What demands brought about human intelligence? (dinosaur, Kingdom, evolution, anthropology)

[Sunstone]

Originally Posted by stephenw

Especially the ability to lie.

Not to mention the ability to get drunk.

[painted wolf]

Long ago man stopped being at the mercy of his environment like other animals, and put the environment at the mercy of him.

Tell that to a tsunami or a hurricane.

Human evolution has stopped, for all practical purposes.

Untrue, we are evolving just not in a flashy way that most people seem to expect.
Most human evolution is done along the lines of disease resistance, such as recent mutations that grant increased immunity to heart disease, HIV/AIDS and so on.
The last "big" mutation that became an evolutionary advantage was lactose tolerance some nine thousand years ago in Europe and appearing again 3,000 years ago in Africa. (this is actually four distinct mutations that have the same effect)
Since we had been raising animals for meat for eleven thousand years the addition of milk and its derived food products was quite a boon.

So no we are still evolving... like everything else.

wa:do

[yossarian22]

Originally Posted by Francine

Long ago man stopped being at the mercy of his environment like other animals, and put the environment at the mercy of him. Since we can live in Antarctica or the Moon, we will even create technological solutions to adapt to the same climate change we are creating. Human evolution has stopped, for all practical purposes.

Dead wrong.
Human evolution is accelerating.

[rojse]

Originally Posted by methylatedghosts

Two things:

Who says we're going? We're probably just going to evolve further and branch off due to pressures like overpopulation and global climate changes.

secondly, I don't think evolution is purposless.

Evolution's "purpose" is to allow creatures that are most successful in their environment to breed more prolifically than those that are less successful, because of a feature they have that is different to the rest.

[rojse]

Originally Posted by Seyorni

Yet until hominids migrated out of Africa they were little more than another ape. The chimps, baboons &c that stayed are essentially the same animals they were tow or three million years ago.

Evolution does not mean that the old species always dies out - it can happen that the new species carves themselves their own niche, not in competition with their ancestor species (even though our niche is more like a gaping crater now).

[painted wolf]

also chimps and bonobo's arn't the same animals they were 'millions of years ago'. They are relatively contempteranious of ourselves. The oldest chimpanzee fossils are only 500,000 years old.

wa:do

[Sola'lor]

Originally Posted by painted wolf

Squirrels are highly adaptable, intelligent animals. Their ease at using humans as an ecological opportunity demonstrate this. I'm always impressed by the number of species that have adopted human habitations as just another environment to be exploited.

In seriousness I agree.

But you wouldn't think it seeing all the squirrels that run across the road. Then when they're almost to the other side they get scared of the oncoming car. Then they try to run back to the side where they came from and they get squished.

[fantôme profane]

Originally Posted by Sola'lor

In seriousness I agree.

But you wouldn't think it seeing all the squirrels that run across the road. Then when they're almost to the other side they get scared of the oncoming car. Then they try to run back to the side where they came from and they get squished.

Natural selection in action.

[Sola'lor]

Originally Posted by fantôme profane

Natural selection in action.

True.

Too bad there aren't any smart ones to survive. Hahaha