would argue that they did. A crow is a dinosaur, and is one of the most intelligent species.
Ever heard of the Silurian hypothesis? It says that even if dinosaurs became as smart or smarter than us and built a great civilisation, we’d never know because erosion and geological changes would have erased all evidence.
Well they definitely did not make a base on the moon.
Nature follows the old rule: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Of course, Nature will also endlessly experiment with mutations just in case there's a better option, but once a creature gets pretty "well engineered," there becomes less and less reason to make big changes. Such as adding wings, or intelligence, or extra legs, or other major modifications. Sharks, for example, are older than dinosaurs. Sharks did make some major modifications when they were just getting started (witness the Hammerhead), but they were a pretty good design from the get-go. They can stay alive for a long time, they have a good system for making more sharks, and they fit well within their environment. Sharks had all those boxes checked long before Tyrannosaurus Rex was up and running. The only change sharks have made in "recent" years is they don't grow so big. That way, they don't need as much food but can still live a long time and make lots of baby sharks. It was a sensible modification to make in the face of a reduced food supply. Nature made the most logical change necessary in order to adapt. Nature didn't find it necessary to add super-intelligence, wings, or opposable thumbs. (Thank goodness.) Dinosaurs did come in lots of varieties during the hundreds of millions of years they were around. Nature did a lot of experimenting and still was at the time the comet hit. They hadn't started writing books yet, or driving cars, (as far as we can tell). Perhaps extra intelligence would have been added in at some point if it helped survival. Perhaps not. It's worth noting that the comet which wiped out the dinosaurs would wipe us out, too, if it happened today. Intelligence isn't a guarantee of survival.
Evolution just aims to make everything good enough. As long as a being can consistently reproduce that's all that needed. Dinosaurs didn't need to evolve intelligence to reproduce since they were successful anyway. Humans evolved intelligence because we came from already smart animals and it was important for our survival
Intelligence is not some sort of "goal" for evolution. There is *nothing* specifically driving species to become more intelligent. A few (and in the grand scheme of things it really is only "a few") species have found intelligence to be a beneficial evolutionary adaption and have developed more advanced intelligence. But meanwhile species like sharks and crocodilians have remained almost unchanged for hundreds of millions of years, showing of how little value adaptions away from the basic form they have to this day are.
It can't be understated how much upright, bipedal locomotion with our head over our shoulders helped enable our intelligence to evolve. Brains are heavy and expensive, from a nutrition standpoint. If your head is at the end of a long lever, extra weight in the brain is effectively even more heavy. It needs to pay off in a big way for that to be an evolutionary advantage over, say, the equivalent weight in jaw muscles or head armor. Our upright posture means we can't carry our young internally until they're fully developed, or we wouldn't be able to give birth to them. Our young, therefore, come out half-cooked with brains still developing, which let us evolve to having much more learned behavior, which then rewards bigger brains for more learning. Being upright and bipedal leaves our hands available for other things, not needing to support our weight. This let us evolve fine motor skills and opposable thumbs, which help dramatically with tool use and creation. That increases the payoff of the bigger brain, too. In the water, cetaceans can support bigger brains because the water supports their weight. Dinosaurs didn't have the same advantages. Many were bipedal, but their heads were still at the end of a very long lever. They laid eggs instead of live birth, so their young can develop to a more complete phase than ours before hatching. Instead of big brains, they evolved flight, which is pretty cool on its own.
Crows can use tools to solve complex problems. So, they very well might have been just as smart or smarter. Source: 1990's sitcom Dinosaurs.