I was going to mention that.
This discussion of primate evolution reminds me of one of the things I object to in the Drake equation. Even assuming something like large animal life evolves on some other planet, we cannot estimate the likelihood of something like human type intelligence developing. We did it in under 65 million years starting from mouse-like shrews, but dinos didn’t do it in 165 million years and we have no idea why. It is entirely possible that the chances are negligeable, but we are on the planet where it happened.
And what counts as “human-type intelligence”? Parrots, ravens, and elephants are pretty smart, maybe even human-like, in their intellect. They happen not to have evolved a planet-wide technology-based society, but we guard that niche pretty carefully. If there were no humans, one of those lineages could potentially do that in a few million years. Or not.
Our intelligence didn’t just start to evolve 65 million years ago. And we don’t know how intelligent dinosaurs were. However, I would agree with the general point that there’s no guarantee that evolution results in intelligence in finite time.
That has always been the question that if humans died off, what animals would rise up to our level?
No good answers.
There aren’t “good” answers because the question makes a false assumption about evolution-- that human level intelligence is some sort of goal that evolution is aiming at; or that we are somehow the end point of evolution. Neither of those is correct. With all due respect, it has not always been the question for folks who actually understand evolution or who work in that field.
Arguing that dinosaurs had 100 million years to evolve intelligence doesn’t make sense. The lineage that led to human beings was around all that time, why didn’t humans evolve from tree shrews back in the Mesozoic?
Mammals have been around longer than dinosaurs, for sufficiently loose values of “mammal”. Then along came the Permian extinction which wiped out the large mammal-like animals, and let the dinosaurs take over. So why didn’t Gorgonopsids evolve intelligence?
It wouldn’t surprise me if the most intelligent creature on Earth in the late Cretaceous was a giant ammonite like Parapuzosia, or some gigantic shell-less cephalopod that didn’t leave fossils.
And of course, even if some cephalapod were as smart as we are, their environment would lead to a very different technological path (if any), which we probably wouldn’t even recognize.
I meant, “Did they need to change their behavior, the way they did things? Did it come to pass that they needed new tools to do something besides slice up meat?”
There were numerous steps along the way, and the population that advanced their tool-making abilities were more likely to survive. Somewhere along the line our ancestors moved from picking up sticks and stones to sharpening them. Further down the road they moved to attaching a sharpened stone to a stick. Along that path they have moved up levels by developing tools to make other tools with and more complex tools. Perhaps if they didn’t develop those new tools they would have survived anyway, meaning there was no need, or they may not have survived without them but we have no way of knowing that. Newer and better tools were an advantage over the species that didn’t have them and didn’t use tools. However, we certainly needed them to develop those tools, without that we’d be posting by scratching symbols in the dirt.
A lot of evolution takes place because population are pre-adapted. Dinosaurs didn’t evolve feathers to fly, but those that did, and ended up flying are the only ones left.
So, the population of our ancestor who had the better tools might have simply outcompeted the other guys who didn’t have those tools. The poor suckers who didn’t make it didn’t know they “needed” the tools, until they did. And then it was too late.
It’s not like some population is teetering on the brink of extinction until “presto” some new trait evolves and then everything takes off. I mean, that might happen once in awhile, but that is certainly not the norm.
Oh, yeah. Look what we accomplished with just one opposable digit. And they have more, and some, like the nautilus, have many more.
What type of technology would be hard to recognize?
Which is an excellent point. Our technology is largely based upon structural modification of hard materials (flint snapping, metallurgical forging and casting), thermal enhancement (fire for heating and cooking of grains and tubers for edibility), and radio frequency free transmission for long range communications and sensing. An ocean-based technological civilization obviously wouldn’t have fire and would likely be limited in metallurgy or radio. We might expect that it would instead develop technology around organic chemistry, building structures by deposition and electrochemical control at a fine level, with long range communications using optic fiber or something similar that wouldn’t be attenuated through water.
And even that assumes that a civilization would develop some kind of analogues for our technologies rather than develop along completely different lines. We tend to assume that we’ve achieved some teleological zenith of evolutionary development because we’re self-aware and thus, can build poorly-run cities, write shitty poetry, and bomb the holy hell out of one another over theological disagreements about invisible imaginary deities, whereas another intelligent species might regard most of this as thoughtless, instinctive wankering rather than productive development toward some other end, such as spending as much time as possible fishing, frolicking, and fucking, with some occasional recreational effort being devoted to solving some minor problems of quantum field theory and gravitation, just for fun.
Stranger
All sorts of animals “build structures”, including insects. That, in and of itself, isn’t a sign of intelligence. I’m just having a tough time thinking of “technology” that wouldn’t be recognizable as such. Unless it was microscopic and wouldn’t be normally seen.
Chimps have technology, and we recognize it. But they’re closely related to us, so maybe that doesn’t count. Ravens have technology, and we do recognize that. Some ants have farming, and we recognize that (even if we don’t attribute it to intelligence). Technology would have to be some physical thing, right?
TriPolar: I love that guy!!
Direct epigenetic manipulation of other organisms to control their morphology or behavior. Encoding information directly into a molecular substrate via protein manipulation for storage or processing. Environmental temperature regulation by bio-catalyzed release of clathrates.
We tend to think of technology as something we use with our hands (or built with tools using our hands) but a technology could be any consciously-controlled manipulation of the environment or any object or organism in it. We make much of fire and flint (and later, copper and iron) to the point that we name our epochs of technological innovation after them, but the real technology that allowed us to advance from hunter-gatherer to the larger social organizations are the artificial evolution of grains and animals for nutritionally dense, regular food sources to support large permanent populations, and the political tools to control those social organizations that extend beyond personality-dominated tribal groups (religion, economics, bureaucracy, et cetera). We don’t generally think of these as “technology” or tools, but they are as much a tool of modification of the natural environment as an axe and shovel.
Stranger
Just taking this as an example, an organism couldn’t go from not being able to do that to being able to do that without a multitude of physical tools. Unless… it was a behavior that evolved without intelligence, like termite mounds or beehives.
Unless the organism learned how to identify the epigenome, manipulating it would be a matter of instinct, not intelligence.
Ants herd other insects and remove nutrition from them.
If you assume that it does it in the same (very crude) manner that we do. If, however, it is capable of consciously producing and secreting enzymes capable of modifying histones, it would not need separate tools to manipulate proteins or sequence RNA. How this capability originally evolves is not part of the question. After all, we didn’t “think up” our hands; manipulative digits (to some degree) evolved first, and then we started building increasingly complex tools which used the capabilities they granted us, or rather, our progenitors. A natural ability to generate arbitrary (or at least a range of) proteins could be a natural ability that would lead to the emergence of intelligence, albeit by a very different path than we took.
In considering alternative evolutionary paths to intelligence and technology I think we need to be fairly broad-minded about how we interpret and classify both, at least as an initial position. While I would agree that terminates are not “intelligent” (either collectively and certainly not individually) the reason we can dismiss that capability is not that the individuals operate by some genetically prescribed instinct, but that the termites as a whole are not capable of responding to a change in environment. If you go and kick a termite mound over, they’ll just rebuild in the same place, again and again. If, however, the termites collectively produced some kind of change to effect a defense against future destruction, we’d have to at least acknowledge the possibility that there is some kind of collective “intelligence”, even if it is nothing with which we could ever have discourse or share philosophical insights. The vast majority of things that you and I and every other human being do every day are unconscious or instinctual, from breathing to blinking to not inhaling while we drink; what makes us intelligent, however, is the emergence of complex rational decision making ability (or a suitable facsimile thereof) which gives us something approximating volition and independent thought.
Stranger