Why didn’t dinosaurs evolve into an intelligent species?
Humans evolved over a course of 6 million years and dinosaurs had been evolving for 165 million years, so the question I have is being that they had over A HUNDRED m. years to develop how is it we achieved a specific level of self awareness in such a short amount of time? Is it that a species has to die off so the...
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answers:
D J say: Maybe they did and left before the asteroid crashed into Earth. They might have only left their stupid members behind.
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Bulldog redux say: Evolution has no goal or purpose. The dinosaurs were an extremely successful group without high intelligence.
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Pearl say: maybe cause god didnt want them to
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JazSinc say: "Intelligence" wasn't strongly selected for over a period of millions of years back in the Cretaceous.
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say: There is a false premise in your question. You seem to think becoming a human or a humanoid is some sort of high level of progression on the evolutionary ladder. There is no such thing as evolutionary ladder or high or low ''rank'' of species. There is no up or down in evolution. Dinosaurs did not evolve into humans because their environment was different from ours. When the global oxygen levels decreased and their food became scarce, most of them died out, others survived for couple million more years and evolved into smaller beings. They adapted into their new environment and became chickens. Our ancestors also adapted into the new constantly changing environment and eventually became humanoids. We were two different forms of organism adapting into changing environment. If the env. did not change, we would not have changed either, and dinosaurs would've still be around. If humans disappear and only chickens are left, they can eventually become humans too.
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JASON say: I think this is a good point. Many things just happened to be present in the right body form around the same time for human intelligence to develope. Walking upright, grasping hands with opposable thumbs, language, the use of fire and cooking, social groups. The reptilian form had bipedalism and probably a social structure, but we are all trapped by our biology. Perhaps reptiles can't vocalise a wide range of sounds to form language. There is a mathematical formula for the probability of life on other planets, but how many would develop intelligence unless other factors are considered?
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Pearl L say: probably cause theyre dinosaurs
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L. E. Gant say: First, look at the basic precept behind evolution. It's about species adapting to the natural environment. Dinosaurs were an evolutionary dead-end -- they did a form of evolution, but the evolution was about getting bigger and stronger to compete for local food. So, by the end of the dinosaur age (if one can call it that) the creatures were huge. But the bigger they got, the more egg-laying became counter-productive.
The suggestion, based on evolution is that the only way the egg-laying creatures could go (after the meteor or whatever) was to become smaller and to be able to hide the eggs better -- that is, birds (in particular) are the direction that form took to survive in the environment.
For mammals, the direction was different -- some species grew larger (elephants, whales), but others became more agile (felines, canines, primates) and started to adapt the environment to their own needs.
It's more surprising that primates (apes, humans, etc.) were the ones that adapted to language using creatures; felines went the other way -- adapting better to hunt other creatures, rather than adapting nature to suit them.
But think of insects, particularly cockroaches -- they were around with the dinosaurs, and they have not developed intelligence as we know it. They're geared to surviving in a different way to humans....
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Dont Call Me Dude say: How do we know they didn't?
Name me one thing built by humans that would still be here after 65 million years. Metal, stone, even plastic, would ALL be gone by then.
Maybe the raptors evolved into bipedal tool users and we just haven't found a fossil. Fossilization is random. You're not guaranteed a sampling of all life.
If they got sufficiently far we MIGHT find something of theirs in space (although it MIGHT be that the odds are even higher against that, except for maybe a lunar base, the obvious first destination for a spacefaring species), but other than that I don't see how we can show they didn't OR did achieve intelligence.
Let me know when the Time Travel Agency is set up and we can go back and look.
Otherwise? We'll never know for sure.
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Phillip say: Natural selection selects. It does not create. Evolution is not true.
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Mark IX say: Because it didn't need to. Dinosaurs were hugely successful across the entire planet, the carnivores were smarter than the herbivores because they needed to be. Humans became intelligent because of the need to communicate within large groups, dinosaurs weren't in the same situation.
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