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

STJensen <RecreationalPoker@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,

Sadly, Traveler does seem to have some strong religious beliefs that are in
my view clouding his judgement on some of these issues.

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.

As I recall, I think there's evidence that Neanderthal might have been
smarter. I think they had larger brains for example. It's certainly
possible they lost out for other reasons. A show I saw not long ago (one
something like Discovery Channel) put forth the theory they lost out due to
climate change. It was speculated (if I'm remembering this correctly),
that they were physically adapted to an ambush style of spear hunting
(short, strong, heavy, but with little long term endurance). They survived
in forests by ambushing their prey. The climate then changed (start of an
ice age maybe?) which wiped out most the forests. Without the thick
forests for cover, they could no longer use their ambush tactics and their
bodies just weren't suited for long term tracking and running down their
prey. Homo Sapiens however, did have better endurance and could chase down
an animal by tracking it for hours until it became so exhausted that it
couldn't escape. This was an evolutionary gift of Homo Sapiens because
they evolved in a savanna instead of in a dense forest.

If any if this is correct, the answer is that homo sapiens won out
basically by the luck of the draw. They just happened to have the right
survival skill when things changed.

Neanderthal might have been smarter, but if they weren't smart enough to
develop traps, or guns, they weren't smart enough to figure out how to
survive before they died out.

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.

I think you over-rate the power of intelligence in survival. I think it's
a very questionable survival trait which is probably extremely hard to
evolve - only if just the right sequence of environmental events happen is
it likely to evolve.

I think your questions about why didn't the dinosaurs evolve it is just
more evidence to support this idea. If it was so powerful and useful as a
survival skill, it probably would have evolved. The fact that it didn't
over such a long period is evidence that either it's not as useful as you
suspect, or it's just very hard to evolve.

To start with, as Wolf keeps pointing out, human level intelligence is very
expensive in terms of the energy it consumes. It might not be possible to
evolve it unless the animal has an energy processing system capable of
producing the needed energy levels. I think there's some evidence to
suggest the dinosaurs didn't have the type of metabolism which would have
allowed them to support such a brain. So before they could even evolve a
brain, they would have to first develop a different metabolism - but this
could be one of those chicken and egg problems which is hard for evolution
to get past - you don't develop the first trait unless there is need for,
and if you don't have the second, there's no need for the first, but
without the first, you will never evolve the second.

It might have required just the right combination of evolutionary
environmental events to force the animals to develop a different type of
metabolism before it even had a chance to develop the stronger brain.

The other killer is that our intelligence is based on learning. The prime
feature of our brain is it's power to adapt through learning. But learning
takes time. It's a statistical process which works by long term
statistical accumulation of trial and error results. These sorts of
learning systems work better (calculate better statistical answers) if they
average the trial and error testing over longer periods (the longer the
period, the less noise and more signal you extract from the tests).

This means that the smarter we are, the slower we learn. Fast learning
causes an increase in mistakes (more learning errors of mistaking what
looks like a statistical trend for fact when it's really just turns out to
be superstitious behavior). Part of why humans are so smart, is because
their learning is very slow. It takes us a year just to learn to walk.
How long does it take a human before you can dump him out in the middle of
a forest before it will have a reasonable chance of surviving? 5 years? 10
years?

How is having a brain that makes us intelligent by first making us so dumb
we can't even survive on our own for 5 years after birth an obviously good
survival advantage when you live with 100 different types of dinosaurs who
want to eat you for lunch? You would think that in that environment, the
number one survival skill was running fast right after birth, not taking a
year to learn to walk.

Intelligence is not an easy thing to evolve in an environment where
avoiding prey is the number one survival challenge.

I suspect it ended up evolving in a time where staying alive had far less
to do with avoiding predators, and far more to do with finding food in a
quickly changing environment. If the environment is constantly shifting,
the animals that could adapt the quickest to new food sources and new food
collecting behaviors without waiting thousands of years for evolution to
re-program the animal's natural behaviors would have a big advantage. And
if the odds of being eaten for lunch was small, then evolving an adaptive
system that made us dead-dumb for years would not be as much of a
disadvantage as it would in a period where not being eaten was the prime
danger.

Most prey animals can walk and escape from predators within hours of birth.
But to do that, it means their walking and escape behaviors aren't learned
- they are hard wired into them. They can't afford to replace those hard
wired survival behaviors with a learning system (aka intelligence) that
would take a year to learn to walk. It's a huge negative survival
advantage.

I suspect it takes just the right combination of environmental shifts to
allow intelligence to work as a survival advantage and to allow it to
evolve. Intelligence is a costly feature, but it pays off big when quick
adaptation is required.

I suspect the time of the Dinosaurs was just not a time where quick
adaptation was needed - and as such, intelligence cost too much to be
justified when the environment was extremely stable for millions of years.
Only when the correct shifts in environment happened which was fast enough
to really challenge the status quo, but not so fast that it killed off
everything was the time right for evolving greater intelligence (aka
improved adaptation traits).

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?

It's an interesting question. I don't know if we have enough data yet to
know the answer. But it's fun guessing.

Scott

--
Curt Welch http://CurtWelch.Com/
curt@xxxxxxxx http://NewsReader.Com/
.

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