Our species is also the only one with a fraction of a possibility of "saving the planet" (whatever than means) if an asteroid was coming this way.
You're welcome, alligators.
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Why have giant beasts not gained sentience yet?
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Our species is also the only one with a fraction of a possibility of "saving the planet" (whatever than means) if an asteroid was coming this way.
You're welcome, alligators.
Mangoverboard
Banned
Start feeding animals cooked food or high calorie gels and things like that and give it a few thousand years
What no one in the thread has noted yet is that they don't lack sentience, they lack sapience.
This may seem like minor and petty semantics, but it is an important distinction to make. We are after all Homo Sapiens.
IIRC this is thought to be largely because we came down out of the trees onto the plains and had to learn to hunt large game which in turn supplied us with the excess nutrients we needed to evolve larger brains to enable us to get better at hunting large game. Our ancestors put themselves(or were forced, quite possibly by the ancestors of the other great ape species) into an environment where their only evolutionary advantage was their intelligence, because they had no way of physically competing. Though going back to my 'sentience vs sapience' distinction, I believe this was mostly a 'software' change, as the hardware of our brains is only incrementally more complex than any of the other hominines certainly. It is the software that made the difference.
This may seem like minor and petty semantics, but it is an important distinction to make. We are after all Homo Sapiens.
IIRC this is thought to be largely because we came down out of the trees onto the plains and had to learn to hunt large game which in turn supplied us with the excess nutrients we needed to evolve larger brains to enable us to get better at hunting large game. Our ancestors put themselves(or were forced, quite possibly by the ancestors of the other great ape species) into an environment where their only evolutionary advantage was their intelligence, because they had no way of physically competing. Though going back to my 'sentience vs sapience' distinction, I believe this was mostly a 'software' change, as the hardware of our brains is only incrementally more complex than any of the other hominines certainly. It is the software that made the difference.
People I have found are not that wise (myself included). Sounds like a misnomer
Lovely Salsa
Banned
Its a shame we werent around 65 million years ago. We'd kick that asteroids ass and save the dinos
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
Intelligence does not necessarily entail evolutionary fitness.
Humans are giant beasts. We tend to look at the animals that are bigger than us and think that we're a small species. But the truth is that humans are easily in the top 99.99 percentile of size when compared against all animal species. The vast majority of animals in the world are tiny relative to humans.
How are we destroying the planet? I think we're doing pretty good.
Technically there are 7 extant species in the hominid family. If you step down to the Genus level(Homo), we are the only ones left, but that is not all that uncommon in taxonomy, for example in reptiles, the largest group of genera have only 1 species in them.
Some genera do have many species though, some insect genera have 1000+ species.
But then this whole taxonomy thing is something we made up, and is arbitrary to a large degree.
old manatee
Banned
Elephants mourn their dead. They bury fruits and come back later when they have fermented and they get drunk and rub on trees and shit. They have a fun time hosing each other down with their trunks and they aren't ruining life on earth for everyone else. An elephant will paint you a tree and take you for the ride of your life. Elephants are stone cold chillers. Just because they didn't make Thor 2 doesn't mean they aren't killing it in their own way.
I think you need to get out more.
What I get from this is that you don't understand science because you refuse to work within the boundaries of reality and evidence, so you spin it as scientific minds being unable to "relate to" it. That's not how science works. It's not that scientific minds don't relate to what you say, it's that they recognize it as irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
An alien race creating a taxonomy for Earth's animals would almost certainly just call humans a third type of chimpanzee. We don't do that because we think we're too special for that.
Made up as it is, its still curious nothing close to being like us exists or has forawhile apparently.
Several other hominin species were around as recently as a hundred thousand years ago, which is a blink of an eye in evolutionary timeframes.
Lamel
Banned
I too was tricked.
Sorry, but all this means is that you don't understand science.
Depends what evolution prioritized. Chimpanzees have superior visual processing time to humans, and certain cetaceans have evolved Spindle neurons, which are mostly found in hominids. Rats have faster brain stem transmission, etc.
Neanderthal went extinct about 40,000 years ago.
no sir you are not
^^
All depends on how you define 'close' and 'a while'.
H. neanderthalensis was certainly 'close' by any reasonable definition of the term, and they were around basically yesterday in evolutionary terms.
Chimpanzees are arguably close today even. Gorillas a bit less so. The society and technology we have built exaggerates our differences, but evolutionarily we are pretty damn close.
7DollarHagane
Banned
Wouldn't evolution suggest that there should be a greater range of intelligence in nature between bacteria, goat/cow/chicken, dog/dolphin/chimpanzee, and human?
It's pretty much biological response only, survival instinct, basic input and response, and then language, problem solving, love, society, laws, and programming artificial intelligence and self driving vehicles.
It's one of the reasons I think evolution is a natural occurrence of the environment and ecosystem set in place by an intelligent design, not the thing that created the ecoaystem itself.
It's pretty much biological response only, survival instinct, basic input and response, and then language, problem solving, love, society, laws, and programming artificial intelligence and self driving vehicles.
It's one of the reasons I think evolution is a natural occurrence of the environment and ecosystem set in place by an intelligent design, not the thing that created the ecoaystem itself.
Imperfected
Member
You have to remember that humans are the whole package, baby, not just big sexy brains.
That elephant has a big brain? Good for him. Those big eyes of his are still pretty rubbish, though, so his ability to gather data about his surroundings is still hampered. Those big, stampy feet of his are similarly an impediment, as not being able to "feel things out" and interact with environments in novel ways in another enormous loss of data.
Check out cephalopods for a good example of this: smaller and less "evolved" brain structures than elephants, but because their ability to perceive and interact with their environment is orders of magnitude better, they have intelligence much closer to what we would think of as being human-like.
That elephant has a big brain? Good for him. Those big eyes of his are still pretty rubbish, though, so his ability to gather data about his surroundings is still hampered. Those big, stampy feet of his are similarly an impediment, as not being able to "feel things out" and interact with environments in novel ways in another enormous loss of data.
Check out cephalopods for a good example of this: smaller and less "evolved" brain structures than elephants, but because their ability to perceive and interact with their environment is orders of magnitude better, they have intelligence much closer to what we would think of as being human-like.
Have you seen what we have accomplished? You never look at a cityscape or some art and think this was all just some stuff in the ground?
We have done amazing things. And the planet is fine, and will be fine.
There already is a great degree of variation in intelligence, you can always arbitrarily decide you want more degrees, but that's not how evolution works.
All life may have come from a common ancestor, but each species evolved according to its necessities, it's not like a linear graphic where there's a species with X intelligence, another with X+1 and so on until we reach humans. That's just not how it works.
The planet will indeed be fine. The ecosystem on the other hand...
RustyNails
Member
Man this thread was one letter away from being thread of the year.
Fried Food
Banned
same
Escape Goat
Member
why would people want sentient breasts?
Auto-Reply
Member
Our physiology plays a large part in that too, I remember that was brought up in some documentaries. Especially our hands, form and opposing thumbs (and the coordination of our eyes/brain with them).
Which ecosystem? Ours?
We might be fucked, sure. Maybe even a few other animals. But that's not the planet. Planet is doing great.
Zepp Twofist
Member
Dunno what op is talking about. Lizard men are already running the world.
LordOfChaos
Member
Intelligence isn't the end goal of evolution. Gaters work well in their niche, so they stayed like that. Cheetahs gained the ability to run fast instead of intelligence.
There are lots of factors that culminated in human intelligence, cooking food and growing a smaller digestive tract being one of them, and it's hard to do that without having hands and thumbs first.
Rabbi_Vole
Banned
I misread the thread title.
RustyNails
Member
Why wouldnt you?
OMG. Thank God I don't live anywhere near that thing, I wouldn't be able to function knowing that monster is roaming around
And_Gignac
Member
Because of Language. Without it we wouldn't be.
Scarier, honestly.
Whatever monster ripped it's arm off is probably lurking somewhere deep in that muddy river
Do you really not understand this?
How is an elephant supposed to use and develop tools? Without that ability theres nothing to push critical thinking and make intelligence a more important natural selection factor then size and strength.
Sounds odd but do you really think humanity would allow another species to be as developed or intelligent as we are?
even in the modern day if we discovered a race or a species that started developing similar things like technology and language do you think we'd leave them alone? We'd capture and study the shit out them, they'd have to live in zoos.
Take the same principle back to primitive times and it's likely we wiped out any other species that could've developed into or been a rival.
even in the modern day if we discovered a race or a species that started developing similar things like technology and language do you think we'd leave them alone? We'd capture and study the shit out them, they'd have to live in zoos.
Take the same principle back to primitive times and it's likely we wiped out any other species that could've developed into or been a rival.
Nope
Ecosystem as in Earth's ecosystem, dramatic climate changes will likely destroy many many "local" ecosystems, life could change dramatically. The planet will be fine until the sun expands or blows up or whatever, the issue is what's on the planet.
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