Robert Karl Stonjek  wrote in message
news:b99t4k$2qf5$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org...
>
> "Brian"  wrote in message
> news:b98lms$2d2s$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org...
> They were around for such an incredibly long time that it seems
> astounding to me that they never seemed to develop any language or
> tools or whatnot to facilitate hunting. I have the concept that the
> reptilian body infrastructure just doesn't support high levels of
> intelligence. It might not be strictly related, but humans seem to
> become very mentally sluggish if they become way too cold.
>
> Anyway, how can it be that evolution didn't push the dinosaurs to
> become intelligent, given so much time? No dinosaur ever picked up the
> trick of using a sharp stick to help it hunt, or to make certain
> sounds to tell the other members of its pack which direction to go to
> capture the prey?
>
> RKS:
> Brains are expensive.  Why grow a big brain if you don't need it??
>
> In evolutionary terms, an intellectual arms war may have occurred, where
> survival of the fittest also included survival of the smartest.
>
> A more likely evolutionary vector can be found in a concept of
> evolutionary expansion - when all the slots available for dumbos are
> taken, only opportunities for intelligent beasts remains.  One could
> cite examples of airborne or other environmental niches.  Evolution can
> be thought of as life reaching out and finding or detecting
> opportunities and then filling those opportunities.  There was an
> opportunity for smart animals which was eventually filled.
>
> This doesn't mean that expansion means an addition of biomass.
>
> Dinosaurs weren't too bright, but they were as smart as they needed to
> be.  Had they evolved a method of deflecting incoming asteroids then
> they may have lived longer, but I think the other attack came from small
> animals or even bacteria.  Very large land animals can be infected by
> quite large mammals - mice can eat away at elephants.  The huge
> dinosaurs would have been easy prey for the tiny mammals that emerged
> just at the end of the dinosaur era.
>
> Why didn't dinosaurs get smarter??  They didn't need to - there was no
> evolutionary pressure to and no advantage for the smart dinos.
>
> --
> Kind Regards,
> Robert Karl Stonjek.
>

I think there are just a few possibilities explaining why we made it and
they didn't on the smart scale:

1. Early on, the dinos got into a size/strength race, taking resources away
from other avenues of evolution such a brain race. This
may generally simply be an equi-probability choice between two standard 
evolutionary paths, or just an unlucky one in what is
normally just a totally chaotic process. In any case, the size race drained
the dinos because it resulted in an ever escalating
strength  arms race precluding devoting energy to preferred brain
evolution. While there were small dinos, even smart ones,
throughout dino history I think, they simply couldn't compete well against
their big sisters for resources and safety.

2. _If_ dinos were cold-blooded (and there's much argument about this
still) the argument of there simply being energy limitations
which made the size path more viable and limited inherent brain function
and its  evolution to large size and better organization.

3. Morphological considerations in the reptilian body may have limited the
development of a rich language, if any at all, and
language may indeed turn out to be an absolute prerequisite to any form of
higher intelligence, certainly the technological kind.

4. A good point has been made that large-size reptiles a subject to many
other problems than human-sized mammals, e.g., diseases,
parasites etc. Maybe with the chance meteor strike, this helped to make the
dinos extinct giving small mammals their lucky
break--and morphologically an excessive size arms race has less utility
than it does for the reptiles, and/or, the few brain
mutations needed to kick-off intelligence are inherently more probable and
viable. I'm not so sure about this last though because I
believe some of those small dinos were actually pretty smart, and maybe
with a little more power and luck would have made it to
intelligence too, albeit at a little slower pace than we did.     ...tonyC
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