06-19-2016, 02:46 AM | #21 | |
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Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Paleontology
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Stone age technology is very intricate and complex. I wouldn't imply it to be so simple. It was that "jump" from late australopithecines to homo genus that really was the main change from super smart ape to something different, in my opinion.
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06-19-2016, 05:21 AM | #22 | |
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Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Paleontology
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06-19-2016, 06:29 AM | #23 | |
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Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Paleontology
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And human-like intelligence is a much narrower category than vision.
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06-19-2016, 08:14 AM | #24 |
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Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Paleontology
I don't have the files to hand, but as far as I remember: supernatural-seeming events caused by the spores of deeply encysted ancient Martian microbiota, exposed to Earth-type temperatures (and atmosphere). (There's more to it than that...)
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06-19-2016, 01:22 PM | #25 | |
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Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Paleontology
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Human intelligence is very general if modular in use in my opinion. Vision is first light detection/intensity, then light direction, all the way to sharp distant imaging. It's really just a very effective, "what's that over there's appearance?" Of course the more general "what's that over there?" requires experience and intelligence. But we digress.
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06-19-2016, 01:47 PM | #26 | |
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Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Paleontology
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06-19-2016, 01:54 PM | #27 | |
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Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Paleontology
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Everything does evolve concurrently affecting nealry every other feature. I was just reading about how our hands didn't evolve just from pressures to hands but also feet as obviously genes affecting one set affect the other.
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06-19-2016, 02:43 PM | #28 | |
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Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Paleontology
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If you're trying to suggest that the metabolic cost makes the brain of questionable value I think the medium of this discussion makes that pretty silly, but whswhs' prehistoric success story more directly refutes the concern.
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06-19-2016, 03:25 PM | #29 |
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Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Paleontology
But then you're defining "vision" broadly and "brain" narrowly. We could, for example, define "vision" narrowly, and say that raptorial visual acuity has only evolved once in the entire existence of the Earth. Or, conversely, that sophisticated enlarged brains have evolved in primates, cetaceans, proboscideans, corvids, and psittacids (and perhaps in cephalopods), or even that practically every animal phylum has some form of enlarged neural information processing center, normally associated with the mouth. Choosing different breadths of definition biases your conclusions.
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06-19-2016, 05:30 PM | #30 |
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Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Paleontology
I see your point, but human intelligence and our full language "module" more specifically are qualitatively different from all other forms of smarts.
It seems to have more trouble evolving past that "hump" in ways more straightforward than vision. But I guess, that's more opinion than fully proven accepted fact.
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