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Originally Posted by questor
as far as Koko, can she do a crossword puzzle or can the parrot
sing La Tosca ? these animals have been evolving right along the same time scale as human beings. why have their abilities and brains not expanded like human beings? if evolution enhances, advances, and improves,why are they lagging?
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You're making the common assumption that "intelligence" is the *goal* of evolution, and it is not. Evolution does not inevitably lead to intelligence. The dinosaurs lasted a much longer time than we have with walnut sized brains on sheer brawn. It took a giant meteorite to take them out. Our particular branch, Mammals have evolved larger brains and that has resulted in lots of interesting evolutionary advantages, only Homo has gone so far as to create technology, but you discount some very significant abilities in social complexity and communications evidenced by many other mammilian species.
In fact what the Homo experience shows is that technological intelligence and advancement is rather easy to evolve, its only taken us about 50,000 years! But there has to be a sequence of events that causes it to be selected by chance events in the environment and the change in genetic information. It really is luck and its not a *necessary* result, but its also easy...
Cheers,
Buffy
