wirtatmar{at}aol.com (Wirt Atmar) wrote in
news:cnhhm6$1ruu$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org: 

> Hans-Marc writes:
> 
>>I think that cats and dogs, who learned a lot from humans, may, in a
>>few thousand years, become advanced intelligent species!
> 
> A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I used to teach
> upper-level graduate classes in whole-organism evolutionary biology,
> which tended to populated with mammalogy, ornithology and herpetology
> doctoral candidates. I always asked the classes the same basic
> question. Of all of the lineages available on earth at the moment, if
> anything should happen to humanity, what group would likely be the
> next taxon to eventually build starships (although in millions of
> years, not thousands as you postulate)? 
> 
> As you can imagine, the answers varied all over the map, but my
> answers remain essentially the same now as then. My first choice would
> be the baboons and my second would be the raccoons. If you discount
> the extraordinarily elaborate language characteristics of humans,
> there's not much more than a dime's worth of difference between us and
> the other large mammals in intelligence. While no raccoon has ever
> solved a calculus problem, that's just as true for 99.999999999% of
> all of the humans that have ever lived. 
> 
> Roger Fouts believes -- and makes a good argument for -- the evolution
> of language in humans was a matter of the control of the tongue and
> the fingers having been co-opted in the same part of the brain. A
> portion of his evidence is on one hand our almost unsuppressable
> desire to talk with our hands and on the other, that we cannot perform
> tasks that require extreme dexterity, such as threading a needle,
> without moving our tongues in sympathy. 
> 
> I tend to believe this hand-eye-tongue argument as a necessary
> precursor to highly communicative intelligence, and predominately on
> that basis alone is the reason that I choose the baboons and the
> raccoons as the most likely successors to humanity. Whatever
> predispositions existed in early hominids to co-opt the brain in the
> manner undoubtedly exist in almost all mammals.More than that however,
> both groups are extremely intelligent, curious animals with 
> extraordinary manipulative capabilities. Both groups exist on the edge
> of bipedality, where their forelimbs could be freed for even greater
> manipulative capabilites, which in turn would imply even greater and
> more rapid brain evolution.
> 
> Indeed, when I look at either group now, I can see them eventually
> building starships with enormous ease and grace.


Well said. I would like to add otters to the short list, for much the 
same reasons. Dolphins and several bird species (e.g. parrots and crows)
are extremely intelligent and have the advantage in developing language 
of already having conscious control of their breathing, but do not have 
the manipulative capabilities.

Yours,

Bill Morse
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