I didn't know the Gorgons had survived.
To my knowledge, the main survivor was the "pig-like" Lystrosaurus, and possibly "dicynodon" or was it "cynodon"? And supposedly one of these was the ancestor of all mammals?

So, if the extinction hadn't happened, maybe this critter would have evolved into intelligence. Supposedly it was warm-blooded and might have had some fur? And did it give birth to live young?

These are effects; what started it all? What causes massive flood basalt volcanism?

What do you think about the giant crater under the ice in Antarctica? Supposedly it was 250 million years old and several times as big as the Chicxulub crater.

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"I am happy to report that once again the universe is doing just great, thank you, purring with perfection, ever-changing same as always. Light is still cruising along at 186,000 miles per second, and the expanding universe shows no signs of contracting. At this rate, it won't be long before they'll have to let the photon belt out another notch."
Swami Beyondananda's 2007 State of the Universe address

Hmmm, so I re-checked and I was wrong, the last Gorgonopsia, as well as the pareiasaurs they preyed on, were wiped out simultaneously at the end of the Permian. Dicynodonts and cynodonts are both valid taxa; the former came first, and the latter are nearly indistinguishable from mammals. And no, cynodonts would've been oviparous. I don't know enough about them to speculate on their potential to evolve intelligence; I'm mostly a marine guy.

The most common explanation for the Siberian Traps volcanism is that of a mantle plume. I haven't had a chance to read the Wilkes Land paper yet but my advisor Peter (who is the Permian expert, not me.. yet) is highly skeptical of all attempts, and there have been many, to explain P/T as the result of bolide impact.

I'll read the paper soon...

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Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.

I wonder if it possible to calculate an optimal impact rate that would fill and empty niches at the maximum rate, in order to predict whether, with a higher catastrophe flux, intelligence could have evolved faster.

Possibly, the tempo of evolution could occur at a much higher rate. Not to assume, of course, that intelligence is an outcome of evolution per se. Since evolution in the hothouse mesozoic instead lead to a bigger body size arms race, but still...

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plenty of woo, at the hotel hoagaland...

Well, since the impact on an ecosystem of an asteroid impact (please excuse the pun, I couldn't help myself) is not precisely understood, it would be very difficult to do such a thing, and any such calculation would need to be based on several assumptions in which we could not have a great deal of confidence.

However, on a related note, you may find this interesting. One approach for antiviral therapy research involves increasing the mutation rate of the virus. Many viruses evolve rapidly because their replication machinery allows for high mutation rates, up to a point. If you increase the mutation rate by dosing a patient with mild mutagens, you may tip the virus over the edge, to a point where it is no longer able to reproduce viably because its mutation rate is too high. The same substance would have little effect on the host because, at any one time, relatively few host cells are dividing (and hence making new DNA). Neat, huh?

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The quarrelsome oarsmen were rowing,
The great violinist was bowing;
But how is the sage
To tell, from the page:
Was it pigs or seeds that were sowing?

It is interesting but that is maybe about mutation rate interfering with the viability of a species, while cosmic impact rate will affect the rate of new species appearing, which may be a process with different dynamics.

I found this kind of paper, by davies and lineweaver which talks about how multiple biogenesis could have occurred and that our one may simply have been the first to survive sterilization by impact. That would imply that our genesis was at the very earlist possible time, and that since the bombardment was continuing that early life maybe just existed at the tolerable limit of impact flux.

In addition there is some data about the recovery rate of paleo-species after impacts which maybe be relevant to this question, yet to look at.

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plenty of woo, at the hotel hoagaland...

Cosmic ray impact rate will not have a real effect on mutation rates. Cells work to preserve their DNA (or presumably whatever) intact. If something acts to increase the rate of mutation their will be a tendency for life that is better at resisting mutation to survive. To be all anthropomorphic, DNA "wants" to be passed on intact. Any DNA that acts to reduce the rate of mutation also acts to help preserve that DNA.

That is a very interesting paper; transreality. It seems to imply that abiogenesis is fairly common, but often the life which emerges is eradicated by impacts. That would be encouraging news, if true; the chances of life surviving in a universe where abiogenesis was common is surely greater than in a universe where abiogenesis is rare.

We would look to find surviving life in systems where impacts occur less frequently, and quite probably find it. But the paper is very speculative, as must be the case at our current level of knowledge.

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New Orion's Arm Site . The Starlark . Against a Diamond Sky (OA Novella Collection) . OA Flickr set

Sorry, ronald, I meant, by 'cosmic impact', large bolides from space.

They promote speciation by clearing out the previous niche holders and the relatively few surviving (<20%) species rapidly differentiate to make new species to occupy the vacant environment.

If this happens more frequently than it did on earth, could intelligence evolve faster, assuming that the more events, then the more likely that one will result in an intelligent critter?

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plenty of woo, at the hotel hoagaland...

Sorry, I should have been paying more attention.

That could have been my fault, drifting slightly off topic.

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The quarrelsome oarsmen were rowing,
The great violinist was bowing;
But how is the sage
To tell, from the page:
Was it pigs or seeds that were sowing?

Hello! I'm visiting this forum at first. Do anybody know when the COROT mission start.

Welcome, Nebo.

Your best bet finding an answer to that one is probably to start a thread in the Questions and Answers forum.

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The quarrelsome oarsmen were rowing,
The great violinist was bowing;
But how is the sage
To tell, from the page:
Was it pigs or seeds that were sowing?

Welcome to BAUT. There is a COROT thread in the Space Exploration section. And this post would seem to answer your question.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

if you subscribe to the ancient astronaut theory that entities came here and genetically engineered humans in to existence you should realise (or know) that they may well have liked us enough to create us (although the reasons for doing so were hardly for love), they also sought to destroy all of mankind with the flood. However they were (according to the texts and theories) very much like humans in that some were 'good' & others 'bad', one very important 'god' wanted to destroy humans for various reasons but another sought to save humanity and instructed someone to create a sealed boat, the biblical Noah. So i wouldnt make too much of the assertion that if they created us they must love us.

Although I'd like to for the sake of my own psychological comfort, I don't believe in God. I believe that all the religions and myths in the world are man made and cannot be considered truth. I think that truth is infinite.

I also don't think that religion disproves or goes against science..its rediculous to try to prove anything based on religion as we are all aware that these are just stories from the past.

This takes care of religion whether it be christianity/hinduiism/bhuddism/Islam etc.

I could believe that God is all energy and that I am just a part of it, but to me that sounds redundant, irrelevant and pointless.

What I believe is what science has proven/presented. That life evolved on this planet and that it took billions of years. Why we are who we are today is due to that long time-span and the MANY events that took place to shape us.

Its rediculous to believe in the idea of an asteroid that carried DNA to this planet as that does not answer the question (although it is a very interesting idea for a Sci-Fi novel).

I think sentience is subjective. The more complex an organism, or a combination of atoms in a system, is the more intelligent and capable. Thus we call it life.

Well, it may be ridiculous to believe it, but there is no reason why we shouldn't consider it a possibility when we are speculating about how life on Earth may have started. But it simply shifts the origin of life on Earth from Earth itself to some other location, which does, indeed, not answer the big question.

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The quarrelsome oarsmen were rowing,
The great violinist was bowing;
But how is the sage
To tell, from the page:
Was it pigs or seeds that were sowing?

I'm not sure what you are getting at here. If sentience is subjective, how do you view the people that you meet, and how do you define for your own purposes whether or not they are sentient?


Here, your meaning is very unclear. Are you saying that, the more complex an organism is, the more intelligent it is? In the which case, we would need to consider all mammals equally intelligent (and possibly all other vertebrates, too). What do you mean by "atoms in a system"? How can atoms in a system be intelligent?

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The quarrelsome oarsmen were rowing,
The great violinist was bowing;
But how is the sage
To tell, from the page:
Was it pigs or seeds that were sowing?

I am referring to the chemistry of life on this planet in general, and when I speak of complexity, I am referring to the complexity of the organism's brain or control centre.

I had a discussion with a friend of mine some time ago about the definition of evolutionary superiority and whether the human race is in fact on the right path. Are we evolving and caught in a difficult transitory state? Are we destroying ourselves and not aware? Or are we evolving?

These questions are of course invalid by themselves, but they are a very important part of a larger question, one with a more positive and constructive purpose.

IMO its worth noting and equally interesting to see that all human beings live within a certain set of rules and paths, just as animals do. The difference
is the complexity of our brains and the pretentiousness of our expressive abilities.

But that is what I mean by complexity, we are considered the most intelligent being on this planet because we have dominated it. Whether we are the most successful from an evolutionary perpective, that remains to be seen.

Are you saying that you think there is some sort predetermined path in evolution towards intelligent life forms?

At one time many biologists would have agreed with that principle but it is perhaps less fashionable today. I think the common feeling is that evolution just occurrs to produce new forms which are better adapted to changing environmental conditions. In that respect information processing capabilities and memory are just other physical adaptations, like horns, fins, trunks and claws. If a change in a particular animal gives it an advantage in particular conditions which A. Increase its survivability or B. Increase its likelyhood of securing a breeding partner then that adaptation will flourish (usually at the expense of another).

Improved memory and processing power can confer and advantage upon an animal in certain conditions. For example if food sources are well spread out over a wide geographical area and/or certain foods only become available at certain times of year then an animal which can retain a sort of mental map and calendar will have an advantage over one that cannot. If however such an environmental pressure does not exist then such powers of memory are redundant and more than that the body cells needed for that information storage become a burden rather than a benefit as those cells will require nourishment whilst performing no real function. Therefore in such conditions increased mental capacity becomes liability.

Therefore it is possible to envisage many natural situations where processing and memory like ours would be almost pointless. We must be very wary of looking back at our own evolution through eyes of information age creatures. Evolution did not know that by giving us big brains we would develop agriculture let alone the internet. Just because our "stone age" brains allow us today to dominate our planet like no other creature that has ever lived before on earth could not be foreseen by natural selection. Evolution does not make long term capital investments. It does not say lets give these creatures the capacity to invent tractors and greenhouses in a few hundred generations. Such adaptations must confer real benefits as they evolve not gamble on future discoveries.

Our common ape-like ancestor developed a mental capacity that at the time it evolved must have provided it with an advantage at the time when it lived probably long before stone tools started to be made. If the environmental conditions had not been right and/or the animal did not have the means (a pair of hands) to exploite that capacity for investigation/discovery/memory/invention then you can be sure that evolutionary mutation would simply have died out.

At some point of course a threshold was crossed which was where our ever increasing tendancy to "think our way" out of a problem started to yield consistent benefits over our rivals. Once that happened then of course we were on our way to becoming the animals we are today. It is perfectly possible that the correct combination of factors that led to us - a diverse and changing environment, hands that could used for tool making and use, combined with a body form where sensory information was always routed through a central processing centre might not have beeh around. In which case there would have been no "feedback" incentive to breed an ever smarter animal.

It is for this reason that I think that although multicellular life may be quite common on planets with favourable environmental conditions. However the unusual combination of circumstances that produced an animal with the physical means to modify its own environment and the mental means control that may be quite rare. Therefore once we are able to discover other planets not unlike earth we will in most cases find them populated with diverse ecosystems and lots of animals but they will be like earth was perhaps 5 to 10 million years ago, lots of animals eating, breeding and dying but no large societies, no cities, not even tool using hunting tribes just wildlife. I see no reason why life on any planet could not continue evolving and adapting for billions of years without ever throwing up a creature that thinks a long stick with a piece of sharp stone on one end might be a smart idea.

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Note 1. All requests for planetary demolition must now be submitted in quadruplicate on form UX-565/B4 and be counter-signed by the assistant administrative officer for interstellar traffic calming - department QG-7. Subject to approval by the chief planning officer and the infrastructure development coordination sub-committee.

No I dont think or believe that there is a predetermined path for evolution. But I do agree, as you mentioned, that there is a particular method. I'm curious to know how different we are from animals. Animals dont exhibit the same social complexity and as a result they are not destroying rainforests or creating a hole in the ozone layer or blowing each other up with machinations of their making. They eat, sleep, fight to survive and mate. We do all these things as well as destroy rainforests, contribute to global warming and blow each other up with our own creations.

So my question is, taking only life on Earth into consideration, if any other animal evolved to our level, would they do the same things? And I guess you could extend this to beings on other planets as well.

You remind me of a line from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
"Man had always thought he was more intelligent than the dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars, and so on - while all the dolphins ever did was muck about in the water having a good time. Curiously enough, the dolphins considered themselves more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons."

From an evolutionary perspective, we are certainly successful. Humans occupy more different parts of the world than any other organism (not counting our gut flora, of course).

__________________
The quarrelsome oarsmen were rowing,
The great violinist was bowing;
But how is the sage
To tell, from the page:
Was it pigs or seeds that were sowing?

Taking your hypothetical situation, I think that any other organism that learns to exploit its surroundings as we have done will almost certainly do so. The harder question is, are they as likely or more likely to destroy themselves before they learn to exploit sustainably?

__________________
The quarrelsome oarsmen were rowing,
The great violinist was bowing;
But how is the sage
To tell, from the page:
Was it pigs or seeds that were sowing?

I suggest you read a bit about wild Chimps in east Africa.

The have been seen to indulge in:

Baby snatching, Infanticide
Inter "tribal" warfare and genocide
Cannibalism.
Some of their actions against one another are clearly similar to the sadism and bullying practiced by humans.
They will even resort to using primitive weapons, such as sticks and stones.

I am perfectly sure that if Chimps knew what a cruise missile was and how to programme it then they would be more than willing to use it. Which puts them in a similar position to our Stone Age ancestors if you offered them the same weapon system.

Therefore what separates us from them is less about "humans being somehow special and evil" and more a case of we have the tools to wreck the planet and they don't.

Now that may sound a little simplistic but I was trying to make a fundamental point, that there is nothing so special about humans that separates us from the rest of nature, we are still just animals but with a few enhancements.

Now clearly there are radical differences from us and single cell organisms. Also we do demonstrate a degree of self awareness that most other mammals do not but we should not think of there being some major fault-line between ourselves and other mammals, instead this separation is more gradual. In that respect the Great Apes provide a useful bridge for us to study between ourselves and the rest of mammals.

For example show many other mammals their own reflection in a mirror and they will become confused and react to it like it is another animal and either run away or try to attack it. Chimps on the other hand have no such problems when they look in a mirror they know exactly who they are looking at. In fact some Chimps are so vain that they will hoard mirrors and spend hours looking at themselves pulling faces, checking their teeth and brushing their own hair. Humans had been looking at their own reflections long before Newton came along with his theories on optics. You do not need to understand all the science in order to make and use a tool. Further experiments have been carried out on Apes which prove that many of the features of self awareness we have they also possess. Their main limitation is a lack of ability to explain to others in their group any more complex thoughts that they may be having. So in that sense it is complex communication that marks us humans out from them but once again this is only another layer of evolutionary development.

So there is nothing special about us other than we are more numerous, can more rapidly spread an idea or discovery made by one human to many others and have the tools to do more good or evil. Just like us those apes too have problems of fear, mistrust, anxiety, jealosy, which can cause them to behave in a way which is unpleasant to one another, we just happen to have the means to hurt more of our own in larger numbers more quickly.

__________________
Note 1. All requests for planetary demolition must now be submitted in quadruplicate on form UX-565/B4 and be counter-signed by the assistant administrative officer for interstellar traffic calming - department QG-7. Subject to approval by the chief planning officer and the infrastructure development coordination sub-committee.

I guess its Monkey see monkey do. You use chimps as your example and they are the closest animal to us in terms of physiology and image. Maybe this vanity you speak of is only related to a particular gene in our DNA.

Do you know any other animals or can you use any other animnals for examples?

How about when animals drink water? Surely they see their own reflection in it, why do they not attack it or why do chimps not sit in front of water for extended periods of time to admire themselves?

I'm more inclined to believe that when animals interact with humans they pick things up, just as pets do. I am implying that chimps are certainly more clever than other animals, but this again is a human judgement. Cleverness is not intelligence.

Why do we need to look in a mirror? Why have we created this whole system of vanity and made reproduction depend on it?

You can't discount the human influence on the rest of the world especially on the more receptive of animals, namely the chimps.

Yes its true we do things just because we can, but does that not imply that we are stupid considering the amount of damage we do to our world and hence diminish our chance of survival?

I'm wondering if our form of communication hinders us in some way.

This is OT, I think, but the remarks on similarities between chimps and human behavior bring to mind a question I've had for some time:

Why do chimps not realize that where they drop their seeds or refuse from the things they eat, why do they not begin "farming" as humans allegedly did?

If, as is thought, environmental pressures are what led to human agriculture why do our nearest relatives not "evolve" in similar fashion since their habitats are rapidly being destroyed?
Are these not environnmental pressures that should lead to a sort "selection?"

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"Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the greater view?" - Hugo

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." - Churchill

So... do you really believe that Rome was built in a day?

Or that animals spurned a large change in a few hundred years?

If so, I suggest you go open up a science textbook on Evolution and study, my friend. Study hard.

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I'm an engineer. I've produced many ideas that have beauty, but only a few that have truth. The difference is important, and truth is discovered only in a harsh and unyielding crucible. It's up to you what you propose to value. -- Jay Utah

Check out my writing, maybe.

Ah yes, once again my understanding of things is "wrong" and I should study.

But I don't suggest it should happen "overnight" as it were, though punctuated eqillibrium should be expected to show up.

This is, of course, in my opinion.

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"Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of the two has the greater view?" - Hugo

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." - Churchill

I think I can answer your earlier question fairly easily.

Why have the apes not moved from fruit picking to agriculture just because their environment is under pressure?

For one very important reason our own ancestors did not move from being fruit/insect/carrion scavenging hominids to farmers in one leap either. Instead we spent tens of thousands of years as hunter gatherers first (most of human existence to be precise). Most importantly during that time they had learned/discovered some important itermediate steps.

A) How to make more sophisticated tools - which could could be adapted from hunting and skinning to new ideas such as ploughing.

B) Constructing shelters - even as nomadic hunters they had built temporary shelters as a base for their activities it was just a further step to move to permanent houses and graneries.

C) Language - this is probably the most important development as it allows much more complex ideas to be exchanged and passed down to younger generations. A young ape may learn learn from an older ape how to crack a nut with two stones but farming is a bit more complicated than that - finding the right ground, knowing the correct planting and harvesting seasons (a bit of astronomical knowledge can be useful there), irrigation, weeding and pest control, processing and storing the crop.

Some ideas, such as preserving foods would have been learned as hunter gatherers and those adapted to agriculture, a species that has not been through that "growing up" process could not be expected to make the leap that took us 100,000 years in just a few decades.

__________________
Note 1. All requests for planetary demolition must now be submitted in quadruplicate on form UX-565/B4 and be counter-signed by the assistant administrative officer for interstellar traffic calming - department QG-7. Subject to approval by the chief planning officer and the infrastructure development coordination sub-committee.

I certainly agree that it would take apes thousands of years to evlove to the level of agriculture. The existence of humans in such large populations hinder or severely intefere with the evolultion of animals whose habitats overlap it. Having said that is there really a chance for any animal to evolve to any considerable level? Also are there any signs of evolution in animals today?

Can anyone refer me to a site that studies evolution in animals today.?

Modern Zoology has only been in existence for a couple of centuries so there has not really been time to observe evolution at work in Mammals or Reptiles. The other problem already mentioned is that we humans tend to mess about with the natural order of such things over such a short time frame that it is difficult to see how most large organisms can really adapt to what we are doing. Large organisms evolve too slowly for most of us to notice because their breeding cycle is not a great deal faster than our own.

However evolution is governed by one key mechanism Genetics and we can see evolution at work at the microbial level with the emergence of AIDs and new Bird Flu strains. So the biological process is still there. In addition to that many animals have changed in size and shape during human recorded history the only difference has been we have interferred through selective breeding. Selective breeding is just another form of evolution the only difference being that the pressure put on a species is human demand not climatic change.

So evolution is a fact and if we manage to kill ourselves off then you can be sure there will be an explosion of new forms to fill the space we leave behind. Mind you if we do go there is no rule which says the dominant land species to evolve after us needs to be a smart as us. It could just be another species that eats, breeds and spreads more successfully than many others. I do not believe that our planet or any other life bearing planet of a similar age than ours has to produce an animal that builds rockets, technology producing species may well be the exception rather than the rule.

__________________
Note 1. All requests for planetary demolition must now be submitted in quadruplicate on form UX-565/B4 and be counter-signed by the assistant administrative officer for interstellar traffic calming - department QG-7. Subject to approval by the chief planning officer and the infrastructure development coordination sub-committee.