/sci/ - Science & Math

Because those species do not have need for intelligence in order to survive?

because you cant have two species occupying the same nitche. One species would kill the other one.

>Why was it that only we evolved into what we are to day?
Natural selection; survival of the fittest.
>Why didn't, say, lizards follow suit and start tacking on more human like properties?
The environment, and just plain luck with mutation, favored primates.
>Is that even plausable? I doubt we are the only things special enough to become what we are.
Sure it is, but we're not going to see your average Garden Skink develop into a biped with human level intelligence any time soon.

>Why was it that only we evolved into what we are to day?
Natural selection
>Why didn't, say, lizards follow suit and start tacking on more human like properties?
Lizards were great. But all of the large lizards died.
>Is that even plausable? I doubt we are the only things special enough to become what we are.
Yep

>>1635191
Didn't we (homosapians) and neanerthals once live together. I know that isn't as drastic as what op was putting across, but still.

I also wonder what the world would have been like if the neanerthals had survive the ice age instead of us.

>>1635161
Evolution doesn't aim for anything, also. That means being bipedal, or intelligent, isn't the measure of success. Simply, whatever lives, and gets to pass on its genes, is an evolutionary success story.
Lizards are just as successful as Humans.

our form of intelligence is a very risky trait, and for it to even have a chance of being successful you need a number of preconditions that are rarely found in a single animal.

>>1635191
Not entirely true, but I understand your overall point.

>>1635204
Yes.

>>1635209
Moar informations requested.

Being not particularly suited for anything else, humans and their ancestors had to use intelligence to capture food and survive.
other animals have evolved intelligence to a degree, but their primary traits are what help them survive, thus there's no need for intelligence. Giraffes have really big necks to get food to survive. Lions run fast and have sharp claws and teeth to get food to survive. Humans have intelligence to set traps and ambushes and make tools to get food to survive.

>>1635204
We murdered every last one of them. That is why they are extinct.

>>1635218
Giraffes have short necks compared to the rest of their body. Giraffes mainly use their necks for combat.

just saying, but the reason we're so smart is because some chimp realize he didn't have to use his hands to walk and used his hands to use other shit like tools.

this chip evolved into a number of species who got extinct because they just plain sucked and failed or because they fought with humans and lost. We were the only species that are biped.


But I've been thinking about this. what abourt bears (why aren't they smart)? I think it's because they don't have opposable thumbs though. right?

>>1635232
It is more accepted that we adoated better to the sudden climate change while they all froze or starved to death.

>>1635242
No, the other species of humans were just around too long and the genetic diseases probably caught up with them. Our species has only been around 200k years, a small fraction of how long the others lasted. Yet we're sadly the last ones.

I put forth this /sci/
How do we know that there wasn't a civilisation as advanced as us in the past? By now whatever they left behind would be gone.
They may have died off or (however unlikely) jumped planets.

>>1635242
>what abourt bears (why aren't they smart)? I think it's because they don't have opposable thumbs though. right?

1. An opposable thumb is not a precursor to intelligence.
2. Define "smart".
2a. They survive fine without Human level intelligence. There is no environmental pressure to select the most intelligent Bear.

Being uber-smart isn't the de facto survival trait. Due to technology humans today are so dominant we can wipe out any species they feel like, but only 10,000 years ago we were just as smart but were only capable of throwing rocks and scavenging from carcasses more powerful animals killed.

>>1635284
They would of left some kind of residue behind. The pyramids are expected to last hundreds of millions of years.

>>1635284
>How do we know that there wasn't a civilisation as advanced as us in the past?
There's no evidence of such.
>By now whatever they left behind would be gone.
The same could be thought for the remains of creatures who lived hundreds of millions of years ago, and yet, there they are...

>>1635284
They wouldn't be gone. We can turn up coals from campfires from a million years ago with our ancestors bones. If there were some I-beams buried with them I think we'd notice.

>>1635284
This would only be true if the earth had been here thousands of trillions of years.

>>1635217

>>1635218

honestly it is pretty much this post.

our early EARLY ancestors were essentially upright chimps that somehow went separated from their jungle environment to the plains of Africa. Now the only things chimps really have going for them are their group mentality, mild intelligence and ability to climb trees really well. with tree's gone, the only way they could survive was by staying in families and using their smarts.

However there is still a problem because a chimps usual diet of fruits and such is very hard to sustain in a plains environment, meaning that they had to shift to eating meat, which isn't too large of a jump because like modern chimps they probably already ate the occasional small mammal and such. The question is how they would go about this, and the obvious answer is by getting some form of weapon. The harder question is HOW they would do THAT, as the usual method of becoming physically powerful would be poor, as a chimpanzee's body is not particularly suited to such things like a lion or bear is; the time it would take for them to adapt enough to do it would be staggering. They probably had some very basic tool use like modern chimps, so the best road they could go down was the one which allowed them to exploit this trait: intelligence

note that I am very tired and can't be assed to proofread.

>>1635328

forgot to note, their method of getting their food would be the scavenge method, which not only required some capability to scare away the predator animal that caught the carcass, but a way to actually get to the parts of the animal that they needed to survive: bone marrow.

early tool use of rocks would allow them both to scare away the predator and get to the bone marrow.

>>1635328
>>1635339
woooaaa. hold the fuck up.

what if we dropped some chimps into the "plains of africa" or w.e. it'd be the start of another smart species!

oh and I was thinking this about the bear thing, bears already have claws and are real strong so they don't have to be smart. chimps are weak as fuck so they needed an alternative that no other animal has done; USE TOOLS. right?

>>1635339

if we dropped chimps into the plains of africa they would probably die. our ancestors were a lot like chimps but they were NOT chimps, they mostly like had a very large transition time between the jungle and the plains.

>>1635204
I can never get my head around this.
2 different humanoid species living on earth at once.

>>1635349 what if we dropped some chimps into the "plains of africa" or w.e. it'd be the start of another smart species!

There is no guarantee chimps will evolve higher intelligence if placed under survival pressure because this is not the only trait inductive of survival. They might just get bigger and stronger, faster, require less food, or a thousand other options.

>>1635357
it'd do SOMETHING though. and there is always that chance.

also, what about fucking a chimp. They're so godamn close to us in terms of dna...

>>1635349
Chimps are fucking ripped. If you get one angry, you're dead, unless you have a gun or something.

>>1635323
they would OF?
OF?
OF??????

Lizards you say?

Are humans still evolving?
Yes.
So are other animals?
Yes.

>>1635269
This makes me sad; think of a sub-species with a higher rate of reproduction evolving from persons of lower IQ and slower cognitive function.

Oh wait, such a species would be limited to their ecological niche.. Silly me for worrying.
DIE CREATIONISTS.

Because being what we are hasn't stopped us from reproducing.

Lizards being what they are hasn't stopped them from reproducing.

>>1635427
Well look at pandas, they refuse to mate.

So it can't be that important a role in evolution.

The reason lizards aren't the dominant species is because they all got pwnt by the meteor.

>>1635892
Imagine if dinosaurs had become civilized and we were kept of pets.


Speaking of pets I've always wondered why dogs seem so willing to be kept as our pets.

>>1635967
>Imagine if dinosaurs had become civilized and we were kept of pets.
Who says we aren't?

>>1635967
Because they were trained to accept it, i.e. do what I say and your live is going to significantly improve.

>>1635161
You're assuming that homo sapiens is the ultimate expression of perfect evolution, while it's true that we are incredible efficient (and we're made out of pure awesome), evolution has many roads and not all of species choose to walk ours (which doesn't mean they're any less awesome).

>>1635995
hi5

It took them a while, but they're catching up!

We have gone from being weak and defensless to being able to wipe out any species we want. It's amazing really.

A monkey that used tools just happened to evolve into depending entirely on those tools.

There are birds that use tools, if they live long enough we might have highly intelligent birds in a few thousand years.

>>1635297
THEN EXPLAIN THIS
http://www.zmescience.com/other/most-amazing-unexplained-artifacts/

oh and those weird spheres in costa rica

>>1636254
I watched a bird build a nest once fuck was I impressed.
You tell a human they are only allowed to use their mouth and feet to bend twigs into a stable structure. The bird has us beaten there.

Crows are fucking brilliant.
>Drop delicious nut in busy traffic intersection
>car drives over nut, cracking its shell
>wait for light to turn red and cars to stop
>eat up delicious cracked nut in safety

>>1636271
To be fair bird's feet are more similar to our hands than our feet and our mouth isn't very useful for that kind of task.

>>1636277

even better I've read about people that have set up vending machines for crows, where a nickel gives a peanut, dime two peanuts, and quarter three peanuts. once you get one or two trained they all start learning and soon you can make a fuck ton of money, like hundreds of dollars per day and the crows line up with the change they found from all over the city.

>>1636270

Time travel

>>1636294
I saw a TED talk on that.. and then I googled it.
http://www.infoaddict.com/ny-times-ted-conference-scammed-by-vending-machine-for-crows-theory

tldr: He only experimented with crows in his apartment, not at the zoo. I still think the theory is plausible, though.

>>1636270
That list is missing one I was sure would be on there.
I can't even remember what they are called but in china (if I remember correctly) there is a mountain, inside this mountain is pipes and tubing that lead to the water below.
So scientists have guesed that it must be some kind of pluming.
It dates back thousands and thousands of years.

I wish I could remember more about it as I wanted to look into it more when I first heard.

>>1636296
Why would people travel back in time and create shitty pictures and leave hammers everywhere.

The wierdest one is the disks that tell a story of aliens crashing into the mountain. It brings back the question I often ask of whether we have been visited.

>>1636310
you think plumbing is more impressive than a fucking ancient battery!?

>>1636298

aww lame, what a fucking cunt to make that shit up >_>

i bet crows could do it though, I live in a pretty big city with lots of crows and next time I move in to a new apartment I'm going to make sure it has a balcony for this very reason.

>>1636298
I remember reading about them on cracked.com, but ovbiously being from their I didn't really believe it.
Now that I know they are real I will go about wondering about how advanced past 'species' on earth have gotten.

I tend to make the argument that the only animals capable of intelligence are mammals. Let me explain:

Mammalian birth is extremely taxing and risky, so a benefit exists in keeping the child alive. A way for the mother to communicate with the child must also be prevalent because of the ease from which most mammals encounter predators (mammals flee more than they attack). So that accounts for calls but not so much for language. However, considering that the child of a mammal must experience a great length of time in growth, there exists a benefit in those that can understand different calls for different situations. Thus a differentiation of sounds exists, potentially leading to language.

Language is the basis of intelligence, couple that with a thumb (a catalyst for tool making), and you have an organism that survives best with an ability to understand its offspring, while the reptile is fine as it is.

>>1636322
It's hard to determine how much he "made up" and how much is just a genuine miscommunication... I don't want to jump to either extreme that he's completely innocent or completely guilty, but it's worthing pointing out the typical journalistic impulsiveness in jumping to conclusions and calling him a "liar" right off the bat. Even during the TED talk, he doesn't explicitly say "we did this and it worked exactly like we intended" (though admittedly he does heavily imply it). And there is video footage of a vending machine device in a park with crows on it, though it's inconclusive that any of them actually learned to deposit coins.

tldr again: pic related

So how possible is it for dolphins to develop advanced technology in the future? I personally think they are crazy geniuses, but are limited the most by their lack of long limbs and digits to hold and mold things.

>>1636402
I had this discussion with my Biology Professor.

Had dolphins the ability to control their environment (through limbs, like you say, though crows have done fine with beaks) they would be an intelligent species.

>>1636415
Well some people think dolphins used to walk the earth...

>>1636419
We evolved from dolphins. I saw it proved in a TED talk.

A large number of specific environmental and biological factors at different moments in time made us who we are. A lizard would require a whole different set of factors to happen to become anything like us, I suspect one of the largest problems would be one of proper diet to sustain their growing brain and their cold-bloodedness limiting their activity.

But we only barely know what led us to be who we are now and to predict a successful path of evolution that would lead to a reptilian humanoid is well... hard.

>>1635967
>Speaking of pets I've always wondered why dogs seem so willing to be kept as our pets.

All dogs descended from Wolves. Bread over thousands of years.

>>1636298
>The Piri Reis map
No, it isn't Antarctica, merely a skewed drawing of the coast of South America, drawn to fit on the material.
fucking_idiots.jpg related.

>The Nazca drawings
>Scientists have had trouble trying to figure out how they could have been designed and created without somebody directing the work from above.
And yet a bunch of college kids have no trouble making crop circles a lot more intricate, in one night, without such "view from above" help...

>Baghdad Battery
>it only needed to be filled with an acid or alkaline substance to produce an electric charge.
Wiki:
"the bitumen completely covers the copper cylinder, electrically insulating it, so no current can be drawn without modifying the design;"
"Controversial stone reliefs depicting arc lights have been suggested, however the voltages obtained are orders of magnitude below what would be needed to produce arc lighting"

"The artifacts strongly resemble another type of object with a known purpose—namely, storage vessels for sacred scrolls from nearby Seleucia on the Tigris. Those vessels do not have the outermost clay jar, but are otherwise almost identical. Since it is claimed these vessels were exposed to the elements, it would not be at all surprising if any papyrus or parchment inside had completely rotted away, perhaps leaving a trace of slightly acidic organic residue."

>>1636434
That woman was a crackpot.

>>1636254
>There are birds that use tools, if they live long enough we might have highly intelligent birds in a few thousand years.

Why wait when we can make use of genetic engineering?

>>1640037
Society tends to frown on such endeavors, why escapes me.

>>1635204
Humans destroyed every species that would compete with us. We killed everything else in the homo genus [Morris, 1968] (fuck yeah citations).

Hey guise,

Read this book.

I like this thread. It has covered so many topics.

>>1640172
is that book good? I bought it on impulse at a thrift store this week because I had a feeling it would be good.

>>1640240
i bought it cause it had a naked little girl on the cover

>>1640240
It is excellent.
>>1640250
I have the reprint version, I can't fap to it.

>>1640250
ha. my copy has only a single male figure. no fap material there... at least for me.

>>1640134
Well, that would be awesome but not terribly practical. I mean, why devote a (probably) huge chunk of society's resources to something just because it'd be cool?

>>1641312
>I mean, why devote a (probably) huge chunk of society's resources to something just because it'd be cool?

If you even have to ask that question you're a huge fag. Just sayin'.

>discussion about provolving crows

What the shit, did I just timetravel to the month after /sci/ was first made?

bump

Because intelligence is an evolutionary fluke, OP.

Lizards are fucking eachother just fine as-is. No need for hands or a big brain to do that.

>>1641312
I guess that's true...

>>1640037
Fucking yes. Genetically engineering crows to be roughly as intelligent as human beings. That would be the coolest fucking thing.

>>1644017
But then what happens when they start to enslave us?

>>1642113
>>1642113

>Because intelligence is a mutation that gives an advantage in every environment, OP.


FIXED that for you friendo

>>1636270
why is the antikythera trinket or the babylonian-battery so unbelievable?

it's not like the pre-classical mediterraneans / near easterners did not have a grasp of empeirical sciences, astronomy and math or that they were ape-like savages

>>1644522
The hammer is pretty amazing though. Considering back then we figured people were savages.

I also quite like the egyption disks that tell the story of an alien crashing.

>>1636270
>what they found within seemed to be an archaic hammer of sorts. A team of archaeologists checked it, and as it turns out, the rock encasing the hammer was dated back more than 400 million year; the hammer itself turned out to be more than 500 million years old.

PLEASE SOMEONE EXPLAIN THIS SHIT!!!

500 MILLION YEARS OLD IS NOT ONLY OLDER THAN ANY POTENTIAL EARTHEN INTELLIGENCE BUT ALMOST OLDER THAN CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM!!!

>>1644536
A previous race of humanoid creatures lived here before us.

Or the creationists were right

>>1644017
>>1640037
First of all, our genetic engineering isn't even remotely advanced enough to achieve this and second, it's not certain whether such modified animal would be capable of survival.

>>1644542
>or the creationists were right:

>they claim the universe is 6,000 old
>a 400,000,000 years old hammer is found
>that proves them right

what did I miss in your logic?

>>1644542
>A previous race of humanoid creatures lived here before us.

not at 400ma before us

the most complex nervous system at that time belonged to nautiloids

also there was no wood at that time

Have already decided that Noah's Ark is real and does nothing but search for evidence to reinforce this idea rather than look at evidence and THEN draw conclusions from evidence.

>>1644555
What might account for the discrepancy?

Flawed dating methods? Contamination from the rock in which it is encased? The hammer, by some freak of nature, descending to a point where it was in a liquid rock, which then rapidly cooled (as in perhaps it dropped into the ocean, was stuck into an active lava floe, which rapidly cooled)?

Notice there are no Carbon dating reports associated with this discovery? That should lead you to a conclusion.

>>1644576
we need to know in what kind of sediment it was found, I guess...

>>1644547
I mean the ones that believe that we were created as humans. Just because you fall into one catagory doesn't mean you believe everything about that catagory.
Plus it was sarcasm or a joke if you will. I believe 100% that we evolved.

>>1635195

>The environment, and just plain luck with >mutation, favored primates.

Humans are not that affected by environment. To survive, they change their environment.

That's why humans > octopus. Since the octopus is perfectly fit to live deep underwater, it's not going to change physically or psychologically over thousands of years.

okay, so like, mutations - they cause evolution slowly right? Well what if he gave tons of radiation to a cat or something and caused millions of mutations simultaneously, Couldn't it then be possible it would evolve into a human?

>>1644594
>Well what if he gave tons of radiation to a cat or something and caused millions of mutations simultaneously

if it was to survive it would most likely devolve into a Deinococcus_radiodurans-like prokaryote

>>1644576
The natural explanation is that the hammer deal is a sham, and/or faulty "science" used to pull off a publicity stunt.

In fact, looking at a timeline of the Devonian period, it becomes even more evident that aside from extraterrestrials (lol) descending onto Earth, this is the only explanation.

That hammer is a load of shit and you should feel bad for buying into it.

>>1644594
No, what if we uploaded the genetic material to a computer, produced a variety of high-mutation simulated embryos, developed an algorithm to select favorable qualities, and output it when we had human DNA?

>>1644610
Brain fart, the "500 ma" would plop itself into the Cambrian period. Even more lulzworthy.

>>1644610
why would extraterrestrials with interstellar-travel tech would use iron hammers with a handle made of a material that did not even exist back then?

>>1644631
Aliens man. Dey craaaazy

>>1644631
To screw with you.

>>1644631
Maybe they liked uh, the appeal of hammers?

In all honesty though, that was sorta the point. (the situation being completely ridiculous)

>>1644489

Then we're fucked.

>mfw the op thinks evolution is directional

>>1636294
links plz, i want to do this in phx az, there are a grip of pigeons and otehr birds here that i would love to turn into a form of passive income.

Youre all so closed minded, i honestly believe we had alien intervention, i think the being mixed with 21 different species and us being the 5th beings to take place here is true.Its better not being 100 sure that than having all "facts" and confirming your own stupidty, our biggest flaw.

Captcha:Stories Noviate

>>1646338
Not sure if troll.

Just in case not troll:
We're not closed-minded, we're skeptical. This means that we don't just accept things without evidence; rather, we attempt to show why things may be true or false. We're mostly unwilling to accept things as fact without some empirical evidence of some kind. There doesn't seem to be (in most of our opinions) any conclusive evidence to suggest such a happening, and so, we don't believe it.

Also way to make a sweeping generalisation, asshole.

Did you know that Whales were once Land animals that returned to life in the Ocean?

>>1646551
Yes.