Abstract

Contents Updated: Wednesday, December 15, 1999

1. One technologically superior species of mammal reached domination over the planet at the end of the 20th century: one species of dinosaur achieved human-like intelligence at the end of the Cretaceous Period. In only a moment in geological time, each destroyed the majority of co-existing higher life forms.
2. Orthodoxy usually proves to be wrong.
3. A non-expert should not feel obliged to accept an expert's opinion.
4. Our future might depend upon confronting the experts.
5. Dinosaurs were physiologically sophisticated.
6. Dinosaurs often had the features of the intelligent mammal and indeed owed their superiority over the mammals for millions of years to having evolved them.
7. The solution of the problem of the evolution of intelligence in mammals and dinosaurs would yield similar features in both.
8. The scars of the past look strangely familiar.
9. The destruction of the dinosaurs is like today's extinctions because they have the same underlying causes.
10. Both the ocean and time are guardians of countless secrets.
11. Time's coffer still holds secure the history of early man and his precursors.
12. The recesses of time's dark chest hides much more about those astonishing beasts, the dinosaurs, than mankind has imagined.
13. Sir Peter Medawar has noted that scientists tend not to ask themselves questions until they can see the rudiments of an answer in their minds. In this case the rudiments even of the question did not arise.
14. To avoid wrong answers you do not ask questions!
15. On passing a certain threshold intelligence would evolve increasingly rapidly.
16. Man diverged from the African apes as little as five million years ago. For orthodox paleontologists this was far too short a time. It spoilt their theories and put us too close for the good of their egos to the apes.
17. Sixty of the sixty five million years of domination of the earth by mammals elapsed before the intelligent model went into the prototype stage, but then in only about five million years technological society evolved.
18. Sixty million years of mammalian evolution to arrive at the threshold of intelligence, yet the dinosaurs had 140 million years at the top—twice as long as the mammals. Could animals that succeeded so well for so long fail to develop an intelligent version of their own? There must be a possibility that dinosaurs too achieved thinking status but 65 million years before us.
19. Technological civilization only began two hundred years ago and might end in the next hundred.
20. Human civilization, hugely impressive to us, is only an oily smear in the geological record.
21. In the millions of years that the dinosaurs dominated the earth, thousands of dinosaur species, billions of individuals, have left no trace. If just one of those species came to prominence very rapidly in evolutionary terms, as mankind has, perhaps making no significant mark until its last few centuries, would much be seen in the rocks 65 million years later? I think not, even if anyone were looking for signs of intelligence. And who's looking? Not the paleontologists!
22. Experts disdain speculation.
23. Speculative hypotheses face a contradiction: they need more proof than less controversial ones, yet often the absence of convincing evidence is the reason why speculation is necessary.
24. Experts, though they defend their own dogmas as determinedly as any medieval prelate, are liable to regard unorthodox ideas with contempt and show little eagerness to investigate them.
25. Experts are often wrong. They are good at determining facts but are prone to ignore troublesome ones, and continue to market outmoded theories until well beyond their sell-by date.
26. It pays to be skeptical about experts who assert whatever is most acceptable to their peers or their paymasters.
27. We should examine the parallels between the present time and mass extinctions of the Cretaceous. Tens of millions of years hence, when geologists see a sudden reduction in diversity terminating the Tertiary epoch, will they notice that a couple of inches of sediment contain traces of one species of ape which briefly exploded in numbers prior to the mass extinction?
28. Is the mass extinction of species the only legacy we wish to leave?
29. Experts are comedians of error.
30. Amateurs are not tied to the conventions of the professional man. They can be more creative, make imaginative leaps with no worries about reputation—they can think the unthinkable. They can speculate.
31. Today some experts deliberately reject their professional field to become amateurs in another subject where they can speculate to their hearts content.
32. Experts are human and subject to the failings of us all.
33. Scientists can be passionate about their pet theories despite their training to be objective, but rarely are they fanatical.
34. Great discoveries have been made through scientists engaging in contests over their competing ideas—gladiators of the Bunsen burner!
35. Every established theory will eventually be challenged in its turn as new observations are made.
36. It is not healthy when experts set up a scientific establishment with its own rules of acceptance, a scientific freemasonry from which others are excluded.
37. When theories no longer belong to individuals but to a group, vested interests are served by cleaving to it and ridiculing alternatives.
38. Yesterday's innovation, a dynamic force for progress, becomes a new orthodoxy, and establishment opinion becomes oppressively conservative.
39. For the general public, the really dangerous experts are those who sell their objectivity for pieces of silver—those employed by governments and businesses to defend their employers' position and take a partisan view irrespective of the facts..
40. Everyone is happy with their scientific paradigm until it is challenged then learned professors choke into their port at High Table.
41. Equally good theories find it difficult to get a fair hearing in the experts' court where the scientific establishment supply counsel for the prosecution, officials, judge and jury, all of whom back the conventional view.
42. Since science progresses through the jousting of different ideas until one is unseated, there is nothing wrong with people defending their theory during the tournament. What is wrong is closing one's mind to the merits of other ideas and, what is worse, closing ranks against them.
43. It is openness, receptiveness, the desire to look at something new, that helps to keep societies and their methodologies healthy.
44. Dogma of any kind puts a straitjacket on the mind and a jackboot on society.
45. Dinosaur bones had been emerging from eroding rocks for longer than man had existed, testifying to the extinction of species and the evolution of new ones, yet the Church dogma of plenum forbade such a heresy.
46. Excessive confidence is a key characteristic of experts.
47. When progress is imprisoned by the experts' paradigms (or preconceptions, call them what you will) the break out is frequently the work of the astute amateur.
48. The famous Victorian paleontologist, Richard Owen, a very remarkable man of considerable genius, who suffered only from becoming an expert.
49. Owen was able to demonstrate, with immense confidence, how spectacularly wrong he could be.
50. Bernard Hauff was not obedient to authority; he did not accept the dogmas of the experts.
51. Experts either see more than is there or nothing at all.
52. One wonders whether a Neanderthal man would risk travelling alone on the New York subway.
53. There is evidence from the wear of horses' teeth 30,000 years old that they were tethered even then.
54. Most experts are not gracious enough to admit it though they know they are wrong.
55. If the structures seen in an electron microscope are often artifacts of the techniques of preparation of the samples, then a lot of experts are spending a lot of money concocting theories that depend only on what has been created by accident in the laboratory.
56. The UK Sloman report, which was published in response to a different case of academic disagreement, said quite forcefully, academic staff must not be inhibited by any tradition of accepted views. They have the right to be unorthodox.
57. Is it really wise to inhibit originality even if cranky? Who knows how many important ideas do not see the light of day because their originator feels wrongly they are a bit too cranky, or is timid about the response of his peers. What is the criterion of the quality of an inspiration other than the influence it ultimately has?
58. (1) Experts are fallible, yet; (2) they are so cocksure they consider it a philanthropic duty to suppress those who contradict them; (3) unorthodox thinkers have a right to be unorthodox; (4) good can come of crankiness.
59. Lizards effectively have to live their whole lives with emphysema: they are unable to take in much oxygen, their blood does not get much and their activity is correspondingly curtailed.
60. In a lizard the two blood streams have to enter the single ventricle where they mix just as they do in the heart of a blue baby. Lizards are like mammals with a hole in the heart.
61. Reptilian physiology obliges reptiles to be slow and to conserve their energy. Compared with mammals they suffer from almost crippling defects of lungs, heart and bone. Unlike mammals their bodies simply cannot sustain continuous effort. That is why they move jerkily and spend long periods totally motionless.
62. As in many disputes, not least scientific ones, the answer might not be at either of the extremes.
63. If a human boxer were fearful that one day he might leave the ring dead, he might be very glad to opt out of boxing and chose instead the life of a grocer or a publican. In a sense, that is what the cold-blooded animals that have survived till today have done. They have opted out of direct competition with the warm-bloods.
64. The fossil record testifies to the superiority of dinosaurs over mammals for twice the period that mammals have dominated the earth. Only when the dinosaurs mysteriously disappeared 65 million years ago did the mammals have the chance to succeed.
65. The very name primates betrays our self-centered view of the world. The order of primates is the first, the prime order, because we are in it.
66. In the four million years separating ramapithecus and Lucy, even the experts speculate unashamedly simply because there is no evidence.
67. A well thrown stone is a remarkably good weapon.
68. Man is the third species of chimpanzee, or alternatively, chimpanzees are two other species of men.
69. Had Linnaeus had the courage to defy the churchmen, we might now be less anthropocentric, more humble and have more empathy with the other inhabitants of the planet.
70. Walking upright preceded any other human traits (kissing would have accompanied this change).
71. Early humans must have taken a lot of grit with their food suggesting roots, meat—probably largely scavenged—and possibly dung. It is humbling to think that we might have set out as eaters of other creatures' faeces!
72. About 100,000 years ago Homo sapiens sapiens, anatomically modern man, arrived on the scene in Africa. It was to be another 60,000 years before he made a real impact. By 34,000 years ago Neanderthal man was extinct.
73. Cities introduced the diseases of civilization, diseases of overcrowding and insanitation, of stress and pollution—venereal disease, plague, cancer, heart attacks, psychoses and warfare. The modern world had begun.
74. We see the story of man told on television by polymath television personalities, but their reconstructions of human evolution are largely fantasy—simply because the supporting material has not been found.
75. From all this, students of human evolution have little reason to be dogmatic about their assertions. If their conjectures are accurate, it is not because they are based on unequivocal evidence.
76. There are so few fossils of hominids that our speculations on the evolution of intelligence dinosaurs are scarcely less credible than the anthropologists' on the evolution of mankind.
77. The experts cannot agree.
78. The change to bipedalism required major changes in our ancestors' anatomy; bones, muscles, internal organs all had to alter. Dinosaurs did not need such drastic modification. They had evolved as bipedal animals.
79. Our brains seem to have overdeveloped for some reason—only a part is used.
80. A creature with a much smaller brain using it more efficiently might be capable of behavior just as sophisticated as our own.
81. If the thinking animal's niche were vacant, Macaque monkeys could evolve into it over the next few million years—and they might still have the chance!
82. The natural interval between successive children in human hunter gatherer females does not differ greatly from the chimpanzee's.
83. Having left the Garden of Eden human females stopped suckling earlier and lost the natural contraceptive protection that went with it.
84. After the loss of natural contraception and before artificial contraception was introduced, human females probably had three or four times as many children as they would have had naturally. So it is hardly surprising then that population should have exploded in the last 10,000 years.
85. Cooperation developed from the longer dependency of human young on their mother.
86. The females, responsible for bringing up the children, undertook the placid activity of gathering, While gathering, the females shared her food and her experience with her children, male and female. Males, used to sharing with their mothers, brothers and sisters, gradually adopted it as adults realizing that sharing provided more secure returns than individual prospecting. The sharing culture spread and eventually societies became more cooperative rather than purely competitive.
87. The hunter-gatherer way of life is not one of grinding insecurity, incessant toil and hardship. It offers as much, if not more, leisure than people have today.
88. Mankind hunted animals to extinction long before we were shown the gate of the Garden of Eden.
89. A killer instinct is possibly a contributory factor to world domination, generating a particularly aggressive competitiveness that has been partly instrumental in mankind's progress. Of course, many dinosaurs were savage killers too—our killer instinct might be part of our dinosaur heritage.
90. Dinosaurs fulfilled the requirement of bipedalism early on—the reason for their supremacy was their upright, bipedal stance.
91. Bipedalism gave dinosaurs a head start on mammals in the race for intelligence because it was the very basis of their evolutionary emergence. Like the hominids, having discovered that they could run on their hind legs, they must eventually have realized that their forelimbs were freed for the manipulation of objects.
92. Opposed digits were very common in dinosaurs.
93. The feathered dinosaur, the archaeopteryx, certainly had grasping hands, as did its near relatives the coelurosaurs, and surely used them for grasping insects and climbing trees.
94. A related but later dinosaur that seemed to have evolved a high degree of coordination of hands and arms was the deinonychus. Deinonychus had long, grasping hands with wrist joints that rotated so that the hands could turn towards each other enabling the animal to grasp its prey in both hands.
95. Some descendants of deinonychus formed a whole group called the dromaeosaurs all of which had opposable fingers and were obviously capable of a high degree of coordination.
96. Stenonychosaurus had manipulating fingers, but also had a complex of advanced features, including binocular vision, that make it rather special.
97. Binocular vision stimulates three dimensional thinking. The evolution of manufacturing levels of intelligence requires the development of hand and eye coordination.
98. The stenonychosaurus had binocular vision combined with manipulative hands and fingers. Its eyes were large and well developed like the eyes of the ostrich (which has the largest eyes of any terrestrial creature alive today).
99. The descendants of deinonychus, the family of dromaeosaurs, were agile, skilful predators with large brains. Few good fossils have been found but it has been conjectured that they were more common, and more successful, than the fossil record suggests, their habitats not being conducive to fossilization—just like the apes and hominids, mankind's ancestors!
100. Must all dinosaurs have laid eggs? Not even all modern reptiles lay eggs. Snakes, skinks, some amphibians and even some fish keep their eggs within themselves until birth.
101. Live birth did occur in ichthyosaurs, the dolphin-like dinosaurs.
102. The large herbivorous dinosaurs probably had to allow their food to ferment in their stomachs because the cycads and ferns they ate were tough and fibrous. Their droppings would therefore be effectively pre-digested food for the infants. Many smaller creatures live on the dung of larger ones and some, like rabbits and mole rats, eat their own to make sure no nutrition is wasted.
103. Whether dinosaurs of all types laid eggs or gave birth to live young it is certain that they were often caring parents.
104. The structure of dinosaur 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.
105. Some dinosaurs somewhere had each of the attributes considered necessary for man to evolve. Some dinosaur somewhere could have had them all and become intelligent before Adam.
106. Evolution is irreversible—but except in a strict sense, it is not true. A fish, hundreds of millions of years ago, left the water ultimately to evolve into terrestrial vertebrates, but land vertebrates have often taken to the water since, and have assumed the shape and lifestyles of fish. The strict sense is that they have not become fish again.
107. Different organisms subject to the same evolutionary constraints will evolve marked similarities.
108. An orange jelly made in the same mould as a strawberry blancmange will have the same shape because it has been subject to the same constraints of shape, but it remains a jelly and not a blancmange.
109. What price the intelligent mammal being succeeded by an intelligent, telepathic fish?
110. The problems faced by herbivorous dinosaurs then were similar to those posed to grassland herbivores today. Sauropods were dinosaur elephants; ceratopsians were dinosaur rhinos; hadrosaurs were dinosaur cattle or horses.
111. There are examples of convergence like struthiomimus and the ostrich, ichthyosaurs and whales, and pterosaurs and birds or bats. Convergence at the time of the dinosaurs to solutions which are still suitable today confirms that many evolutionary problems were broadly the same, even though elements of the environment characteristic of today, such as grass, had not emerged in the Cretaceous period. Many of the solutions discovered by the mammals had already been discovered by the dinosaurs before them.
112. There are three driving forces of evolution. 1. Overpopulation. Far more creatures are born than survive to adulthood. Those that fail to breed are either unlucky (a random factor) or are not suited to their environment in some respect, however small. 2. Variation. Not all creatures are the same and even small differences can be important to survival. 3. Inheritance. Animals pass on their innate characteristics to their young.
113. A grey polar bear might be able to pass on its greyness for many generations because ninety nine times out of a hundred it is as successful in catching seals as its white rivals. But that one time out of a hundred that the white bears are more successful than the grey ones will ensure that the population of polar bears will eventually be all white. Over generations of natural selection that tiny difference favors the white variety.
114. Could there be an incest gene? By conditioning its owner to prefer sex with close relatives and its children could it allow speciation via sexual isolation within a breeding group? The incest gene would make an animal prefer its own kin, perhaps by linking with a gene which expresses itself in some subtle physical feature, recognizable even at a subliminal level by parents and siblings—a pheromone, perhaps. If, by breeding together, an incestuous family retains some advantageous characteristic, the incest gene will spread and will ultimately determine a new species to replace the previous one.
115. In the last 80 million years mammals have often entered the water, found it comfortable and stayed.
116. An animal in a given environment is faced with a set of evolutionary problems. To resolve these, it has a limited number of efficient solutions—there are only certain routes in the evolutionary landscape that are feasible.
117. Similar solutions to the problems of environment suggest that environment.
118. The energy cost did not materially differ for two legged and for four legged locomotion, but, for the same energy output, animals could move much faster on four limbs than they could on two.
119. Wading out into the sea to search for seaweed or shellfish is a safe and natural way to become upright.
120. A minor change to a gene controlling development is all that is needed to delay growing up.
121. If nakedness solved the problem of overheating, why did other mammals not adapt in the same way?
122. It is strange for any creature of the savannah to be bald unless they have thick skin like the elephant or the rhinoceros.
123. Maturity was delayed so that an extended childhood could fill the growing brain with knowledge and experience.
124. Creatures which commonly do lose their hair, quite naturally because it is favorable to their evolution, are animals that spend all or part of their time in water. The longer the evolutionary period they are immersed, the more likely they are to be bald.
125. Human hairlessness can be explained by a few million years' dip.
126. Hairlessness could have served to allow the hominids and the australopithecines to distinguish themselves when the two lines were still evolutionarily and geographically close. Those in the hominid line might have selected sexual partners that were hairless while, in the other line, hairiness might have been the factor chosen. Each would find the appearance of their close relatives repugnant. This is sexual selection.
127. A layer of fat underneath the skin is a much better insulator than fur for a warm-blooded water dweller. No primate has it—except man.
128. For sweating to evolve as a means of keeping cool on dry or even arid grasslands is absurd—it drains the body of essential water and salts. And it would be suicidal for any ape to opt for a water cooling system where water is at a premium—on the dry grasslands. A man walking naked in the tropical sun at 100 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius) can lose up to 28 liters of fluid and an eighth of his body's salt a day by sweating. For urination only one liter is needed.
129. Only elephants and humans of land animals express tears. All other animals that weep are aquatic.
130. It is a poignant sight to see a baby seal after its mother has been clubbed to death by a human with a baseball bat, weeping on the ice floes before it too has its skull crushed—killed to gratify human vanity.
131. Crocodiles do cry crocodile tears but only the marine variety, not river crocodiles which do not have to cope with salty water.
132. Asthma is unknown in apes but in humans it mimics the constriction of the bronchial tubes in a diving seal. Diving is, of course, a stress. Asthma looks like a partial adaptation to diving that now manifests itself not under the stress of diving but under the different kinds of stress to which modern humans are subjected.
133. Rudimentary webbing can be seen between most people's fingers and especially between the thumb and forefinger, but in about seven per cent of people it is pronounced enough to be regarded as ugly. Webbed hands are useful only for swimming.
134. Mammals like wolves, hyenas and lions hunt cooperatively but have not evolved speech. Watch humans hunting.
135. In the brief period since the forest ape took to the water, not more than 6.7 million years ago, intelligence emerged.
136. Mechanisms have evolved which allow quite astonishingly fast evolution.
137. Intelligence corresponds with certain troughs in the evolutionary hyperspace, lakes in the evolutionary landscape.
138. One could not imagine two separate intelligent species evolving in mutual contact. Whichever was the more advanced would rapidly eliminate the other.
139. Selection is not selection merely to survive but selection to reproduce. It is survival until reproduction that is necessary for the continuation of the species. Darwin's dictum would be better expressed as reproduction of the fittest rather than survival of the fittest.
140. Reproduction has its own necessities, the main one being to find a suitable mate—one which prefers you above other competing members of the species. This is sexual selection.
141. If the preference for smooth chests became dominant then the most hairy chested men would find it difficult to find a mate.
142. Linkage disequilibrium can form a positive feedback cycle leading to explosive evolution.
143. Sexual selection is one way of developing a grossly enlarged feature.
144. The human brain has prodigious amounts of memory and the potential for even higher performance.
145. We are developing two brains working in parallel on different types of problem.
146. Evolution often uses redundancy.
147. Redundant parts of an organism are found new uses by evolution.
148. Introns contain bits of DNA with odd properties. Some are mobile, acting as though they are hitching a ride on the main sequence of the DNA molecule but cannot make up their mind where to sit. Some are decayed genes, no longer functional but subject to mutation. Others seem to be immune to mutation. There are repetitive sequences apparently made by bits of the code that are conceited, duplicating themselves at random places in the introns and even from one chromosome to another.
149. Introns seem to be one place where mutation and role adaptation can occur with ease. They are just the place to look for the causes of fast evolution of new species.
150. Even ordinary evolution by selection of the fittest can be extraordinarily fast. Experimenters with fruit flies claim to have shown speciation to occur in only 12 generations.
151. Evolution is not random in its overall effect precisely because natural selection tends to eliminate the bad variations.
152. In the multidimensional evolutionary hyperspace, stable forms correspond to depressions in the landscape. The flow of evolution can be imagined as the flow of a river down the valleys of this landscape into a depression, forming a lake corresponding to a stable species or a developed feature.
153. No birds today have teeth but experiments have shown that birds are capable of growing them given the right conditions.
154. Having found itself with a new, or revived, macro-feature, the mutant organism finds itself in a new evolutionary channel possibly leading to an undiscovered Shangri-La in the evolutionary landscape.
155. In the evolutionary landscape lakes are stasis and torrents tumbling down steep hillsides are rapid evolution.
156. Embryos spontaneously abort if a macromutation is unsuitable for embryological development.
157. The only macromutations that see the light of day are those that permit survival of the embryo until birth.
158. Successful embryological development is the first stage of natural selection.
159. Evolution might be a vector quantity, having direction as well as magnitude.
160. Not all genetic mutations are equally likely.
161. Mutation can be itself controlled to some extent by a gene.
162. A gene could tag another gene or mixture of genes for change when appropriate.
163. A saltatory gene determines how much mutation occurs in the genes which it controls.
164. Animals evolve more quickly when their brains are advanced enough to allow them to modify their behavior.
165. If humans were to die out another mammal or a bird would replace us.
166. We find ourselves realizing simultaneously that the anthroposaur preceded us, and that we have just stumbled over the precipice of our own extinction.
167. There is no reason why one of the dinosaurs should not have evolved intelligence during the last five million years or so of the Cretaceous Period.
168. Though brain size is obviously a general measure of intelligence, there is no way of telling whether the brain of an extinct class of animals functioned in quite the same way as those of animals with which we are familiar.
169. We cannot be certain that modern creatures with larger brains are more intelligent than the smaller brained dinosaurs.
170. A higher metabolic rate, more active brains, faster synapses, sharper nerve impulses could all contribute to greater efficiency of the brain even though it were smaller than ours.
171. If the mammals were more intelligent than the dinosaurs then they should have been able to outwit them and usurp the dinosaur's dominant status. They didn't so they weren't.
172. Just as mankind eliminated the intelligent opposition, the anthroposaurs would have eliminated any other animal, dinosaur or mammal, that seemed likely to become a rival.
173. What was in the trees when the dinosaurs were on the ground? From the fossil record there seem to be no dinosaurs adapted for tree dwelling in the sense that such creatures as monkeys, apes or even squirrels are today. Yet, if there were no dinosaurs in the trees, the mammals would have had a perfectly safe niche, would surely have evolved into it and, if they merely had to find a place free of dinosaurs to realize their destiny, developed brains much earlier.
174. If the dinosaurs were afraid of heights, how did the pterosaurs and archaeopteryx learn to fly?
175. Why should there not have been hosts of dinosaur monkeys and dinosaur apes? Perhaps there were but because of their habitat they did not fossilize easily: a whole fauna of advanced dinosaurs about which we know nothing.
176. Imagine a Spring tide that went out for ten thousand years before it returned. Then it stayed in for ten thousand years. This would put strong selection pressure on the species living on the flat coastal lowlands or on low islands.
177. The dinosaurs' loss of variety is much more characteristic of the loss of variety in species we are seeing today—by unnatural selection—at the hand of man.
178. Could it be that ceratopsians and hadrosaurs were actually domestic animals like cows and sheep kept for food?
179. Is it possible that hadrosaurs were the cattle of the Cretaceous period, herded on the great plains before being shipped to a Cretaceous Chicago for making into meat pies and hamburgers?
180. Some creationists or their less scrupulous supporters are willing to resort to fakery to disprove evolution by proving that men and dinosaurs lived on the earth together. What sort of a God do they have that requires his mortal devotees to fake fossils to defend him? Does he really advocate dishonesty? To the being that created the world in seven days surely a plethora of genuine fossil man-tracks should be no trouble if he felt they were necessary!
181. Our atmosphere is rather delicately balanced. An increase in atmospheric oxygen of only four per cent, let alone nine, could be disastrous for us.
182. Today the oceans of the world have a heat store of about ten years of sunlight.
183. Dinosaurs were on the wane and by the end of the Cretaceous survived in numbers only in the West of North America, having died out in South America and possibly Europe.
184. The dinosaurs had shown that they were well able to adapt over 140 million years and were still evolving in the Cretaceous. A gradual change of conditions was unlikely therefore to overwhelm them—they would have adapted into the new conditions.
185. Volcanoes and asteroid impacts do not have to be invoked to explain the environmental problems we are experiencing, or the mass extinction of species currently taking place. Similar things are happening today to events at the end of the Cretaceous.
186. What does seems indisputable is that many of the mechanisms of extinction expected of a cosmic collision sound uncomfortably close to what we see about us today, the result of high technology and too many human beings demanding too much of the earth's resources with no thought of the consequences.
187. We began killing other species a long time ago—and not just for food.
188. Although mammoths, mastodons and woolly rhinoceroses had survived several periods of intense cold in previous cold phases of the present ice age, only at the end of the last one did they go extinct. A variety of catastrophic explanations for this have been suggested but, more likely is the simple explanation that they were hunted down by man.
189. We have confined the gorilla, the chimpanzee, the orangutan and the gibbon to narrow areas and within our lifetime they could be extinct. We will have murdered our intellectual rivals.
190. About two million years ago mammalian evolution went into overdrive and the number of genera of mammals trebled in the next million years. The diversity of mammals peaked about one million years ago. Since then it has continuously declined as mankind became increasingly dominant.
191. Most mammals other than domestic animals will be extinct within decades.
192. In historic times humans have exterminated many varieties of animals and birds, though some of them, like the bison, existed in vast numbers.
193. What we see is a reduction of species variety together with an increase in actual numbers of some animals. That is just what happened at the end of the Cretaceous.
194. Pollution is a symptom of increasing entropy, a scientific measure of disorder. By creating greater order in constructing themselves, life forms reduce entropy within their bodies and perhaps in their immediate surroundings but in so doing they vastly increase entropy in the world at large. The more such creatures there are, the more disorder, the more entropy, they create.
195. Entropy is waste. Organisms trapped in a sealed environment with plenty of food quite often poison themselves to death on their own waste. When the entropy of their world gets too high they die. The anthroposaurs poisoned themselves on their waste. We are doing the same. The earth is effectively a sealed environment and if we fill it with waste products we shall die.
196. It takes 5000 years for the world's groundwater to replenish. If it became a poisonous soup of acid and heavy metal ions, it would be 5000 years before it became usable again. The poisoning of the earth's groundwater could be a very effective way of initiating a mass extinction.
197. Lead poisons the nervous system and the brain by interfering with enzymes. Young minds are particularly affected. The symptoms, at dosages that may well be far below the official toxicity level, are distractibility, impatience, frustration, restlessness, impulsiveness, destructiveness and violence—symptoms typical of the behavior of much of our urban youth!
198. Cancer-causing PCBs are never found in nature but are found in the bodies of 99 per cent of Americans. The sperm count of the American male is only half its value in 1940. The reason why is not known. What is known is that in the same period increasing amounts of organochlorine compounds have been found in sperm. Organochlorine chemicals kill pests so why shouldn't they kill sperm?
199. Farmers bathe the land with chemicals. Many have the simpleton's philosophy that, if a little fertilizer is good, a lot must be better.
200. A warmer planet will mean that the permafrost of Siberia and Canada will melt releasing methane trapped there forming a positive feedback loop pushing temperature higher still.
201. In Cretaceous times the anthroposaurs had plenty of fossil fuels because the great coal making era was the Carboniferous starting 300 million years earlier.
202. Thick deposits of carbon have been discovered in New Zealand and elsewhere associated with the Cretaceous terminal event. Was this carbon from forests being consciously burnt?
203. Though the average Brazilian consumes less meat each year than a domestic cat in the United States, he has to slash and burn forests to satisfy our demand for steaks and hamburgers.
204. A habitat which harbors perhaps 50 per cent of all species is destroyed to make pastures for one species, cattle, and food for one other, man.
205. The fall in variation of the hadrosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous might indicate they were herded. Could the anthroposaurs have burnt their own forests to provide more nutritious browsing for their cattle?
206. Why should elaborate filtering systems have been necessary at the end of the Cretaceous but not apparently beforehand, even in closely related species, unless something was happening to the air?
207. Crested and non-crested hadrosaurs were contemporaneous about 75 million years ago. By the end of the dinosaurs' reign 65 million years ago the crested hadrosaurs were particularly successful. The crests were either enormous plates or long projections having no ostensible use. The odd thing about the crests however was that they consisted of enormously extended nasal passages protected by the bone of the skull. There must have been evolutionary pressure to extend the nasal passages, and the skull had solved the problem of where to accommodate the resulting labyrinth by developing the crests. The evolutionary pressure was pollution.
208. Having started to develop a feature for one reason it is characteristic of sexual selection to make a virtue of necessity and use it for another.
209. Any advanced society worth its salt will have discovered the equivalence of matter and energy. Did the anthroposaurs?
210. Evidence of prehistoric nuclear combustion has been found by French scientists in Gabon, West Africa. The deposits are far older than the Cretaceous, but neither do we extract valuable minerals from deposits that are being laid down today. The anthroposaurs were tapping rocks laid down long before they appeared on the scene.
211. By the year 2000 AD there will be 2000 tons of plutonium stockpiled and 160 tons a year being produced, all in civilian reactor programs. Twenty pounds is enough to make an atomic bomb. Criminals or fanatics who got hold of this small amount of plutonium could make a bomb. It would not have to be well designed or efficient.
212. Even a nuclear damp squib could cause horrific damage especially in a populated area. It would spread so much radioactive contamination that it could be worse than an atomic blast.
213. Rosalie Bertell, a cancer specialist, calculates that 13 million people in the world have died of fallout since the War.
214. Advocates of the asteroid theory point to stress lines in pieces of quartz, stress lines that have only been noted in quartz in four different circumstances, one being in the residues at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. The other three instances are in the laboratory produced by tests, in known meteorite craters, and on the Nevada nuclear test site. The expert's argument goes: We have found stressed quartz; we know it occurs where meteorites have fallen; therefore a meteorite fell. (Oh, the same effects can be made artificially in the laboratory or by nuclear bomb blasts, but we all know those are irrelevant in this context.)
215. Dinosaur mummies are rare, but when found they are usually late Cretaceous hadrosaurs. Why should they have died so perfectly and been preserved? Because they died of gamma radiation and neutrons which preserved them as surely as it would preserve strawberries in a plastic bag?
216. A major exchange of bombs on the scale we have them at present could release the same energy as the fall of a 1000 yard wide asteroid. The asteroid would concentrate all the impact in one spot and be capable of blowing chunks of terrestrial matter high into the atmosphere, even out into space. A nuclear exchange would not put as much matter into the high stratosphere, but what did go up would be more evenly distributed geographically, and might also be spread out over a period of time.
217. A nuclear winter is not in the realms of fantasy. Smoke and dust do not have to be sent into the stratosphere to prevent the sun's rays from reaching the surface—nitrogen oxides do the job quite well, though any serious nuclear conflagration will provide smoke and dust aplenty as well as brown fumes.
218. One feels justified in asking whether today's events have been experienced before by the earth.
219. Experts have unquestioning faith in their own pronouncements no matter how arbitrary they may be. Yet we accept them.
220. Not only are the scientific experts to mull and ponder over the diagnosis but the political experts are then to debate it in the legislature and legal experts are to test it in courtrooms. Too bad if the patient is in terminal decline.
221. We have no time to study, no time to understand the cybernetics of our environment. There is no time to decide what we can safely do. Deterioration continues daily. We must call a halt to the damage now. But we may already be too late!
222. Can't you picture the Professors Expertosaur, 65 million years ago convincing their compatriots that they should examine the skies and muse on the best ways of saving life on earth by deflecting planetismals while everything died about them? The meteor never came but the anthroposaurs fooled observers 65 million years later into believing it had, by simulating all its symptoms.
223. We are all indifferent to the fate of the earth.
224. Like the anthroposaurs, we do not seem to have grasped that we are also on the list of endangered species, and as more go, so we get nearer to the top.
225. Is any one of us able to use our intelligence for the broader good when selfish motives intervene?
226. It is possible for societies to live and prosper with advanced technology. Sagan calls this the Existence Theorem. The evidence presented here does not favor it.
227. History is repeating itself. The Existence Theorem is bunk!
228. Now, mankind, the new intelligent lifeform, breeds the few species at the expense of the many. Then, it was the intelligent dinosaur. Genetic variation was narrowed by breeding and environmental destruction until it virtually did not exist.
229. Propensity is probability with intent—it exerts an influence on events as if it were a physical field like an electric or gravitational field.
230. We might be locked into an outcome that will be nigh on impossible—might be impossible—to alter.
231. Is it our destiny to verify the Existence Theorem or our fate to falsify it.
232. Where is the will to change our behavior? Where is the mechanism to do it? Do we suffer from the same affliction as the anthroposaurs and perhaps all intelligent life forms—some self-destructive syndrome that is a sine qua non of intelligence? If the answer is yes we are doomed. Even if we can see the fault in ourselves, we are powerless to change it.
233. We have a legacy from the dinosaurs. It is part of our psyche. We cannot reject it. It is our dinosaur heritage!
234. There have been many prophets of the forthcoming catastrophe but they are not hailed and praised for their forethought—they are ignored or condemned as Jeremiahs.
235. The human race persists in its willingness to destroy itself and most other higher organisms for selfish economic and ideological reasons, all of them short term.
236. We are indifferent to the deaths of our own species as well as to others.
237. The code of ethics, made in primitive societies, might not be forever correct. If we have built on behavior maladapted for modern conditions, we shall find that our mores, rules, norms and habits—our very ways of thinking—are leading us to disaster instead of giving us guidelines for a better existence.
238. Norman F.Dixon, a professor of psychology at the University of London asks us to consider the following equation: Man + Technology = Extinction. Mankind exists and has invented technology. The combination inevitably leads to mankind's extinction. Can it be avoided? Yes, if we get rid of technology. But technology cannot be disinvented, so extinction can only be prevented by changing the nature of man.
239. Mankind will have to change to prove the Existence Theorem or technology will falsify it.
240. In our mechanized, urban societies we have lost the knowledge of our relationships with the rest of the biosphere. Instead we are obsessed with mechanical devices, our cars, TVs, computers and washing machines, and mechanical analysis of the interrelationships between ourselves, our hierarchies, social symbols and selfishness.
241. Not only are we unaware of the stench of death around us, in some unconscious way we revel in it.
242. Selfishness is not excessive self-love, but indifference to others.
243. Obsessive selfishness seems to overwhelm all other feelings—all obsessions do.
244. Ultimately the obsession destroys even the obsessive.
245. Initially selfish, such behavior eventually contradicts self regard by being self destructive! It becomes a death wish. Necrophilia! Long live death!
246. Our society depends upon highly specialized people—experts—who have to be obsessive in their field to succeed. Our society selects for obsessiveness. Entrepreneurs, Presidents, Prime Ministers, Generals, Scientists—successful people must be obsessive! They must be necrophiles!
247. We begin to see that we have a very odd civilization indeed! Through maladaptation we have become necrophiles—and the most necrophilous of all are the experts. Just like the anthroposaurs?
248. We have elections in the belief that governments will carry out policies we want, but our favorites lose, or join a coalition with another party whose policies we do not want, or on election they simply adopt different policies from the ones we voted for. Is it surprising that 30 to 50 per cent of the electorate commonly do not vote. Yet in comparison with totalitarian countries we make failure to vote into a virtue—it proves how free we are. The real message is that many people are resigned to being punished. They have become passive and often despairing, believing that they cannot influence events so there is no point in trying. Similarly we may all know the planet is dying but we feel helpless about it and so have become apathetic about our fate.
249. In subconscious atonement for the guilt of our selfishness, are we preparing to sacrifice our lives and maintain in death the humanity which we can see we are losing? Do we justify our drive for this luxurious existence by subliminally accepting that we are committing gigasuicide, self-effacingly cleansing the earth of the parasite that we have become?
250. Milgram's findings show that many, perhaps most, of us could have been Eichmann.
251. We think we are much more willing to defy authority than we are—authority therefore has much more power over us than we think!
252. By yielding to authority we can absolve ourselves of guilt. Like Eichmann, we are doing our duty, only obeying orders—it is not our fault! Furthermore those who give the order also absolve themselves from guilt—they do not have to do the dirty work themselves. A chain of command or a technological device (like a B52 bomber) diffuses the responsibility, reducing guilt more.
253. Who cares about the fate of those you cannot see? Young Americans dropping vast tonnages of high explosive bombs from B52 bombers six miles high would not have suffered the guilt feelings even of the ground troops killing face-to-face at Mi Lai. The same applies to those who pollute the environment and rape the world. We feel the benefits but see little of the carnage. We are removed from the outcome. We are absolved of guilt!
254. Broadly speaking the left brain manages language, mathematics, logic and detail while the right brain manages imagination, creativity, dreams, spatial conceptions, recognizing patterns and relationships, intuition and seeing the whole picture.
255. Those who make more use of the right brain are divergent thinkers, imaginative, spontaneous and intuitive compared with those who stick with the left hemisphere who tend to be more coldly logical, analytical, keen on organization and concerned with detail.
256. The left brain is generally responsible for rational thinking and the right brain for intuitive.
257. Yet not all right brain inspirations are significant. To determine which ones are, they have to be scrutinized rationally by the left hemisphere. Effective discovery requires both.
258. Irrational reasonableness gave way to rational unreasonableness, as Dixon puts it.
259. In the modern world the left hemisphere's rationality increasingly suppresses the intuitive side. Yet intuition is more likely to give advanced warning of impending problems. Reason cannot accept that anything is wrong until the full chain of logic is evident. Try to question experts or warn politicians—express sensitivity to matters such as the environment, the plight of the deprived or the dangers of mass destruction, express right brain values—and out come the establishment assassins.
260. Since the left brain concentrates on detail rather than seeing the whole, one manifestation of it is ignoring the welfare of the mass in favor of the welfare of self, even when self is part of the mass and inevitably must suffer with it—obsessive selfishness.
261. The purveyors of pollution ignore its effects on themselves and their own children.
262. Now we Westerners want to preserve our material possessions and demand ever higher standards of living even though continuous economic growth must inevitably destroy the planet. We all lose not just those who are obviously exploited.
263. John Donne's bell is not tolling only for the unfortunates starving in The Sahel—it is tolling for thee, mankind!
264. Today's industrialist or politician cannot be squeamish about a little atmospheric pollution, a few dead animals or the destruction of more primitive but more sensitive cultures than our own. Their left hemispheres tell them we need more efficiency, higher productivity, greater economic growth and less interference in their right to manage.
265. It is the left hemisphere that is truly illogical—it will lead to our deaths. It can, with intensity and interest, analyze in academic detail the tiger's fur, tail, muscles, camouflage, claws and teeth. It can debate endlessly about their functions and which are more important than others. But it cannot see the whole animal licking its lips! Only the right brain sees the whole tiger and the danger it poses!
266. Death—extinction—stares us in the face. We can expect no sensible response until that is accepted.
267. Men remain ludicrously optimistic about the outcome of prospective battles until the first blows jolt them, like sleepy drunks, into reality and a hasty and often inadequate defence. Better adapted animals would assess the real situation to be prepared with an appropriate response.
268. Optimism preserves our peace of mind by evoking positive expectations of future events and a false and deceiving euphoria about possible outcomes.
269. We think that the future will be that which is most preferable to us.
270. The right brain is the entropic brain. It sees the whole results of our actions not just the immediate results. That is what makes it more sensitive and caring.
271. Has the right brain all the while been trying to warn us against the monster taking over. The right brain is mute and can only give images, mystical impressions and dreams. Nightmares about monsters coming to get us could be the right brain's way of saying that there is a real monster taking over—inside our heads! Apparitions, hauntings, UFO contacts and the menagerie of paranormal creatures that loom out of the night, might be right brain warnings of a threat from something intangible... because it is within.
272. Norse mythology suggests the frightening prospect that the monsters will re-emerge amidst cataclysm and pollution, destroying mankind and reclaiming the earth. Have we created the conditions for the primordial captives to escape Thor's prison?
273. H.P.Lovecraft anticipated the idea of intelligent dinosaurs in his story, The Nameless City, written in 1921. The Nameless City of the title had been built in distant times by a race of intelligent dinosaurs depicted in sculptured low reliefs on the cyclopean stones of the ancient city.
274. Another theme of Lovecraft's was that of degeneration. He often wrote about human beings degenerating to rat-like creatures, living in warrens, sewers and burrows. Mutatis mutandis, this conjures up images of the last days of the anthroposaurs, as they degenerated to contorted ciphers of their former selves. What lifeform would most vividly depict degeneration to an intelligent dinosaur? That of the loathsome rat-like mammals that scurried about the anthroposaurs' polluted cities, living in burrows and sewers, thriving on the waste and decay, while the superior creatures fought a losing battle to maintain a spaceship earth.
275. Are we willing to yield up the earth, whether to the dragon or to the worm?
276. Will we succeed in throwing off the shadow of the serpent and disown the dinosaur heritage?
277. Are we locked into ritual ways of behaving—helpless resignation, mechanical left brain thinking, purblind optimism and obedience to the authority of dictatorial experts and governments?
278. The earth, like mother Tiamat, can replace us with monsters.
279. The obligatory principle of our lives should be not to offend the earth whether directly or indirectly. All other laws follow from this one.
280. No doubt there is comfort in knowing that there will be nobody left to reproach us, or even to gloat over our stupidity. Unless when we have gone... the sleepers awake!

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