[LINK] "Why Dinosaurs Would Have Never Built Spaceships"

[rfmcdonald]

Forbes' Bruce Dorminey argues, after paleontologists, that dinosaurs were never particularly likely to evolve into intelligent tool-users akin to human beings. Even if the asteroid never hit, they seem to have been locked on their own, evolutionarily lucrative, path.

Anyone’s who’s ever stared into the eyes of a snake can attest to their cold-blooded instinctual ire. But the gray matter needed to create thinkers like Einstein and Edison requires more than steely instinct. That’s one reason most researchers scoff at the notion that dinosaurs — whether cold-blooded or not — would have ever evolved into a technological spacefaring civilization.

“Physiologically, ‘classic’ [non-avian] dinosaurs, like Brontosaurus, Triceratops or Tyrannosaurus rex are most akin to reptiles like snakes, alligators, and lizards,” Bruce Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, told me. “In modern ‘reptiles’ there is always a very small brain size ratio relative to body size, [which] is why you can’t really ‘train’ a pet snake to do complex tricks.”

Dinosaurs may have been cunning and very efficient in adapting to their environment, but they also had no reason to evolve into Mesozoic philosophers, Peter Ward, a University of Washington paleontologist and most recently the co-author of “A New History of Life,” told me.

Yet, for argument’s sake, even if the dinosaurs had survived the climatic ravages triggered by the comet that struck the Yucatan coast some 66 million years ago, could they have vectored into anything like human intelligence?

“The notion that some subset of dinosaurs would have evolved into human-like creatures is absurd,” Lori Marino, an evolutionary neurobiologist and executive director at the Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy in Kanab, Utah, told me. “We [haven’t] any data to suggest that complex technology has survival value along evolutionary timescales.”