How come nothing intelligent ever came out of the millions of

>>8127808

Because God just wanted one intelligent species on this planet and raptors were getting to uppity to leave around.

Probably a number of factors, including diet and basic anatomy. Birds can be pretty smart, just look up videos of corvids performing cognitive tests at the level of infants and chimps.

What are you talking about, OP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhJjJoHJVrs

>>8127808
The theory I was taught is that the intelligence came because we had really shitty ice ages and apex preditors (big cats are natural preditors of humans) that kept making smarter apes until we heated ourselves to fight cold and made weapons and groups to fuck up preditors and prey.

>>8127808
corvids and parrots are among the smartest animals around.

but it's a pretty good question. If human-type intelligence is supposed to be a normal outcome of evolution, why hasn't it ever happened before? There's certainly been more than enough time.

Biology doesn't really have an answer.
I mean, astrobiologists and such love to pretend evolution always follows the path it did, but there's really no way to know since it's only happened once that we know of.

as to why, you'd probably need to appeal to the anthropic principle... Evolution doesn't normally produce human-type intelligence, you just won't exist to be aware of all the times it didn't.

>>8127808
Evolution is not goal driven/teleological.

Intelligence is a result, not a goal. Human intelligence is quantitatively different but not qualitatively different from intelligence in other animals.

Current hypotheses focus in intra-species competition as the driving force behind the evolution of human intelligence (e.g. Flinn, Geary and Ward, 2005. Ecological dominance, social competition,
and coalitionary arms races:
Why humans evolved extraordinary intelligence
in Evolution and Human Behavior volume 26).

>>8127823
>not qualitatively different
this is a popular meme in biology, but it's not really true.

you have to generalize behaviors to the point of meaninglessness to make it true.

>what other animals write novels?
>well other animals communicate and writing novels is just a type of communicating
>what other animals start fires?
>some animals produce electricity and light which are just types of fires

>what other animals generalize their own unique behaviors so they can pretend they're just like unrelated animals in kind?
>....

Because we're less a true adaptation and more an "evolutionary spandrel" as Steven Pinker put it.

>>8127827
>unrelated animals
no such thing, anon. animals, by definition, are all related.

if you don't even know basics your assertions regarding much more complex phenomena are irrelevant.

>>8127808
Because reptilian vertebrates are all about brute strength and no brains, warrm bloodedness is the only reason we have our human level intelligence in the first place. The further you go down the evolutionary road the more stupid the animals are no they arent even stupid they just have no minds they are basically drones acting on instinct. Though the real reason is because Earth has been a mostly warm planet so animals that are stupid and can get large in warm climates excelled for most of history then the planet started cooling and suddenly the reptiles began losin to us mammals. The cold literally requires forethought as a basic requirement for survival as even grey wolves plan our their attacks and dont on pure instinct so if the earth as colder more intelligent life would have risen sooner.

>>8127829
related is relative.
>if you don't even know basics your assertions regarding much more complex phenomena are irrelevant
>your points are valid and I have no answer to them.
ftfy

>>8127830
Dinosaurs were probably warm blooded though.

>>8127808
How do you know nothing intelligent ever came out?

We "know" nothing technological came out, however we can't ever say no other sapient species existed in the past.

>>8127839
Probably because nothing technological came out.

>>8127841
Humans were sapient for a very long time before they developed any palpable technology. I mean, there could have been other sapient species but shits got fucked up really hard and they went extinct. Even humans almost suffered a fate like that at least once.

>>8127823
only post that needs to be read in this sorry thread

>>8127843
Anon hominids have been making stone tools since 3 million years ago it took a while for us to figure out how to construct stone buildings.

>>8127846
why?
he spouts a couple common memes among amateur and undergrad biologists, neither of which is news to anyone on the internet and one of which arose only to combat creationists in debate and isn't strictly true.

then he proceeds to answer a question that wasn't asked. OP didn't ask why humans evolved particular intelligence, he asked why other animals didn't also.

>>8127850
Could we even recognize stone tools that are 200 million years old or so? I don't really know.

>>8127854
Also, sapience doesn't guarantee the development of any sort of tools.

Orcas and Dolphins are technically sapient right now, but I don't see them developing technology ever.

>>8127854
we could recognize them by context perhaps.

probably more worrisome to the argument is the current common view among archaeologists that ancient stone tools weren't the result of conscious invention, but rather something like a bird's nest that's complex but still built by instinct alone.

>>8127839
Would even basic tools such as bows, arrowheads, beads, ect be preserved over that long? Would an ancient dinosaur campsite have any evidence left of it, or would it be buried into dust by 70 million years of geologic activity? Obviously a society such as ours would leave a trace, but a simple culture maybe?

>>8127854
There was no animal with the limb configuration to make stone tools 200 million years ago though.
>>8127858
Well they are in the water if they were on land and learned to walk things would be different.

>>8127864
if they made tools of stone or bone we'd find them. Fire pits would be found as well. Structures.

>>8127864
You're observing this from a very anthropocentric position.

As >>8127865 pointed out, there were no creatures with limbs compatible with tool fabrication (none discovered anyway). So if some of them reached a level of intelligence similar to ours, we'd have no real way of knowing.

>>8127808
There is a inherent evolutionary alignment where many species have developed in completely unique environments yet still have adapted the same processes. With a probability of 100%, if the dinosaurs had not been wiped out they would of at some point evolved a highly intelligent branch like modern humans.

>>8127870
There were already reptile primate like creatures in the Permian era that died off for some reason before the dinosaurs came about in the Triassic Period, had these things continued to exist mammalians primates wouldnt even exist.

>>8127874
>With a probability of 100%, if the dinosaurs had not been wiped out they would of at some point evolved a highly intelligent branch like modern humans.
the dinosaurs weren't wiped out.
they've existed hundreds of millions of years longer than apes have and they never produced anything like us.

and they never will.

>>8127879
>they never will
>what are crows

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZerUbHmuY04

>>8127880
>Picks up styrofoam
>And throws it away

Destroy them before they destroy us.

>>8127879
Well Birds dont really have the limb configuration for consistent tool building anon. Theres only so much you can do with a beak compared to a hand.

>>8127808
There definitely seems to be a distinct demarcation between what we could imagine as a cunning animal and human intelligence.

Think some lizard man breaking into your house and sniffing for eggs to eat, he climbs the walls and blends into the background colours, he moves up to 50x faster than you, can spit poison in your eyes,

Now think of a naked dude politely knocking on your door and introducing himself as the egg barterer. He needs different tools to get your eggs.

Dinosaurs could leverage their incredible physical adaptation to compete on a hot humid world. When cataclysmic Earth changes happened due to meteor impacts, the sudden global cooling must have killed off many species due to starvation. Life took the direction of versatility, the jack of all trades creatures survived, amphibians, birds. The very well adapted large and powerful land animals needed vegetation or other animals to survive and with a disruption in the food chain and climate cycle, they died out.

Notice we still have air, and water dinosaurs: birds, whales, sharks, crocodiles. The land dinosaurs died out, amphibians and mammals took over, they got very big, more cataclysms happened, they died out and were replaced by the even more versatile hominid species, of which there must have been many, all competing for limited resources.

Intelligence is a new type of adaptation, it's taking a slow physical process and turning it into a fast technological one. I imagine the natural tendency towards this due to sudden and dramatic weather instability led to a particularly ruthless and predatory animal which invented labour saving devices to kill faster. We would have a lot more human like creatures on the planet, but we probably killed and ate them all as they would have been a considerable threat to us millions of years ago.

>>8128261
>We would have a lot more human like creatures on the planet, but we probably killed and ate them all as they would have been a considerable threat to us millions of years ago.
True, but all of them would be classified in genus Homo.

If you're saying other animals would have developed competing technology in the few million years we've been walking upright, there's the twin problems of those animals giving no indication they were headed that way, and having tens or hundreds of millions of years to get there before us and still failing.

>>8128267
The timidity most wild animals display towards us hints at millions of years of being chased and eaten by two legged creatures.

Why didn't the octopii build underwater civilizations? Why didn't birds develop bombs?

Swimming and flying give you tremendous natural advantages over even modern technology, you can withstand a shock to the local food supply because you can larger distances more efficiently.

Why didn't bears or pigs develop stone tools and language? They adapted in different ways, bears can hibernate to survive extreme weather, pigs can eat almost anything and fuck like rabbits.

Technology is primarily born out of necessity. Some feeble strain of monkey probably did not have the strength to climb trees and needed to come up with different strategies to survive on land. Fishing, fire, cutting tools.

It could be just a question of luck, like OP said. 2 million years left or right in history and that early hominid never survives to multiply.

Let's say for arguments sake that humans poison the oceans and destroy the atmosphere then wipe themselves out. The next form of life would have to be intelligent cave dwellers or deep sea creatures, either hiding from the pollution on the surface or being able to filter it in the water. The cave dwellers would need to find a way to survive the new environment and farm lychen, moss, fungi. The sea creatures would just need to develop natural resistances to radiation and pollution.

I would put my money on the morlocks over the mermaids as the next form of intelligent life, eventually learning how to use the pressure and heat of the underground to grow more food and power labour saving devices.

The relative ease of navigation underwater over the relative difficulty of it on land and underground, leads to an imbalance in outcomes.

>>8127880
Is that bird actually understanding what its doing though, or has it simply been trained to identify the configuration of tubes and which things to drop into which tubes?

I liken that video to claiming a bird has understanding of electronics because it knows how to peck at a button that releases some food.

>>8128281
>Why didn't the octopii build underwater civilizations?
fire is necessary but impossible for them to develop
>Why didn't birds develop bombs?
lack of digits
>Why didn't bears or pigs develop stone tools and language?
because neither outcome is normal or to be expected.

It's not just luck, the path we've come down is abnormal, not at all to be expected, and extremely unlikely to ever be repeated.

Something happens once in 4,000,000,000 years and people suddenly think it happens all the time? And they should expect to see it more often?

why? what's your basis for thinking any of that is to be expected?

birds had hundreds of millions of years to evolve civilization, they didn't. Compare that to how long it took us to go from apes to modern humans and you'll see how absurd it is to expect any animal to do what we did.

it simply never happens. It's never happened before us and there's absolutely no reason to think it will happen after us.

>>8128300
so then it's aliens?

It happened to an entire species: genus homo, of which there may have been dozens of offshots for millions of years, all which sapiens sapiens eventually out-competed.

There is no evidence to show it didn't happen to other species, so it cannot be ruled out. Looking back in time is hard, we are struggling now to uncover the first human settlements and explain the rise of civilization and metal working, and that is a record only a few tens of thousands of years old.

Are you telling me it was impossible for landlocked lizard people to evolve tens of millions of years ago and die out, never getting past the stone age?

You see only evidence of humans because that's the most recent, and we have a pretty good idea of where to dig. You see evidence of dinosaurs because that's geological evidence trapped in layers of rock. There is a fuzzy period where unless these creatures were incredibly widespread it would be hard to find them. Maybe it happened on islands which sunk, maybe it happened in clusters and since the Earth is so large nobody has managed to find a cluster yet.


Thinking there is something special about humans is rejecting all the evidence to the contrary: the emotional and violent nature which is similar to so many other social animals.

>>8128306
>There is no evidence to show it didn't happen to other species, so it cannot be ruled out
and that's it, we're done.

>>8127819
>but it's a pretty good question. If human-type intelligence is supposed to be a normal outcome of evolution, why hasn't it ever happened before?
False premise

>>8127819

Gorillas, chimps and bonobos have human-type intelligence

Just not to the same degree

Even corvids can compete with infants on certain IQ tests

>>8128355
>Just not to the same degree
yes, as I said before you have to generalize greatly to claim humans are just like other animals.

>>8127808
>implying reptilians didn't leave for the stars
>implying they didn't wipe all traces of there technological presence before leaving

>>8128284
I think it genuinely understands basic physics, wild crows that live in cities have also adapted to traffic and use it to their advantage, they throw wallnuts onto the street so that the cars crush them and then they watch the traffic lights so that they know when its safe to get them again.

Crows on New Caledonia have been observed to fabricate simple tools and use them to "fish" for worms that they can't reach with just their beaks.

>>8128659
Dogs in Russia know how to use the metro to get around

>>8128281
It wasn't feeble monkeys that couldn't climb, it was jungles giving way to Savannah and being upright freed up the hands for other things and you could see farther. Babies could spend more time developing outside the womb while the mother carried them. The biggest limiter on human intelligence is energy and pelvis. We sacrificed muscle strength for brain power, which is why chimps are stronger than humans despite being smaller.

>>8127808
They were good enough at hunting that they didn't need to.

Look at sharks: probably the oldest unchanged animal on the planet. Mutations occur at random, but when an offspring gets greater intelligence, that often comes at the cost of something else (because brain and muscle development are going to be competitors for energy input inside the organism). Therefore, unless the additional intelligence has enough of an added benefit (as in, the animal is able to hunt more effectively) to compensate for the additional "burden" of having to spend energy on developing greater intelligence, then the dumber animals are going to have an easier time surviving. This also applies for reproduction.

>>8127811
0/10 bait

>>8128707
Slightly tangential here, but the mention of old, unchanged species got me thinking.

I'm not saying this is necessarily the case for any given ancient species, but I wonder if it's possible to genetically "dead end". Like if your genetic code gets to such a configuration that any mutation is detrimental/unsurvivable.

Any geneticsfags care to tell me how stupid of a notion that is?

>>8128744
Bio-fag here I guess it's close enough

It's not exactly the way you think about it, but there's species like sharks that you mentioned that have evolved to fit their environment so efficiently that there's no other change that could be helpful, barring a change in environment.

Thats the reason that sharks and alligators have largely not changed despite millions of years.