Re: Dinosaurs
- From: Robert Carnegie <rja.carnegie@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2007 18:26:33 -0700
gyansor...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
I am interested to know why the Mamals have evolved to such greatness
whereas Dinosaurs, despite their time on earth appeared to stay as
wild beasts with the exception of a few who appear to have hunted in
packs. Would this imply that intelligent life is not a certainty on a
planet given enough time. Form meets function but what function
required humans to be intelligent and not Dinosaurs? Have humans had
longer on earth? I heard we just arrived.
Intelligence is one of those things that there is only one of to
study, which makes it hard to work out what causes it. Life is
another such thing. Intelligence is a controversial study, but I
think it's fair to say that the human brain is larger and consumes
more energy, perhaps proportionately more with our size, than almost
any other creature's brain - whales or dolphins may beat us, but then
again their brain may be larger but less clever. For instance - I
don't know - if their brain cells are larger than ours, or if they are
slower. Most other creatures get by with smaller brains and work less
hard at feeding their brain.
I hope I'm also right in saying that warm-blooded mammals typically
work harder at staying alive and warm than many other types of
creature do. This probably also applies to creatures that lived in
past times - the environment varied, by temperature, oxygen content in
air, etc., but the laws of physics are generally accepted to be the
same. (There are dissenters; we laough at them.)
In a cience discussion on radio, I heard someone say that if dinosaurs
had survived - if the asteroid blamed for wiping out the last of them
(except birds), during already-difficult times, hadn't come - then in
due course an Ice Age would have -illed them, anyway. On the other
hand, they managed quite well for a very long time. But for many
times longer than that, before, only single-cell microbes lived on the
Earth. Maybe all planets are like that, if they can support life;
billions of years for microbes, assorted predators and prey and
plants, eventually intelligent life arrives andin just a thousand
years after that they work out how to blow up the Sun, so we hear no
more. The trick would be to point a telescope at their planet just at
that time.
.
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