Re: Why didn't at least one dinosaur species become human-level smart?

On Dec 8, 9:50 am, STJensen <RecreationalPo...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Traveler <trave...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dinosaurs did not have human-level intelligence for the same
reason that chimps don't have it now. Animals are genetically
programmed to be idiot-savants. It cannot be otherwise, IMO.

And yet one animal did gain human-level intelligence. Humans. Unless
you're a religious nut that thinks there's a supernatural being at
play in the universe. Saying (and hoping) you're not one of those,
why did us humans become as smart as we are and dinosaurs, who ruled
this planet for hundreds of millions of years before our time, didn't?

Why I think we became as intelligent as we are is because that was our
competitive edge. For an animal our size, we didn't have speed,
strength, claws, armor, flight, or anything else special except for
our brains. We out-thought our opponents. My question is how did we
end up picking this competitive advantage as our niche and why didn't
at least one dinosaur species do likewise? It wasn't because it
wasn't the best. Clearly intelligence is the best advantage. If we
existed in the dinosaur age, we would rule it as we rule this one.

Now once our species picked this competitive path, the smartest humans
succeeded, reproduced, and passed along their genes thus ramping up
our intelligence scores over time. Neanderthal man being one of the
human sub-species that lost out in that mental arms race. Even within
our own human sub-species, the smartest had a reproductive edge over
those dumber so the mental arms race was at play with us as well.

But I think all that would have happened with a dinosaur sub-species
as well if one of them had picked intelligence as their competitive
edge. But why didn't one of them do so? As fossil evidence shows,
dinosaur diversity was very large. The largest creatures on land,
sea, or air to have ever existed did so in the reign of the
dinosaurs. But not all were massive size either. They ran the
gambit. So why didn't one ... just one dinosaur sub-species pick
intelligence as their competitive edge?

Scott

i suspect that humanimals developed what we now call 'intelligence'
because of a single trick that we evolved, and this trick was
exploited by a number of other features, like grasping hands, upright
posture, binomial vision and large breasted women.

The trick was a permutation of pattern recognition,
which nearly every animal has to some degree,
but humanimals somehow twisted it, so we could 'think backwards' and
instead of seeing patterns ( leopards in trees )
we were able to project patterns into our predictions of future
events.

And this evolved into language.

Without this one trick of thinking backwards,
we would still be scampering around on a subtropical forest floor.

So my argument would be that there wasn't a big or necessary or
fortuitous evolutionary shift to becoming 'intelligent' --
It was pure crazy, random evolutionary theory.

Which speculates that animals DON'T evolve into better animals,
( The creatures of the Precambrian era were just as 'successful' at
survival as we are today )
But rather; They just change in totally unpredictable ways.

Intelligence is just a kooky permutation,
which will ultimately prove itself to work against the survival of the
species.
.

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