Anthroposaurus
Smartarsaurs: Is Technological Intelligence Common or Just an Odd Chance?
Abstract
"It is tempting to hope that the most original achievements of the mind are also the most recent."
Contents Updated: Monday, 18 May 2009, Thursday, 22 October 2009
Dinosauroid
Jeff Hecht, a Massachusetts, USA, science and technology writer, wrote in issue 15 of Cosmos, June 2007 that Dale Russell’s idea of the dinosauroid began as a thought experiment when scientists began to think dinosaurs were not as dumb as reptiles. Measurements of fossil dinosaurs showed steady increases in the encephalisation quotient (EQ) over millions of years. The EQ is a relative measure of an animal’s brain weight compared to that of an average animal of a related species and the same body weight. An EQ of 2.0 means the animal has a brain twice the weight of similar animals with the same weight. Russell wondered how the trend might have affected non avian dinosaurs had they survived to the present day. Could they have become intelligent, like us? Research has revealed intelligent behaviour in birds, the closest living relatives of dinosaurs.
Hecht says we tend to think intelligence is a good thing that contributed to the evolutionary success of our species. So, what’s good for humans should have been good for dinosaurs. Yet some palaeontologists echo the late US evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who doubted natural selection has any inherent preference for what we call intelligence. It would hardly be surprising as evolution is said not have any preferences at all because its direction depends upon the conditions pertaining at some particular time, and the characteristics of the animal itself. These can change from era to era. That said the overall tendency is for growth in brain size (Marsh’s law) and it is intelligence that need larger brains. Moreover, species seem to have developed characteristics that allow rapid evolution when it is needed, and that can give evolution direction!
Russell’s starting point was a fast, 60 kg, two legged predator called Troodon (Troodon formosus), which lived about 75 million years ago in Canada. The first Troodon skull showed that its brain, relative to its body size, was large for a dinosaur. Russell calculated that Troodon had an EQ that was nearly six times larger than the average of known dinosaurs, though small compared to modern humans. He extrapolated the figures to show that, if Troodon had survived and retained the same body size, its modern day descendants could have a brain volume of 1,100 cm3—comparable to that of some modern humans.
Moreover, the placement of Troodon’s large eyes suggested it had binocular vision, and the outer two of its three fingers also appear to be opposable. Russell decided that evolving a big brain would have reshaped the dinosauroid. The back of its skull would have expanded to house the enlarged, bird shaped brain. The snout would have shrunk and the teeth would have disappeared, leaving a short, turtle like beak. To support the heavy head, Russell replaced the dinosaur’s long, horizontal neck with a short, upright one. That, in turn, required an upright posture, which would have made plausible the use of tools and weapons.
As the body became upright, he expected the tail to diminish until it disappeared, as it did with our great ape relatives, but that the dinosauroid would retain reptilian traits of scaly skin and the lack of external genitals, and to have evolved live birth for its large headed young. A colleague, Ron Sequin, sculpted a 1.3 metre tall dinosauroid for display beside a life sized model of Troodon.
Dinosauroid Critics
The main problem was that it was much too human.Thomas Holtz, University of Maryland
It would not have needed to lose its tail, nor its largely horizontal body posture even with a large head. Holtz adds that Troodons did not increase their brain size during the tens of millions of years between their evolution and extinction. Even so, dinosaurs related to Troodon did survive and did increase their brainpower—birds. Despite their reputation as birdbrains, parrots and corvids (crows) can think! Grey parrots seem able to grasp aspects of number theory. New Caledonian (from New Caledonia in the west Pacific) crows use sticks as tools. And most recently, western scrub jays were found to plan for the future by caching food when they expected to find nothing to eat the next morning.
These birds may have evolved intelligence to cope with living in complex 3D environments (trees), like our primate ancestors, says Holtz:
They needed to process a lot of complex information. One consequence is that you have the ability to make lots of other connections… Intelligence probably wasn’t the thing initially being selected for.
These people make it seem as if evolution is the creationist’s intelligent designer. Nothing is consiously selected for in evolution, but evolution is adaptation, and something that is adaptive in some circumstance can end up increasing intelligence. Darren Naish, a palaeontologist at the University of Portsmouth in England, adds:
There is nothing inevitable about the evolution of big brains and/or intelligence. If non avian dinosaurs had continued to evolve, they probably wouldn’t have evolved human sized brains.
Darren seems to think Russell was saying they inevitably would have, but Russell will have known as much about evolution, and was not supposing that his extrapolation was inevitable. It was a conjecture about what might have happened if Marsh’s law had continued to apply to these dinosaurs. Darren adds that even if they had evolved large brains, unlike Russell’s dinosauroid, intelligent dinosaurs would have retained feathers, powerful jaws or beaks, a horizontal body, and bird like feet.
Quite possibly, but Russell supposed that the human form itself conferred some advantage in terms of intelligence, and so that the trend would follow a human like path. As humans are the only animals we know with advanced intelligence, it does not seem a stupid supposition. But Naish might be right in that the horizontal form still allows the forelimbs to be free to grasp and hold tools. The Troodon already had forelimbs with grasping hands, and Holtz expects it would have kept its tail and near horizontal body posture, in the way pachycephalosaur dinosaurs did, despite their big heads and skulls laden with solid bone. So even if Troodon, or one of its dinosaur descendents, had evolved intelligence, they may not have looked much like humans at all.
Troodon sapiens
Brian Switek, an ecology and evolution student at Rutgers University, has a science blog by the name of Laelaps where on 23 October, 2007, he posted a contribution called “Troodon sapiens? Thoughts on the ‘Dinosauroid’”. He claims only that it is a “somewhat cursory analysis of the Dinosauroid and it’s philosophical underpinnings”. But like other Smartarsaurs mentioned on these pages, he seems to be tilting at windmills. He says:
The famous image of a humanoid dinosaur standing next to it’s Troodon ancestor is a provocative one, a hypothetical relationship that confronts us with some important questions about our own evolution.
And the questions that he asks is:
Are intelligent humanoids destined to evolve?
Suggesting his own answer by adding:
Such a hypothesis invokes the philosophical idea of teleology.
He means that any such hypothesis assumes evolution has a purpose, namely to produce intelligent humanoids. Unless evolution is the tool of the believers’ Intelligent Designer, it can have no purpose, yet intelligent humans have evolved, so why not intelligent humanoids?
The primary problem that I have with the Dinosauroid and other similar reconstructions is that it rests on the assumption that a level of intelligence on par with extant Homo sapiens would have evolved in one lineage or another if hominids never evolved.
To read Dale Russell, that is not an assumption he made at all. It was a conditional question in the form of a “what if” clause. In other words, it was not a simple naïve assumption, but a question:
What might have been the outcome if the alert Troodon (Stenonychosaurus inequalis to Russell, later identified with the Troodon) had never gone extinct, but been able to evolve for another 65 million years until the present?
He was not suggesting that the Troodon actually did survive, or even that it could have survived. It was a thought experiment. So the problem Brian raises:
Would they have survived for the next 65 million years, or at least long enough to evolve a greater level of intelligence?
is a windmill to tilt at. Without it the exercise does not arise. Moreover Brian tilts at a similar windmill when he reminds us that Troodons could have gone extinct after the KT extinction, even if they had survived it:
So our hypothetical Troodon would not have been free-and-clear during the Cenozoic.Brian Switek
Indeed, they could not have been running free during the Cenozoic, but again it defeats the point of the exercise, and it also omits the possibility that the Troodons branched into an even more intelligent branch before the main stem died off. He persists in tilting away:
Allowing non-avian dinosaurs to survive the end of the Cretaceous would impact life on earth in ways that we cannot account for, and there would be no guarantee that the group would not go extinct sooner or later due to some other cause.
Who can deny it, but that is not the point, and, of course, large numbers of species survived the changed conditions, including many reptiles and amphibians, besides birds, despite the rise of the rat-like mammals that had run around the feet of the lumbersaurs, even if they had avoided the predatory dinosaurs as swift as the Troodon. The hypothesis is that they did survive, despite other possible outcomes precisely to consider what could have happened to them when they did! Despite Russell’s own protests that it was an imaginative exercise, a thought experiment, Brian wants it to be something else, and so he assumes that it was what he wanted—a hypothesis that it would have happened, not that it could have happened. So, he carries on tilting away:
There is no goal or endpoint to the evolutionary process, and what is adaptive today might not be tomorrow.
Who Lies Sleeping?
The hypothesis that an intelligent dinosaur (Anthroposaurus sapiens) actually did evolve in the last ten million years of the Cretaceous is the proposal put forward in Who Lies Sleeping? It is not merely a gash assumption, but it is based on the evidence we see around us of a technologically advanced species destroying its own environment. It compares what we see now with what we can see from the fossil record happened then. Many parallels are found to justify the hypothesis that technologically advanced dinosaurs did indeed destroy themselves. Of course, it is not the only hypothesis, and many experts will not even consider it, dismissing it without consideration simply because nothing could have been as clever as we humans are, after all we are made in the image of God!
Interestingly, Brian Switek’s analysis now portrays a man called Simon Conway Morris as being on the side of theology in a debate between him and the Godless atheist Stephen Jay Gould on the prospects of advanced intelligence arising independently of human intelligence. Gould seemed to allow that life is probable given the conditions but that technological intelligence is “highly contingent and chancy”. Morris seems to think life improbable but once it has evolved, it would inevitably produce some creatures “we would recognize as parallel in form and function to our own biota”, including “a creature with intelligence and self-awareness on a level with our own”.
One might imagine the frequency of an event in terms of barriers, usually energy barriers, so that Morris sees a huge barrier against the formation of life but a lesser one then against the emergence of advanced intelligence. Gould sees the barrier against the emergence of life as quite low, but the barrier against the emergence of intelligence as high. Energy barriers can be expressed as rates and rates as probabilities. The point of evolution is that the cosmos is vast in extent and immensely old, so that even very rare events can have happened somewhere, and both contenders are tilting at windmills—given the time, both life and advanced intelligence will occur. J W schopf made this point in a somewhat different context:
Evolution proceeds at some rate and we do not yet understand what determines that rate. Biologists do not appreciate the magnitude of geologic time. Seven hundred million years, the time from which the environment became clement to the first fossil record, is a long time—longer than the time from before the first trilobite to man! It is long enough for lots of things to happen. Since we do not understand what determines the rate of evolution, there is no basis at all for saying there is a problem of complexity—it could have been produced rapidly, but there was a tremendous amount of time available.J William Schopf
Life happened on earth, either spontaneously or brought by comets. Of that there is no doubt, but there is still no sign of life elsewhere even in our own solar system. But besides life, advanced intelligence has also arisen on earth. In the only place we know where life arose, so too did advanced intelligence. The evidence we have therefore supports Morris. Gould counters it by arguing that life arose as soon as it was possible on earth, but advanced intelligence took a few billion years to emerge from it. Intelligence is therefore highly contingent. Tilting at windmills is rarely productive, and this one seems to be a pointless and inconclusive draw. Given enough time Morris is right, and without enough time Gould is right! No one knows, though, what the required amount of time is.
The only case we have is our own, and though Gould thinks we are peculiar and rare specimen, the reality might be that we have had a peculiarly difficult path to travel to get here—far from benefitting from favourable contingencies, we have been hindered by unfavourable ones. After all, mammals had to wait for dinosaurs to be extinguished before they could begin to evolve into many of the ecological niches held by dinosaur species. Dinosaurs held all the best ecological niches for twice as long as mammals did. Maybe towards the end of that time technological intelligence arose, and the earth was quickly stripped of its advanced lifeforms. Humanity took about two million years to evolve from apes to advanced civilization, maybe dinosaurs took ten million years, but in both cases, technology ended advanced intelligence as well as advanced life in only a few hundred. Despite the intense productivity the lifetime of advanced technology is so short that not much that is obvious will remain millions of years later.
The Law of Exclusive Intelligence
Brian continues tilting, asking why “so many of our evolutionary relatives, so close to us in form and mental ability”, did not survive? Well, the main reason is almost certainly that their most intelligent and aggressive relative would not let them. Though we shall never be able to test it, a law suggests itself that not more than one species in the same environment can develop high intelligence simultaneously. Inevitably there will be a war between the contenders for the intelligent species and only one will survive. There is one ecological niche for advanced intelligence, and Homo sapiens won it thirty or forty thousand years ago when it finished off its last remaining rival. Brian persists:
If we were to go back to the time when the chimpanzee lineage and the line leading to Homo split and started over again, would we have reached the same outcome? Would another relative of ours, perhaps Neanderthals, survived and developed in a similar way? This is a game of “What if?” that I have no answer to, but it seems clear that high levels of intelligence are allowed to evolve and are not an unavoidable consequence of the evolutionary process.
Just who is it that allows the high level of intelligence to evolve? Is Brian a secret IDer? If we did Brian’s thought experiment of going back and rerunning the Homo line again, it is certain we would not see the same happening as before even if the conditions were precisely preserved. The reason is that chance plays its part and chance cannot be stopped, but even though the rerun would not be exact, if the conditions remained essentially the same, the evolutionary pressures on the species remain the same, and enough time were allowed to permit adaptive forces to operate as they did before, then the outcome will be similar. Intelligence is not an unavoidable consequence of the evolutionary process, but convergence shows that similar circumstances lead to similar outcomes.
Intelligence and Convergence
Would highly intelligent creatures converge on a humanoid body form (as Morris suggests)? Again, not necessarily, and there’s no reason to think that high levels of intelligence must be accompanied by an upright, bipedal stance, opposable thumbs, or an overly large braincase.
“There is no reason…?” Is the fact that humans converged on to that body form “no reason”? It obviously is a reason, and because it is the only case we have to study does not stop it from being a reason. The elements—upright, bipedal, grasping ability, large braincase—that constitute the human form are all perfectly intelligible too. Intelligence evolved in other situations, particularly media, like water and air, will not have this form, but we are looking at the form that developed to run, hunt and forage on land and make use of manufactured tools. Perhaps colonies of squid could evolve technology in an aqueous environment, and then the shape of the creature would be expected to be different, but in the human condition, the human form is selectively optimized.
How does that disregard the way evolution works, as Brian says somewhere? In answer, Brian cites Darren Naish (Tetrapod Blog):
The reason that we humans have the body shape that we do is not—I think—because it’s the “best” body shape for a smart, big-brained biped to have, it is instead the result of our specific lineage’s evolutionary history. Given that, so far as we know, the humanoid body shape has evolved just once, we simply have no way of knowing whether it’s a particularly “good” morphology or not. Furthermore, the humanoid body shape is not a prerequisite for the evolution of big brains given that brains proportionally as big as, or bigger than, those of hominids are found in some birds and fish (that’s right: humans do NOT have the proportionally biggest brains).
Oh come on, Darren! You might be a very clever chap, as clever as any Smartarsaur, but what you think is scarcely science, now is it? Others think differently, so now what? The outcome of every species that ever lived is the result of its evolutionary history. That is what evolution is, and it says nothing about whether that particular course of evolution is conditioned by pressures that make the form characteristic of the pressures or not. A dense medium conditions a fish shape. An airy medium conditions a light frame and wings. Maybe the evolution of intelligence in an animal living among trees on a flat landscape is characterized by an upright form, bipedal gait and grasping hands. We have no way of knowing whether it is a good morphology, Darren tells us, yet as he says it is the one case we have, and it is good for that—ours! In the absence of any other evidence, we would be idiots not to gamble on that being the best one.
The Morphology of Technological Intelligence
Brian has another windmill to tilt at:It is often birds, the descendants of dinosaurs, that often show us that animals with high levels of intelligence do not have to be upright apes, or even primates. Alex the African Grey Parrot (who recently passed away) possessed extraordinary cognitive abilities, and it has long been known that members of the Family Corvidae (ie crows) are extremely intelligent, having brain sizes comparable to that of chimpanzees, dolphins, and humans.
If the argument is that only primates or apes can be intelligent, then what is the point of talking about Dinosaurids at all? The argument has been about what a dinosaur evolved to the human level of intelligence would look like. Russell thought it would perhaps look quite human—humanoid. Birds and crows might be “quite intelligent”, but you have to try to figure out how they could evolve to become technologically intelligent. They are bipedal with otherwise horizontal bodies and tails, rather like dinosaurs, but there is no obvious way they are going to be able to manipulate tools other than simple sticks and stones. They have no arms and hands let alone grasping ones, so how can they make sophisticated tools? Flightless birds might manage it by evolution or atavism, but the fact remains that cleverness is not merely the point.
Having got this far Brian seems on the brink of conceding that intelligence, at least of an incipient variety is pretty common:
Truly, the more animal cognition and intelligence is studied it seems that some have minds that are far closer to our own than we acknowledged previously.
So, if we should go, plenty of species are well placed to succeed us as the Lords of Intelligence? Not quite, yet:
Many birds have high levels of intelligence, however, and so we can say that dinosaurs did evolve high levels of intelligence, but look nothing like Homo sapiens, refuting the Dinosauroid model.
Quite so, but high intelligence is not on the the level of human beings. None of them remotely approach the ability to make sophisticated tools, and that is the characteristic of technological intelligence. One reason is that they just do not have the right morphology for it, and the second is that now they would be wiped out by human beings as soon as they looked to offer a threat to our dominance.
The extinction of so many of our own evolutionary relatives like Paranthropus show that intelligence does not provide an evolutionary free ride or have inevitable consequences, making the development of intelligence all that more special and rare.
Who said it did provide an evolutionary free ride? Intelligence is a weapon, and weapons are used in wars. Rivalry drives arms races, and the human species were in an arms race for dominance via intelligence with other similar species. We know which one succeeded. The trouble with weapons is that they can kill their owners. Maybe that is what is inevitable about the evolution of technological intelligence!
The hypothesized Dinosaurid would not have had to face human opposition. Any human development would have had to face the evolving Troodons. As Brian noted, modern birds are ill suited to become technological, but the hypothetical Troodon was not left in that dead end because it was a thought experiment. Russell allowed it to find the optimum route for the evolution of intelligence and that was to have a humanoid form.
Anthroposaurs
One of the correspondents to the page saw the possibility of the Anthroposaur:
I find it amusing to consider things from the other direction. Not “what if dinosaurs had not died out but had evolved into sapient beings”, but “if some species of dinosaur had evolved sapience, how advanced could their society have gotten and still left absolutely no recognizeable trace 65 million years later?” Not so much about the dinosaurs but just question of whether or not there is anything a civilization could do that would leave recognizeable traces after 65 million years.Posted at Laelaps by SMC
Another correspondent, Nathan Myers, invited a response from Brian Swetek:
The insistance on humaniform sentients is nothing short of pathetic. …that the human shape has only ever evolved once is itself evidence that our form is far from the best possible. That is, if it were any good, there would be (or once have been) other animals like us.Nathan
Nathan makes a good point. Dolphins and ichthyosaurs mimicked sharks because that form works so well in their environment. If our upright, bipedal posture worked so well, you’d think other organisms would have figured it out first (or second).Brian
Does Brian think evolving species have to figure things out? Presumably not, but scientists ought to take more care what they express themselves, for their readers might not know how they mean by a casual expression like this. Just how close to the human form has an upright bipedal creature to be? Does a chimpanzee or a gorilla count? What about a kangaroo or wallaby or jerboa, and so on? What about an ostrich or any other similar flightless bird of any size? Or even some flighted birds like the parrots and crows mentioned above? Many monkeys and bears can walk upright. All of these are upright and bipedal or partially so. Meerkats or mongooses and prairie rats, rats, squirrels, mice sit upright. Maybe they are not strictly bipedal but look to be getting there, and are effectively upright too in the sense that the forelimbs are free for manipulating things. What Nathan is saying is that humans are the only animals with a human form, but others close in form to us in the past have been wiped out in rivalry with Homo sapiens, as described above.
In respect of the fish shape that is conditioned by the watery medium, it does not follow that more subtle effects than a dense medium cannot have a conditioning effect on adaptation and variation. The upright posture linked to grasping forelimbs is a case in point. These seem to be necessary if the animal is to be able to make tools. So however intelligent the creature gets to be, without the ability to use tools it seems impossible to evolve technology, and that is what characterises humans.
Another correspondent gets to the Anthroposaur too.
What if in their 165 million years of existence some form of Dinosaur did evolve intellegence? If one or even two groups did over the run of the mesozoic what are the odds of us finding the evidence? Evidence of civilization is pretty short lived in the geologic record. Wood, bricks, cement, metal, it all erodes, decomposes, or disintegrates back into the surrounding environment within thousands (not millions) of years. If Dinosaurian civilizations existed we’d be hard pressed to find these remains. Just look at the efforts to find a few thousand year old Troy. Imagine the cause of late cretaceous global warming being fossil fuel using dinosaurs. We were only looking at evidence surviving 1 million years into the future of human civiliazation and couldn’t prove much would survive.Traumador the Tyrannosaur (abbreviated)
This correspondent also points out that the theme has been mentioned in Star Trek Voyager. Some Dinosaurs saw the need to go into space before the KT extinction. One of the star fleet people says to the modern inteligent dinosaurs, “It’s possible we just haven’t found the evidence of your peoples civilization on earth”. Otherwise TtT says the episode was stupid in that the dinosaurs that had evolved intelligence were Anthroposaur cattle, hadrosaurs!
Nathan Myers goes on to support the idea of the Anthroposaur and Who Lies Sleeping?
Judging by repeated experience (Pacific Islands, North and South America, the present), the best and most reliable indicator of the advent of a sentient species is ecosystem-wide mass extinction, both terrestrial and aquatic, particularly affecting larger species, and starting with large predators. By that measure, the upper-Cretaceous extinction is practically unimpeachable evidence for the rise of a sentient dinosaur. That would also explain why so many species declined sharply below the iridium layer. How could any future civilization fail to notice such evidence? Of course, it’s one thing to notice it and another to interpret it correctly. And maybe the asteroid didn’t just fall. Maybe it was pushed. Just as the present mass extinction, still in progress, may be traced directly to our (ie sentient apes’) collective doorstep, I’m blaming the K-T mass extinction on the ill-considered collective activity of our hypothetical sentient dinosaur. To reroute an asteroid onto a collision course would be spectacularly ill-considered, but the difference from past and present behavior of members of our own species is only one of degree.
One of Brian’s correspondents sums up nicely:
That the same design solutions are found time and again to many of the problems faced by organisms set by their physical environment shows us how well adapted organisms can be to the world around them and does not fit with the highly contingent view of evolution portrayed by Stephen Gould. The question of where contingency applies to evolution is one of scale, the details are contingent but the patterns need not be, much of an organisms shape and behaviour is highly predictable, eg the shape of leaves are often used by paleoecologists to reconstruct the rainfall patterens of past environments as leaf shape adapts to prevent damage. The gap in ecospace reprented by reefs has been filled on 5 separate occasions following mass extinctions, and, given a few details on an animals ecology, zoologists are able to make highly accurate predictions as to its likely mating system.aaron
Afterword—Wikipedia
It is a curious thing that Wikipedia, the amateur online encyclopedia, has a reference—in its item sub voce “Reptilian Humanoid”—to Darren Naish’s blogged critique of Who Lies Sleeping?, the book about the intelligent dinosaur (the Anthroposaur) but it does not refer to Who Lies Sleeping? itself. It might be because Wikipedia has rules forbidding “original research”, research considered beyond the scientific pale—ie not peer reviewed and accepted—but obviously has no rules against criticizing such research. It does not seem too fair (Wikipedia editors should read J S Mill On Liberty), but, more importantly, it is scientifically absurd! Indeed it is dogmatism no different from the Church allowing criticism of heresy, but refusing anyone to read anything about heresies themselves except whatever the critics cited for the purpose of refutation! And just adding the appropriate citation is not requiring any contributor to include any inadmissible claims—it is merely showing where the intelligent reader can find them.
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