[QUOTE=Christopher]
It doesn’t seem that anybody is really presenting any proof of any kind. People say that six legged creatures could have been the first to walk on land, but they don’t offer any proof of that. An elephant can be held up as an example of something that is a quadruped that uses tools, but an elephant is pretty limited in what it can do wth them. As I mentioned earlier, an octupus is an interesting example. I don’t know why octupuses haven’t developed intelligence. It could be that an ocean environment is bad for the development of language. Maybe the mutations that would lead to intelligence are only feasible in vertebrates.
Playing like your giving me information I haven’t already considered isn’t going to convince me of anything. Tell me something new.
[/QUOTE]
[list=a][li]You’ve made an affirmative claim, to wit: tool-manipulating intelligence can only occur in bipeds, and have failed to present proof of it, despite examples to the contrary.[/li][li]There is no “proof” that any number of other legs would be ideal, useful, or possible for a terrestrial vertebrate in the form of example because it hasn’t happened, and indeed the purpose of that line of reasoning is to indicate that evolution of life on Earth hasn’t demonstrated an exploration of all possible alternatives and dismissed them in favor of quadrapedal (and later, bipedal) locomotion. Four limbs (or deprecations thereof) are endemic of terrestrial vertebates because that number was, as far as we can tell, the number of existing lobes on primative lungfish. Furthermore, we have every reason to believe–from the study of anatomy, evolutionary zoology, and molecular biology–that adding more locomotive limbs to an existing complement is irreducibly difficult. Four is the number because it was arbitrarily first, not because it is some kind of evolutionary optimum, as evidenced by a wide variety of other numbers of limbs in insects.[/li][li]Various species of octopus have demonstrated very high levels of conceptual and problem-solving intelligence, and while not social creatures in the sense of habitat or defense, they show a remarkable degree of visual communication skill in experiment. As they lack vocal or sound-generating capability (not a part of their cumulative form, see) they don’t have the ability for speech or hearing, but they have an enormous brain compared to body mass, and have a visual cortex roughly comperable in complexity to primates. The main restriction, it would seem, in more extensive evolution to developing social intelligence and capability is their reproductive cycle; they die (by function) not long after impregnating or laying eggs, and thus don’t have the kind of extended social or familial contact that is common among the more intellegent vertebrates.[/list]At this point, you seem to be dedicated to defending your thesis despite a complete lack of rationale beyond appealing to the extant but highly limited dataset of life on Earth, and are in your own words adverse to considering even contraditions therein, rather than engaging in honest discussion or debate. Evolution and natural selection are not simple processes that are readily analogous to simple chemical reactions or mechanical thermodynamics, and generally can’t be boiled down to a simple set of rules that follows a linear and inalterable path toward a preconceived or universally optimum solution. The fact that you don’t understand this suggests that you need to spend some more time reading up on the field rather than preserving a facile and unsupported claim.[/li]
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