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.

Wirt Atmar
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