From: Vincent Campbell (VCampbell@dmu.ac.uk)
Date: Fri 24 Oct 2003 - 12:03:30 GMT
Not a particularly intelligent contribution, but I recall several sci-fi
stories, and I believe I saw some mail-order book once that was serious,
that suggest that the dinosaurs were not wiped out by lava flows on the
deccan flats, or the asteroid strike in he gulf of Mexico, but by a nuclear
war/accident occuring amongst an advanced saurian race (actually, star trek
voyager suggested they left the planet and travelled across the galaxy to
set up hom elsewhere...).
Dinosaurs had many times as long as we've had to evolve big brains etc., but
one serious point about evolution is that it is not progressive is it? If
an organism is adapted to its environment, and that environment remains
largely uniform for long periods of time, there's no pressure to evolve into
'higher' organisms. Or, perhaps its more correct to say that only a
particular set of environmental pressures led to the circumstances whereby a
large brained primate succeeded.
Vincent
> ----------
> From: derek gatherer
> Reply To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Sent: Friday, October 24, 2003 9:05 AM
> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Subject: Re: Online Paper: "Ideas are Not Replicators but Minds Are"
> by Liane Gabora
>
> > One question is why we were the only mammal to go so
> > far?
>
> I used to wonder why, for example, there are no
> reptile lineages that have evolved larger brains -
> some did get as far as being bipedal and social. I
> vaguely remember that the answer was something to do
> with warm bloodedness, but I wonder if that argument
> still holds in the light of more recent ideas about
> warm bloodedness in dinosaurs?
>
> Is there a physiologist in the house?
>
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This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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