I was playing World of Warcraft this weekend, playing as a Minotaur-esqe character. In game, they are no longer herbivores, and they are modeled after Plains Indians.
I began wondering if it would be feasible for herbivores to achieve civilization. Or is civilization something that can only be achieved by the apex predators?
The only sci-fi story that I have come across that has intelligent herbivores was “The Sparrow”, but even then they evolved in conjuction with, and were subjegated by the predators.
So sci-fi readers, what do you think? Do you believe that herbivores can achieve civilization? Or does their place in the food chain make it impossible for them to advance?
Jack Chalker’s Web of the Chozen has a herbivore civilization, but ity’s a “constructed” one, not an evolved one.
Chalker, a former history teacher, cites a possibly apocryphal meeting between Mark Twain and George Bernard Shaw. After going to a meeting of the Fabian Society and hearing a lecture on their vision of Utopia, Twain is supposed to have remarked “Sounds like a herd of cows after they shot the last wolf”. Clearly, neither Twain (if this is true) nor Chalker cared for this vision. Chalker’s herbivores went on to become invaders themselves.
Then, of course, there’s Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s Footfall, about elephant-like herbivores who form a space-traveling civilization. They’re invaders, too. They invade the Earth.
Another Niven one would be the Puppeteers of ‘Known Space’. And even one of them points out that they have thought ‘long and hard’ about why they were the only herbivorous species to acheive spaceflight.
I think it would be a true challenge. The extra energy and protein from an omnivorous diet would be a great asset in having the time to develop technology. It should cut down on the amount of time spent finding food quite a bit.
It depends what you mean by herbivores; diet isn’t fixed across the span of time; I’d be surprised if none of today’s herbivorous groups such as bovines and equines didn’t have some sort of omnivorous rodent-like small mammal somewhere in their evolutionary ancestry, likewise, I expect some of today’s carnivores and omnivores probably have ancestors which lived exclusively on plant material.
The emergence of intelligence and civilisation in any situation isn’t inevitable and may even be incredibly unlikely; there are other ways to solve some of the kinds of problems that our ancestors solved by intelligence (brute force, speed, etc), although intelligence is a useful all-rounder.
I dunno; if a situation arose where a herbivorous species could make good use of increased intelligence, and there was no particular biological or environmental hindrance to it, and they happened to experience a range of mutations that gave rise to potential for said intelligence, it could happen - they’d have to ‘get lucky’, but in essence, that’s all that happened to us.
Of course if we’re talking about alien worlds, then we must consider that the terms ‘plant’ and ‘animal’ (and therefore ‘carnivorous’ and ‘herbivorous’) might not apply in the same way as they do here, or at al. Also, the economies of energy (in terms of what sorts of organisms are more nutritious) might be different too.
Niven asks, “How much intelligence does it take to sneak up on a blade of grass?”
Intelligence is useful in adapting to, and adapting, the environment. Herbivores only have to know what plants they can eat, while Carnivores have to hunt down their prey. Omnivores (like us) have to know how to find edible plants and hunt down live game- we’ve got the worst of both worlds, and I think that means that Omnivores will always develop intelligence faster than the other two.
Well, in a real-world sense, that hasn’t happened yet. Depending on how you define civilization of course, but so far it’s only been achieved by a mid-level omnivore/scavenger (that only after developing technology became a medium-high level predator).
Now, it’s hard to extrapolate from only one data point, but it could be argued that apex predators are rather less suited to develop tool-using, large group cooperation, and ultimately technology and language. What does a tiger need technology for, and who is it going to cooperate with?
That said, it could also be argued that game hunting, while it might not be the original pressure for tool use, is a resource that tool-use (and cooperation) provides a lot of advantage in. So without hunting, a proto-tool using species might not be able to grab the resources to expand and develop to the point of agriculture.
Anyway, back to fiction, there are plenty of races that don’t rely on consuming the flesh of other species. I believe Larry Niven’s Outsiders (or whatever they’re called), live off of solar radiation, for one example.
Sure, but you have to have the brains *first
*. Grazing is easy.
The only way a herbivore could develop intelligence is if it entered an IQ arms race with an similarly intelligent predator. Of course, at some point the predator would move on to easier prey, probably long before the prey had reached civilization-starting intelligence.
It’s been a while since I read the book, but this sounds like a good description of Robert L. Forward’s neutron-star-dwellers in Dragon’s Egg (and its sequel, Starquake).
There are lots of non-meat-eaters in SF – the thinking sponges (or whatever they were) in Forward’s Firefly/Rocheworld, Hoyle’s The Black Cloud, etc. But the OP was asking about herbivores, which implies a different kettle of grass. Usually herbivores are dull and dumb. Look at Arthur C. Clarke’s The Sands of Mars.
Not really confining ourselves at all. I’d like to hear everyone’s hypotheses.
This idea first occurred to me when I first saw Star Wars. I lot of things about the series bothered me, but one of them was the Mon Calamari(sp?). Eyes on each side of their heads to look for predators, not pointed forward to focus on prey. I thought to myself, “How would they end up dominating their planet if they are constantly worried about predators?”
Seems like any herbivore animal that did not have to worry about predators, because of size or intelligence, would just be content to graze. If I were to write a sci-fi story about Buffalo humanoid species or some other grazing animal, a lot of people would have a hard time suspending their disbelief. While a story about a humanoid Tiger species, everyone would buy. Are we just use to these themes? Are predators just cooler? Or is it unlikely that grazing prey animals achieve intelligence and civilization?
Niven’s grasp of evolutionary zoology was always shaky, at best, and was utilized only as plot devices (the Pak decendants of the Earth in Protector and on the Ringworld, for instance) rather than circumspect speculations about natural selection.
While it is true that the primates and the ursines (probably the most intelligent mammals on the planet’s land surface) are omnivores, there are many other species which demonstrate at least some potential for conceptual intelligence that could potentially lead to self-awareness and civilization. In particular, elephants are noted both for their reasoning ability and outstanding memory, and are also capable of some amount of manipulative ability. Horses and burros are quite clever and (as anyone who has been around them knows) often entertain themselves by playing elaborate (multistep) pranks which indicate at least basic conceptualization. I don’t see any direct method by which they’d develop manipulative capabilities (unless they grow knobby lips like Pierson’s Puppeteers…ew!) but there’s no question that they’re smarter than the average politician.
On the avarian side, parrots (which I think are strictly herbivores…someone correct me if I’m wrong on this) are intelligent, gregarious, and capable of advanced manipulation with beak and claw. Underwater, you have the mammalian cetacean (dolphins and other orcas, whales) which are clearly more intelligent than man, seeing as how they have avoided fighting wars, messing about with fire, and building New York City, and from another phylum entirely, the higher cephalopods have demonstrated an amazing capability of intellect, including advanced mechanical problem solving and communication of abstractions. While their environment works against permenant structures and their blood chemistry (hemocyanin instead of the more efficient hemoglobin of phylum chordata) prohibits the high energy activities that vertebrates engage in, they are potentially capable of many of the same skills as the higher primates, including interpreting other octopuses’ emotional states and partaking in tool use. Both cetaceans and cephalopods are strict carnivores.
I think the reasoning that only omnivores have the proper set of skills and perceptions to achieve higher intelligence is a fallacy based on our limited data set and self-centered viewpoint. We’re first (well, we assume, anyway) to reach the level of intellect that permits permenant civilization and there are a lot of interesting speculations as to what led us to that path, but I think you’d be hard pressed to demonstrate that this is the only path intelligence could take.
What about the Delvians (Farscape), a race of sentient, bipedal humanoid plants, they photosynthesize (intense light causes “photogasms”) and eat both plant and animal matter, they have a deeply spiritual culture, similar to Buhddists, and are a spaceborne race.
normally they don’t eat meat, but when food is scarce and they’re in the company of animals, they emit spores that irritate the animals and cause allergic reactions and death, once the animal has been killed by the Delvian spores, the Delvian eats the animal and the budding stops
[smug vegetarian] And it’s worth noting that Chalker was close to 100 pounds overweight when he died last year of congestive heart failure. [/smug vegetarian]
The OP is a false conundrum. As someone said, we only have one data point here, and furthermore we don’t know enough about how our own intelligence evolved to make assumptions about what makes it possible. Maybe it’s our plant-eating more than our animal-eating that made the difference for us.
Gorillas are almost completely herbivorous but are pretty close to us in intelligence.
Also, horticulture and agriculture require a lot of reasoning. You have to know about the seasons, when various plants grow and germinate, and how pollination works. It’s certainly just as complicated a problem as killing dangerous animals; it’s just a less-dangerous one.
W.R. Thompson wrote a number of short stories for Analog magazine back in the early '90’s about humanity’s first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, the herbivorous Kya.
I agree with Stranger On A Train that it may be overanalyzing from too little data to say that only omnivores or only carnivores or whatever could evolve intelligence. I’ve seen some speculations that high intelligence isn’t correlated with any sort of inter-species conflict (after all, sharks are consummate predators who have no trouble finding prey, even marine mammals, yet they don’t seem too bright by human standards of brightness), but rather with intra-species relations–that highly intelligent animals (humans and other primates and cetaceans, for example, are very social animals. In other words, we may have evolved big brains to keep track of what our fellow hominids are doing and to stay on top of all the vital social relationships within our bands. By this reasoning, we would expect intelligent species not so much to always be carnivores or always be omnivores, but we would expect intelligent species to be social animals, not solitary. (I admit I don’t know where, say, orangutans would fit into this hypothesis.) Thompson’s Kya are the descendants of herd animals, IIRC.
OK, people here are confusing two different things: intelligence and civilization.
Intellect: Difficult to say. We still don’t properly understand what caused man to evolve intelligence in the first place, since we were not, apparently, much worse or beter off than any other creature, and it happened over a fairly short span of time, geologically speaking. It may have been, physically speaking, a random feedback loop that kept getting bigger.
Civilization: Actually, to a certain popint I think almost any creature can handily make one. Carvivores might start pastoralist cultures or could set up efficient transit systems, herbivores might start settled agrarians and/or hunter-gatherer tribes. Omnivores might well have an advantage here in building civilization because right form the start we have an impetus to specialize (i.e., meat or food production) and can spread to new area more easily (many herbivores and carnivores are much more specialized and limited in diet).