There Are those who believe that if the dinosaurs had had more time they could have built higher civilization eventually by way of the evolution of life more like ours. Some offer pictures of what the dinosaurs may have evolved to, in a rendition of a dinosaur with more avian mouth and clawed feet that looks and walks like us and perhaps has more agile grip.. Mike Shermer in Scientific American this month argues that the chances of this taking place on other worlds are small because… 

 If our way of life is caused by our physiology as has often been thought, he offers the counterexample of the Neanderthals who have a physiology of large brains, etc. like ours and who lived for hundreds of thousands of years in Europe without our intervention and never showed signs of developing civilizations like we did..

  This leads to the question that’s been asked, why did we live without blending our families in with the Neanderthals side by side for 100’s of thousands of years? Perhaps, like many near relatives, we just were in competition. Darwin believed that, competitors, not predators were the most risk to advances in evolution.

   This would explain why the Neanderthals lived only near the coast of Europe instead of Africa like us in those times. The Neanderthals lived in a time when South Europe wasn’t as conducive to living in comfort as Africa. Europe was mostly covered with glaciers and as cave paintings show Africa in these times was more like Europe now, a grassland. Why did the Neanderthals live in a more unfavorable place? Perhaps not by choice if the answer would be there was first our distinction in physiology. The small advantage we had in brain power also multiplied up by our advantage of good weather and tools like the Indians in the US may have forced the Neanderthals to life in the smaller and smaller area of Europe.

    While this about competition may be why we won over the Neanderthals (our ancestors were the first Africans) it’s also possible there were other causes. Even so Shermer says the Neanderthals may have lived in Europe without our intervention and this might be so on the inner realm of their land where our competition couldn’t reach, but on the outer realm of their land there might have been conflict, and between us and other relatives when we were in competition.

  In history the bad weather may have slowed the Neanderthals down, for example in ancient times wars were only fought in the summer. This means, because they were almost as intelligent as “us”, if we had not been in competition they might well have gone on to develop higher civilization like us. Thus the real cause of the loss of the Neanderthals may have mostly been competition, not the lack of being in the general area of higher evolution. We remember e.g many believe the Neanderthals buried flowers with their loved ones presumably because of their belief in the afterlife. While they find evolution is like a business with no sure guarantee of winning, once evolution is in the general area of great advantage, evolution would usually then refine and boost it.

  If so the idea that We Are Of Advanced Civilization in Evolution because of Physiology would be not disproven by this about the Neanderthals.

  Shermer goes on to list what I think is evidence against his own conclusion, ”Of the 40 to 60 phyla of animals, only one, the chordates, led to intelligence, and only the vertebrates actually developed it. Of all the vertebrates, only the mammals evolved brains big enough for higher intelligence. And of the 24 orders of mammals only one-ours, the primates-has higher intelligence.

  The late evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr calculated that even though there have evolved perhaps as many as 50 billion species on Earth, “only one of these achieved the kind of intelligence needed to establish a civilization.”"

   As Shermer says, “If the evolution of a smart, technological, bipedal humanoid has a certain level of inevitability because of how evolution unfolds, then it would have happened more than once”. You may also say if it’s so improbable, we wouldn’t have even evolved once.

 But this is evidence for our physiology being something special for our creativity of science, civilization, and culture. To me this paucity of intelligence seems to not be proof that civilization creating intelligence is possible, or we wouldn’t be here. The rareness tells us that there is something special about how we evolved that other life other than our relatives hasn’t, at least about intelligence.

  Shermer goes on to quote Carl Sagan, who noted that technologically advanced species, “may live on the land or in the sea or air. There may be many different evolutionary pathways, each unlikely, but the sum of the number of pathways to intelligence may nevertheless be quite substantial.”

  In other words, as in the famous cyber proverb “any machine that computes given enough time can solve any problem”. This reflects Sagan’s other great comment that though the Greeks were the first to invent science. “Science resonates so well with the higher brain that all the other great civilizations would have done the same, given enough time.” I agree with Carl Sagan about much, only Einstein has influenced me more, but Carl Sagan wasn’t a saint of science. Sagan was mostly a teacher and not orignal like Einstein or others, even he was wrong sometimes.

  It’s more complex than this, however. What gives a machine enough time?

  We think of the Earth’s evolution of life like a giant computer, of finite computing power. With enough time evolution evolved intelligence, then higher intelligence, and with it, our own civilization. In Sagan’s belief that life with advanced intelligence on other worlds could live in the water or air he seems unaware that life there needs to maintain a different physiology than life on land would.

  If most of the avian life is spent with the economy of moving through the air, less time and computing power is put into evolving larger brains, so higher life on other worlds that’s in the air is less probable than here.

 It’s true that some birds are intelligent, even so they’re limited by the physics of flight. And there is less use for articulation and heavy feet when the life in the air can just sail away, claws would be better, from evolutions “short term” computational way of life. When on land, birds are on two feet and the wings are for lift in the air so they were without play like us in evolution if our hands and brains were around the wife in celebration! 

  In the water, there’s no surface for whales or fish to stand on, and the resistance of the water has to be constantly overcome, using up a large part of the energy amount like we had left over used for play and higher evolution. And fish generally don’t develop articulation like the birds in flight. Most of the time, there’s nothing to grip; teeth would be evolution’s obvious “short term” answer putting off the possibility of play indefinitely. There’s not much need to land on in the water so fins may have seemed of more worth no doubt to fish in evolution.

 Simon Lake, the inventor, thought up lots of submarines, and they had wheels to move on the ocean floor, and most ships are in the water in these times. Swimming wins out in the waves. We may have needed our feet as well as agile reach to evolve intelligence because without feet, the arms have no support for agile movements.

  A whale may have the possibility of evolution to higher civilization and the chance of this may be higher than a prion (a small life form). A small cyber machine takes longer to compute than one that’s already more highly evolved. Even so fish may not have the chance to evolve to higher civilization even in 4 more billion years of evolution, as on most other worlds.

  Insects in evolution as we know in their evolution had a bit of luck that stopped them from reaching higher evolutuion. When they evolved breathing, they used tubes that connect to the air outside from inside for respiration. If passive circulation is used breathe and pump the air, the air can’t reach more inward than just so much, without evolution to better ways of life this sidetrack of evolution has limited the size. Before we go out and buy all the honey and flowers around, it’s to be remembered too that with the limitation of respiration, the same may be true for insects like bees vis a bees about how life in the air may not have allowed the more general nonspecialization in the evolution of higher intelligence. This is why the new chameleon software is a good innovation, it’s a cell phone and many other kinds of machines, like cash machines at Reno, but more of it! 

  Ants that live on land aren’t limited by the limits of aviation, so this would seem to be a type of life on other worlds than ours that could evolve without the luck of not having found how to use active respiration first to large size and then higher intelligence. Even so evolution of life like larger ants may have the same problem that may have limited higher intelligence of most other life that walked on land too; a giant ant might be ferocious but not smart either for the same reason other four footed animals less smart than we are because of how they move around. 

  Life of most evolved intelligence here on Earth other than us is life that is neither in the water or the bird life, rather mammals in general. A bacteria or a flower may not evolve higher intelligence (it’s to be noted however that there are indeed some exothermic plants that put out more heat per unit of weight of the plant than even a Jaguar pound for pound, so the idea that it’s completely impossible that even plants might evolve to higher life on some worlds is not to be ruled out. The secret life of flowers smells so sweet.).

  Even so most of the life on Earth may have been limited in the evolution of intelligence by either general restrictions in environment, like a small business being kept small by lack of cash. To maintain life in the air or water and have leftover time for the evolution of play is less probable, or may have been limited by mere luck.

  So I think Sagan’s idea about computers may be revised to say, “While any computer given enough time can solve any problem, time is often limited.” With luck and limitations like this about air and water in evolution for most life there may not be enough time, and vast realms of life are not at the top of the food chain, if we at least know who the boss or lion is, we know the worth of mom and labor…

  We evolved about halfway through the Earth’s allotted 8 billion years. Being first, even after billions of years is only evidence that our way to achieve intelligence may or must be one of the more important ways, not that it’s the only one.

  Because of the advantages to higher intelligence, I think the majority of advanced intelligent life may walk on two feet and also be agile with their upper physiology like us. In exochemistry they find good evidence that life can’t start to evolve without land, at least a solid realm of some lift, and my idea of the improbability of limit to advanced life in the water or air seems to fit in with this limitation. Both seem to take so much special physiology there’s not enough leftover power to compute to higher levels.

 There may be no sharp line between the possible kinds of life determined by billions of years of loss of some life and the survival of others, often by luck as here on Earth. A dinosaur or other large beast that walks on two feet and has higher intelligence on other Earths may not be exactly like an Earth mammal or unlike a bee, due to luck in evolution and exochemistry or even gravity and radioactivity in exobiology.

  The science of computer life seems to show that when you program small cyberbots in the machine to compete for a payoff and the winners are the ones that copy by way of changes they find, there are definite regular patterns all the programs settle down into after a while, like e.g. about the chemistry of say water or air (almost completly created by life) here on Earth. This seems like what they expected in all the old time drawings and paintings by artists of what other worlds were perhaps like before we reached them with the Voyager and other machines, filled with uncommon rock formations and land masses. In truth when the voyages to Titan and Mars arrived they showed the land forms to be mostly like the land on Earth. This is because the general physics are the same so the results are much the same too. There may be no reason the main problems of physics and computation on other worlds may not be much like on Earth and thus with generally convergent evolution, where unrelated life solves a problem of physics or even chemistry in much the same way.

   One question may remain. If we evolved with our higher reach this is a great advantage. Billions of species that have evolved, none with such high intelligence. If higher intelligence is so definite and inevitable why hasn’t it evolved before? The answer may be because we may have evolved our arms and legs in a whim of evolution….

   In her book The Descent of Woman author/biologist Elaine Morgan offers evidence for her belief that we may have evolved into the water like the manatee and other mammals like cetaceans, and then returned to land. This would explain many features of our anatomy, e.g. our nose is used to breathe when standing in the water without flow in, and we have reduced hair like the manatee, dolphins, whales and other animals of like type (for streamlining in the water, the flow of our waves on our legs and arms is the same as when water flows). Our tears are salty like the seagull and like the seagull this would be to reduce the salt of the ocean water, so blood pressure is good. And a woman’s hair is stronger when she has a baby. This would be for the baby to hold on in the water, and so on. One good anecdote in the book is about elephants (and other animals like this which are bright like us). The elephants are so adapted to the water they go swimming around the islands of the Mediterranean using their nose as a breathing tube!

  As I say on This Page Link on my site Encyclopedia Computoria , first we may have evolved to the water and stood upright by way of the hydraulics of the water by the shore (Morgan offers evidence that this was to stay out of the reach of wolves). When the rivers and estuaries may have dried up we moved to the forest (which I think might be because the woods were more like the water than the intervening land, not because we were evolving away from the land, if we were already adapted there we wouldn’t have had as much cause to move). We may have evolved for better reach in a separate step, just by luck to reach the branches of the forest. In this explanation if we indeed evolved because of both our hands and feet, in two steps, only after we and the Neandeerthals may have only evolved higher intelligence when we evolved more adroit arms and hands. There could be a wait of many thousands or hundreds of thousands or more years between when we walked on two legs and when our brains started to win because of our adroitness not found by other evolution here on Earth. If this is how it actually happened we would perhaps expect a mostly unchanged intelligence like brain size between when we first started to walk and then a more sudden increase at the time when our hands more completely evolved to suit our new higher level of intelligence in the world.

  Thus we may be intelligent because of two separate steps. First we were lifted up by the water, then we walked on land where our hands perhaps evolved in a second step, and perhaps it took many millions of years for evolution to have this accident. And no doubt, the plains may never have dried up and we would still be out in the water, this may have even been how other mammals evolved walking like us many times.

  We may say no doubt a plant needs at least some soil and nourishment to live well. If we weren’t already with higher intelligence we might never have evolved higher.

 There was a lot of trial and error by evolution to make us smart, even so the world could well have waited another 10 million years for evolution to have the same luck. At any rate, like Sagan’s comment about the Greeks and science someone had to be first.

  Four billion more years is a lot of time for evolution and more narrow focus of intelligence giving rise to more general life like us without play seems to me like an infinite force to an immovable object, and the immovable mass wins out, the Earth is more at rest than the Moon. Would higher life evolve from more limited play? Or is our way the only way of most evolution? Both of these ideas have merit. Here again though I conclude that the main cause of our intelligence may be because we were the first, our life seems certainly one of the better ways.

  There may be billions of planets nearer to us than it was believed before. If we find the earthlike worlds by way of a recent use of science of mine we may even find out soon. My conception is to use the flow between two charged satellites, a “bubble”,  a giant lense.  Beams through the lense find changes and take out the random vibration leaving a good image from a telescope 500,000 times the size of telescopes on the ground. This may make it so we can see the nearer earthlike worlds waiting without hundreds of years..

The idea that physics and hydraulics and luck helped evolution find how to make us intelligent might be proven as I say on the link if we also eventually find fossils of whales or dolphins or manatees that also walked on just two feet in the water at some time in their evolution before they evolved on out to the open oceanic realms from nearer the shore. As you may know the whale was originally a small land dwelling mammal the size of a house pet, and it then evolved into the water, and we have a major boost to evidence for evolution, the continuous record stretching many millions of years for many types of life simple to complex.