Go you!
Environment influences genetics and in the case of intelligence, it isn’t an automatic advantage like bigger fangs are, you need to work at it. Surely you can recall times in high school when you found yourself about to be pummeled by the school bully and realized at that moment the fact that you were smarter than him wasn’t going to help at this point in time?
Sigh. I said that I phrased it poorly, you however, seem to have latched on to the idea that I was verging on saying something else. Now, let’s look at how this scenerio plays out if I continue with it.
1.) I stick to my guns about the matter, you continue to chase me around with a Bible calling me a liar, a thief and a coward.
2.) I say that I meant “low” compared to a humming bird, you will either accuse me of lying or berate me for comparing a primate species to a non-primate species.
3.) I say that I meant “low” compared to a sloth, and you will:
[ul]
[li]Accuse me of lying, or[/li][li]Berate me for comparing a non-primate species to a primate species, or[/li][li]Point out that this is wrong and pat yourself on the back for being cleverer than I am.[/ul][/li]
This is really like when Ford Prefect and Arthur have the discussion about the Garden of Eden and Ford says that when you’re dealing with someone who enjoys putting bricks under a hat, you’re screwed no matter what you do, so the best thing to do is not deal with that person. It seems to me, that aside from my botched phrasing of my statement, we’re really on the same page of the matter, but I doubt that you’d agree, and I really don’t have the time to hash this out until you see that I’m not trying to throw evolutionary theory out the window here.
I could be really snarky here and ask why the sudden switch to a third person and inquire if that did not mean that you were having someone else write this for you, but that’s a cheap debating tactic and I’m not really fond of those. I will plead guilty again to not being clear in my phrasing. What I mean was, “If a reptile could evolve intelligence and remain a reptile, we would see examples of it.” AFAIK, reptiles, despite being on this planet longer than we have, are still considered to be pretty dim.
Oh, I got it. The increase intelligence is not a goal of evolution, merely a “side effect” as it were. It “just happens” provided conditions are right (if conditions aren’t right, then the species goes extinct). At some point, however, greater intelligence becomes such an evolutionary advantage that it becomes the driving force in evolutionary change, rather than things like physical prowess or the best tail feather display.
True, but some things are of such a low probability as to not be bothered with. For example, it’s entirely possible that aliens will land, revive Marilyn Monroe and send her to my place to have sex with me today. The actual possibility of that happening, however, is pretty much zero.
Sigh, as I said, I phrased things poorly. I am not, in any way, trying to rewrite evolutionary biology. Whenever I have the time to fully hash the idea out, if it does not fit the established facts of evolutionary biology, I will toss it out. Believe that or not, I don’t care.
Eh, I don’t really care if I do or not.
Assuming, of course, a mod had read the posts in question.
Why don’t you just call me a “liar”? Why bother with the oblique phrasing? Frankly, you can call me anything you want it doesn’t matter to me.
Let’s see here, you’ve also said that you don’t have much time, and you’ve also said that if I didn’t provide cites to your satisfaction in my last post you were done with me and yet here you are. I really shouldn’t be spending the time that I am on this, and I certainly don’t have the time to go around digging up cites and lord knows that can turn into a “game” where one of us makes a claim which is a commonly recognized fact (like the sky being blue) and the other one cry “Cite!” I think I speak for both of us when I say I have more important things to do than that.
Okay, I plead guilty to being so imprecise in my thinking as to lump humans and neanderthals into the same broad general species category.
You know, my memory on the theory is a bit fuzzy at the moment as to what all happened. Did we start moving out on to the savannah after our brains began to grow or before? I don’t remember. In either case, would you not agree that there was a bit of a feedback loop in that as we took advantage of energy dense food because of our developing brains, this enabled our brains to develop more, so we were then able to make better use of energy dense food, thus allowing our brains to grow even larger?
“Known facts”? Unless I miss my guess, the only way it can be a “known fact” that human-like intelligence can exist in a non-bipedal species would be for us to encounter one. AFAIK, that hasn’t happened yet.
So you’re saying that it has been proven? Great! When and where?
So if I said to you I’d just created warp drive, you’d be completely wrong in asking me to prove it? :dubious:
I didn’t know I had any.
Okay, let’s see here, I mentioned a cite earlier which you failed to acknowledge (and let me quote it, just so we’re clear on eveything)
and you have cited
Off-line sources, and, quite frankly, I wouldn’t consider Science of Discworld to be any more valid than the fanwankery excuse filled The Physics of Star Trek, which does a lot of handwaving backed up by phrases like “while current theory says that this is impossible, it may turn out that it’s possible due to some as yet undiscovered principle” and now you want an on-line source? Meh. IAC, I’ll plead guilty to being stupid on that point. I really like Douglas Adams, and he certainly was an intelligent person and interested in things like the environment, biology, etc., but he’s no evolutionary biologist AFAIK, so just because he said that a slime mold could evolve intelligence doesn’t mean that one can.
So, you’re telling me that you’ve never posted something in GD that you thought would pretty much go unnoticed? Or that if it did get noticed it’d either be quickly dismissed or given mild acknowledgement? Because that’s really what I figured would happen, not that someone would latch on to every single word I posted and begin parsing them as if their very life depended upon finding a flaw in what I said.
Yeah, and when you’re a mod, I’ll do just that.