Scientists today consider that just because the development of human life happened in our case, it does not mean anything comparable could happen for others. They say it is a ‘quirky evolutionary accident’ that human beings have developed consciousness, and intelligence has no prospects of evolving again if mankind were to be destroyed. They claim mankind is unique.
"We are no more aware," Nikos writes, "than the medieval churchmen who placed us in the center of the universe; nor than post-Darwinian Victorians who considered us to be at the apex of the tree of progress. Men believe mankind to be the pinnacle of creation, indeed created in God’s own image. No other animal could have that divine image, no other animal could occupy that unique position, since otherwise man would simply be another beast, another of God’s experiments in creation.
"The prejudices of our scientists stop them from asking: Has intelligence arisen before mankind? or Could the mass extinction of the dinosaurs be self-inflicted? They do not ask these questions because the answer might be the wrong one. To avoid answers you do not like, do not ask questions!"
He said that besides mankind’s ego, the obstacle to the idea of intelligence in dinosaurs was that dinosaurs were believed to be reptiles. But reptiles and lizards are cold-blooded, whereas warm-blood seems necessary for a high capacity brain. In fact dinosaurs were not reptiles— they were a more advanced evolutionary group and they were warm-blooded! They were closer relatives to modern birds, which have hotter blood than mammals than to reptiles.
Nikos wrote: "Not only were the dinosaurs warm blooded, they also had every characteristic necessary for the development of intelligence. Intelligent beings must walk upright, freeing their forelimbs to develop hands instead of paws; be sociable, because intelligence arises out of the need to communicate; have complicated social relationships, especially in connection with the rearing of young; have binocular vision so that they can see and think three dimensionally, and be able to transform their environment.
"Bipedalism was the very basis of dinosaurs’ evolutionary emergence. Like the hominids, having discovered that they could run on their hind legs, they must eventually have realised that their forelimbs were freed for the manipulation of objects. To do this one of the digits of the hand, the thumb, should be opposed enabling its tip to touch the tip of the other digits. Opposed digits were very common in dinosaurs. Large carnivores had an opposed toe rather like perching birds. The feathered dinosaur, the archaeopteryx, had grasping hands as did its near relatives the coelurosaurs, and surely used them for grasping insects and climbing trees.
"A related but later dinosaur, the deinonychus, evolved a high degree of coordination of hands and arms, its hands being better adapted for grasping and holding than those of any other dinosaur. It also had wrist joints that rotated so that the hands could turn towards each other enabling the animal to grasp its prey in both hands. The human is only one of the few mammals which can do this.
"Of the descendants of deinonychus, the dromaeosaurs—all of which had opposable, manipulating fingers and were capable of a high degree of coordination—the stenonychosaurus also had many other advanced features, including binocular vision. Its eyes were large and well developed like the eyes of the ostrich (which has the largest eyes of any terrestrial creature alive today). This suggests that they had evolved from a nocturnal form, further evidence that the dinosaurs were warm-blooded, because cold-blooded animals must be inactive at night. What would they be hunting at night time that needed speed, agility, keen vision and grasping hands? Mammals! Mammals were hounded into the night, terrorised by creatures with keen senses, nimble and agile enough to hunt, by night, the supposedly superior mammals! All mammals at this time were small, but these dinosaurs were also small—stenonychosaurus was only about five feet long including its long tail.
The popular idea that the dinosaurs were dim-witted is not true of the ones noted above with the grasping hands and binocular vision, the smaller, agile coelurosaurs and dromaeosaurs that lived late into the Cretaceous period. Dromaeosaurs were skilful predators which had evolved large brains to coordinate their sophisticated movements and vision. Few good fossils have been found but they were more common, and more successful, than the fossil record suggests, their habitats and light frames not being conducive to fossilisation—just like the apes and hominids, mankind’s ancestors!
"Meat, being concentrated protein is an important factor in the development of intelligence. The predator needs less bulky food and needs less time eating, so it has more thinking time—time free to become cultural and inventive. Some dinosaurs were predatory, some were herbivorous, and we can deduce that some must have been scavenging omnivores. Plainly, meat was available to them and the predatory dinosaurs were aggressive enough, if that were an important attribute for technological success.
"The skulls of the dinosaurs show that many had very well developed senses. Crocodiles and birds, both of which are related to the dinosaurs, have acute hearing so it is not surprising that dinosaurs also had. All dinosaurs had sensitive middle ear bones and a notch in their skull where the tight ear drum stretched. The structure of their ears, indicates excellent hearing and the ability to hear high pitched noises, possibly initially the calls of their young and later the sounds of communication.
"Would they then make sounds? Birds do. And present day crocodiles do. There seems no reason to doubt that dinosaurs also did. They had no larynx to enable them to speak as we do. But they had other ways of making noises, based on a host of sounds not made in the human way. Many of the hadrosaurs had distinctive crests protecting their elaborately long nasal passages allowing them to make sounds rather like a French horn. The edmontosaurus had an inflatable sac on its snout, like an elephant seal’s, that acted as a resonator enabling calls and signals to be made to other members of the herd.
"Brain casts show highly developed olfactory bulbs showing the sense of smell was often good. Large orbits and pronounced optic lobes tell of excellent vision. Many were caring parents possibly having live young, had stereoscopic vision and manipulating hands. Many walked upright and some later dinosaurs had large and growing brains. Some also were fierce hunters and presumably correspondingly aggressive. Some dinosaurs somewhere had each of the attributes considered necessary for man to evolve. The only conclusion is that some dinosaur somewhere could have had them all and become intelligent before Adam."
Michaela Magi Griffiths, Bloomsbury, September, 1993
© Copyright AskWhy! Publications 1997. Quote by all means but credit this source.