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Why did monkeys alone evolve into higher life? Why don't we have species of upright walking racoons or bears?
All other things being equal (time, climate, ancestry) what's so special about Bonzo the Chimp that her great-times-5000000 grandkids get to drive around in Mercedes?
posted
You religious nuts! Always trying to poke holes in evolution! Why can't you just leave our beliefs alone?
Posts: 3564 | Registered: Sep 2001
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I was really quite serious-- in science fiction, generally, all alien planets have one dominant, sapient, life form. I wanted to know if there was a legitimate scientific reason for the evolution of a single master species per planet, or if we're not quite imaginitive enough.
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The only obvious reason I can come up with is competition for resources, which would get quite fierce.
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That, and I imagine that the move to higher intelligence takes quite a long time. Even if you believe it inevitable that life will lead to sentient life, that doesn't mean it is likely that it will happen twice on the same planet at the same time.
On the other hand, we don't have any evidence of any planet (other than this one) to evolve life, let alone intelligent life, so we can't really speak with authority on how common intelligent life is across the universe or how likely it is to have evolved differently on other planets.
You also have to define "sapient". Is it a yes/no issue or a matter of degrees. Some might argue that dolphins and certain apes are sapient to some exent, though they certainly have no claim to the "dominant" title.
Posts: 6394 | Registered: Dec 1999
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>>The only obvious reason I can come up with is competition for resources, which would get quite fierce.<<
That actually brings up a good point. Or at least, a story idea. What evolutionary tides did we quell in our attempts to keep the waterhole for ourselves?
Homo erectus vs. ursa sapiens. ..
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I'd like to point out a common misconception in that first post. Humans didn't evolve from monkeys. Humans and monkeys just have a common ancestor at some point (which is why we are still genetically similar). As for why that common ancestor evolved into humans, it probably was competition for resources or something along those lines. I think the bigger question here is that if we are connected to monkeys through a common ancestor, why haven't monkeys (and also why didn't neanderthals and the other human forerunners) developed a higher level of intelligence? Natural selection didn't choose for our intelligence; sexual selection did. So why didn't sexual selection for intelligence come into play for the monkeys or for that matter any other species? It's sort of an odd thing to think about.
Posts: 1960 | Registered: May 2005
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quote:I'd like to point out a common misconception in that first post. Humans didn't evolve from monkeys. Humans and monkeys just have a common ancestor at some point (which is why we are still genetically similar).
But it's quite likely we would call that common ancestor a monkey or ape.
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quote:I'd like to point out a common misconception in that first post. Humans didn't evolve from monkeys. Humans and monkeys just have a common ancestor at some point (which is why we are still genetically similar).
But it's quite likely we would call that common ancestor a monkey or ape.
Which would be technically incorrect. (I'm assuming by "we" you mean us common folk and not the scientific community.)
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posted
I just call it some kind of proto-monkey myself. I just wanted to try and clarify. I think a lot of people have this idea we came from monkeys (as we know them today), which just isn't true. I assume some of you already knew that though, but I felt like posting it anyways.
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It is my understanding that there were a number of competing hominids, not one species that evolved, but Mankind got a leg up from the Toba Erruption and overwhelmed the other species taht it encountered through more flexible tool use.
One thing that seemed to work out was our sexual dismorphism, which is pretty great (pun intended) and the natural division of labor that this created. Versatility through specalization, who knew?
quote:Originally posted by Dagonee: Not really. There are birds alive today that evolved from birds that are now extinct.
Yes, but "bird" is analagous to "mammal" which much broader than "ape".
I agree that there is a lot of wiggle room in this, though. I've heard some scientists say that we are apes, contending that we fit all the basic classification criteria and it's just human prejudice that keeps us from including ourselves in the classification. I don't know enough about that aspect of zoology, though, to say whether that is right or not.
Posts: 6394 | Registered: Dec 1999
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No "proto-" necessary. The split between man and chimpanzee came much later than the split between apes and monkeys, so a species of ape was the common ancestor of both man and chimpanzee. Monkeys are similarly ancestral to apes, and therefore to Hatrackers.
Except for ScottR, who is ":sheepish:" : and thereby negates "Why did monkeys alone evolve into higher life?"
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"While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats." -Mark Twain
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My totally unscientific speculation on this topic goes along the lines of getting a foot in the door, although I have seen a proper scientific television show that showed this development. My theory is that our ape ancestor were going along their merry apeish ways and all of a sudden the generations got a little smarter. Perhaps they learned how to kill or repel animals by throwing rocks and as soon as they started using their brain to survive in an analytical way, it starts becoming a useful survival tool and therefore evolutionarily important.
Perhaps no other animals managed to get that foot in the door, and perhaps they did (neanderthals) and we just wiped them out. Perhaps it is impossible or highly improbable for two species to evolve alongside each other who think in the same way because in their early stages one'll just wipe the other out from the feeding grounds and any survivors will either die or become intergrated into the new society.
If elephants figure out a way to repel humans that requires the use of their brains perhaps elephants will start to think on a higher level too and will get their foot in the door.
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quote:Originally posted by aspectre: No "proto-" necessary. The split between man and chimpanzee came much later than the split between apes and monkeys, so a species of ape was the common ancestor of both man and chimpanzee. Monkeys are similarly ancestral to apes, and therefore to Hatrackers.
Except for ScottR, who is ":sheepish:" : and thereby negates "Why did monkeys alone evolve into higher life?"
By your logic, then, the common ancestor of Man, and Ape could just as easily be said to be a species of "human". By similar reasoning, the common ancestor of Humans and Chimpanzees what a species of chimp. Therefore evolutionarily speaking a humans evolved into a species of chimp which evolved into humans again. In other words, it sounds like you're playing a semantic game.
Posts: 6394 | Registered: Dec 1999
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If one adheres to the "selfish gene" explanation, intelligence is actually a bit of a liability since it allows us to override our evil genetic masters.
Further, you've got to take a look at what brains are good for, adaptively speaking. While we humans like to think of ourselves as the lords of the earth, there are a number of bacteria and arthropod species that could easily dispute our self-bestowed title.
Posts: 4548 | Registered: May 2001
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Maybe sapiens were more curious about their surrounding than other species.
A recent finding found some kind of star material at the bottom of the ocean. They believe it was from a "nearby" supernova a long time ago. It happened to have happened right about the time the path to humanity is said to have started. Some think that the star going nova increased the temperature enough to shrinken the forests and jungles, forcing our ancestors out and to begin evolving longer legs for running through prairie, and the growth of less hair.
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I've considered this idea from time to time. Never really came up with a good answer. The best speculation I've got is similar to the farming/hunter-gathering split, which was one of the many things well-described in Guns, Germs, and Steel. That is, primitve farming is generally more work for less yeild than a hunter-gathering lifestyle. It takes either special conditions or a large leap for people to hook into the system.
I wonder if on our planet, the same could be said for the development of sapience. That, while on a long-term scale, it's highly beneficial, it hurts in the short term except in special conditions or when there is a much bigger than normal leap towards it, or possibly a combination of those two.
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I would call the common ancestor of monkeys, apes, and humans a monkey. But I probably don't count because I also call most apes monkeys even though I know they're technically not. Also various people and occasionally my computer.
quote:Originally posted by MrSquicky: I've considered this idea from time to time. Never really came up with a good answer. The best speculation I've got is similar to the farming/hunter-gathering split, which was one of the many things well-described in Guns, Germs, and Steel. That is, primitve farming is generally more work for less yeild than a hunter-gathering lifestyle. It takes either special conditions or a large leap for people to hook into the system.
I wonder if on our planet, the same could be said for the development of sapience. That, while on a long-term scale, it's highly beneficial, it hurts in the short term except in special conditions or when there is a much bigger than normal leap towards it, or possibly a combination of those two.
At the same time agriculture itself allows for the creation of cities. It allows for many people to work on science and culture, and the few to feed them.
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Stephan, I'm not entirely sure how to take that. Is that meant as a criticism of what I said or what?
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Not criticism, just another point of view. Like evolution, no one that isn't a creationist is 100% sure of how it all happened. Actually reading what you wrote closer I think we are agreeing?
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What I was saying was that, while adopting an agricultural way of food production could yield many substantial long term benefits, these benefits weren't known to the people initially going down the farming path and that, in most cases, primitive farming was a much worse choice in terms of short term "how much work I have to do for how much I get out of it". Thus, farming was only adopted in rare cases.
I was extending that idea to the possibility that the development of the rudiments of sapience may, in most cases, have been a burden in a short-term, biological survival sense. If so, it would only be in rare cases where the mutation survived long enough for the long term benefits to start coming into play.
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edit: As a programmer, this idea is something I come up against a lot. In many cases, performing a task once manually is much easier than coding a program to automate it for you. Many, many people don't see past this to the long term, where the created program does the often repeated task in a tiny fraction of the the time that it takes to do it by hand. (I've even made a neat little graphing program that takes "time it takes to do this by hand", "time it takes to create a program", "time it takes to run the program", and "number of times this task will be performed" and shows people concretely why writing the program makes sense. Cause you can't argue with graphs)
quote:I was extending that idea to the possibility that the development of the rudiments of sapience may, in most cases, have been a burden in a short-term, biological survival sense. If so, it would only be in rare cases where the mutation survived long enough for the long term benefits to start coming into play.
That idea seems to have a limited view of sapience, in my opion, of course. In other words, I think that "the rudiments of sapience" moved proto-humans down the path to modern man long before agriculture was a significant development. Sapience surely was more a benefit than a burden to early hunter/gatherer societies, who greatly benefitted from development of tools/weapons, and methods of efficiently processing the food that was hunted/gathered -- all of which require some degree of intelligence. In fact, by the time humans discovered agriculture, I'd argue they were well past the "rudiments" of sapience, and probably full into sapience.
Posts: 6394 | Registered: Dec 1999
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I must be doing an exta-specially bad job of getting my point across.
Karl, The farming/hunter-gathering example wasn't there for any reason other than to illustrate the general principle, which is that some things that confer long-term beneifts fare poorly in the short term and thus are generally not adopted unless there is a strange set of circumstances. I certainly wasn't trying to say that our species' development of sapience was somehow related to switching to farming or only beneficial in a agricultural society.
I'm not going to pretend that I know what steps go into a non-sentient species developing into a sapient one, but it seems to me that there are plenty of intermediate steps between "dumb" beasts and effective tool use. It's not like there's this zap! and suddenly they've got weapons and fire and all that good stuff. There's plenty of potential developments that I think would go before this. And I'm saying that it's quite possible that some of these developments would carry severe short term costs in many common environments.
For example, it seems to me that one of big features distinguishing between sapient and non-sapient species is whether they behave according to a deterministic stimulus/response system or whether there is some mediating factor between a stimulus and the response to it. In many cases, this will lead to a superior response, but it carries two significant disadvantages. First, response time is greater. Barring sudden and/or drastic changes to the environment, the stimulus-response patterns that have evolved over eons in a non-sapient species are generally very well suited to whatever they encounter and they execute near instantaneously. Systems that incorpate conscious decision making take more total time in generating a response.
Second, loosening the bounds of strict stimulus-response behavior means that some things must be taught. Asimov's short story Profession gives an interesting look at the ambivilent nature of non-automatic knowledge. Humans have just about the longest childhood and poorest sense of automatic self-preservation of any animal.
It's also possible that the rudimentary development of sapience depends not on one mutation or on one related path of mutations but of two of more separate mutations occuring concurrently. For example, curiosity without the ability to integrate the new stuff into a coherent whole just leads to dying a lot, while the ability to integrate without a drive like curiosity behind it is sterile.
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Look, I know very little about primitive evolutionary biology. I'm just telling stories here. But it's an interesting thing to speculate about and, I don't know, I don't think my stories suck that bad.
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Scott, Not true. I was educated by the Oblates to be a Salesian gentleman. I'm all over that bidness.
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I've heard some interesting ideas on the evolutionary potential of lemurs, were they not more or less restricted to Madagascar...
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might be worth mentioning that the ads on that site are probably not work-safe or appropriate for those with more tender sensibilities... I've run into a few of these types of video collection sites lately posted on other fora.
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Because each and every one of our ancient ancestors was a survival machine, adaptable, fierce and sneaky, when the need arose.
Posts: 9293 | Registered: Aug 2000
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Do the fish know we're smarter than them? Do the dogs know we run the world? Do the birds sit ther, thin legs hanging out of the birdnest, and consider the stunning 'higher lives' that surround them?
So, why would we know when and if something became more "evolved" than us? Wouldn't we just get on with our discussions about the surprising talents of humanity and fail to apprehend...
I think this is particularly relevant on the cusp of some significant evolution on the part of our networks etc.
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And humans aren't dominate on Earth. Cockroaches are.
What would it be like to be a sentient dolphin, on a planet full of self obsorbed humans? Maybe dolphins are smarter than humans and know that swimming all day is funner than what humans do. Sheez, going to work all day??? Who says we are smart and evolved?
I think people were smarter when people worked out of their homes, before the industrial revolution. Now it seems that everyone dreams of working from their home, with few getting the priviledge... Ok, maybe that isn't true, but I want to work from home.
Actually, I think OSC has said something like we are people because of the stories we tell, not because of using tools. I wonder if dolphins tell each other stories?
Posts: 1209 | Registered: Dec 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Jon Boy: Psh. Someone finally notices my obligatory stupid link, and that's the response I get? Philistines.
Sorry, JB, but when I posted it I had kids nearby that were a mite bit squicked out at a couple of the image ads.... and I never got back to actually watch the video. Maybe by posting this, it'll remind me to look tonight after they go to bed.
Posts: 4515 | Registered: Jul 2004
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Goodness gracious. I didn't even notice the ads on that page. I'm really sorry about that. I'll replace the link with a safer one.
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They view domination differently than us. For them, domination involves numbers. If germs viewed domination the same, they would dominate. But they don't. So we are safe from them.
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(I'm assuming by "we" you mean us common folk and not the scientific community.)
