I wonder if the dinosaurs would have developed intelligence and civilization by now, had it not been for the Chicxulub asteroid?
At the same time, sharks never developed civilization, so who's to say?
But yes -- my point was that no shark species formed a civilization over that vast period, so it's hard to say whether any dinosaur species would have.
If your intent is to educate HN on the difference between species, genus, family, order, ..., perhaps do so more constructively?
But I suppose you didn't understand what I meant.
The land thing was not as strongly implied but again one might consider it when thinking yeah dinosaurs aren't a species, neither are sharks but the numbers don't align...hmm,hmm oh yeah and also the dinosaur species covered many more possible environments.
"Civilisation" defined as "having established cities". Arguably much of North America and Australia would be pre-civilisation by this definition. There are some exceptions among Native Americans in North America, but most cultures seem to have been tribal and reasonably nomadic or based in small villages lacking the complex social and economic structures, as well as trade and diplomatic relations associated with cities. Pueblo culture would be the obvious exception, possibly also mound culture (Illinois / Mississippi Valley). This is not an area of expertise for me.
And my point remains that even without signifificant cities or intensive capital, these cultures had profound iimpacts on their landscapes and were clearly an apex species.
I assume you would say humans are the dominant life form of the present day earth, and many would agree with that. Ants are more numerous, cattle and antarctic krill are heavier by biomass so clearly such simple metrics are not what we are after.
And clearly back when humans started developing “higher inteligence” they were just funny monkeys running around the savana harased by jackals left and right. Very much not a “dominant life form” in any sense of the word. One could attribute any special significance to them only in hindsight by what they become, rather than what they were.
But the question is, does that mean that if such an evolutionary path is possible in a given environment, it will always eventually occur? My guess would be yes, but I'm certainly not 100% confident. ('Eventually' meaning, say, within a hundred million years. Presumably given infinite time, everything possible would occur, so that's not really interesting.)
We don't know if there's some special sauce that makes humans unique.
Complex life --- multicellular life with differentiated structures --- took another 3.4 billion years to form, emerging only about 600 million years ago.
Much of the biological hardware and processes for intelligence seems to have emerged with the first mammals (~200 million years ago), particularly emotional-hormonal systems that seem broadly common. It still took most of the intervening time for clever apes to emerge (about 2 million years ago), with anatomically modern humans showing up 200,000 years ago. When language developed isn't clear, but likely by degrees somewhere between 2 million and 50,000 years ago.
(There's a great presentation on the anthropological evidence of complex thinking in this 2012 presentation by Sander van der Leeuw: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=pOyQqPi28ug 69 minutes, most of the meat is in the first 20--30 minutes, high-density information.)
And modern technological society is really about 200 years old, with "peak invention" being variously defined, but the 50 to 100 years beginning about 1875 would be a good choice.
So: over 4.6 billion years, life has existed for over 4 billion, and developed complex and technological intelligence only within the past 1 million years, and quite possibly substantially less. That's 0.02% of the total time.
Earth itself will remain generally habitable for only about another 800 million years. If humans or other intelligent species survive over that period, they'll still account for less than 15% of the history of life on Earth.
Considering intelligence to be inevitable is ... somewhat poorly supported, at least based on that timeline.
(Related, see the Drake Equation, and yes, we're working with a single sample study and numerous unknowns.)
Intelligence is in no way the best tool to guarantee reproduction, there's absolutely no inevitability to it. Grass reproduces just fine without intelligence. There's species practically unchanged for hundreds of millions of years.
There is no evolutionary plan or roadmap, it's random mutations.
It’s not impossible that they did have a civilization, of sorts, and all traces have been wiped.
Intelligence and civilization is not the pinnacle of evolution considering all the species that lived, live and will live without developing it. It's rather an oddity in the story of life.
Complexity affords efficiency advantages, though usually with a resilience cost. Over the period in which that advantage exists, it's beneficial. A sufficient shock could (and frequently has) greatly negated the benefits of complexity.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/05/13/einstein-simple/
A fave. Several others of similar spirit:
Occam's Razor: "Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity".
"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
-- Antoine de Saint Exupéry
Ashby's "Requisite variety" (I'm not aware of a concise or elegant formulation) is another.
"This law (of which Shannon's theorem 10 relating to the suppression of noise is a special case) says that if a certain quantity of disturbance is prevented by a regulator from reaching some essential variables, then that regulator must be capable of exerting at least that quantity of selection."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics)
It's been adapted as well to a "law of requisite complexity", which effectively states that only complexity can manage complexity, or alternatively, that the complexity of a control system should correspond to the controlled system. See "Complexity and Organization–Environment Relations: Revisiting Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety" by Max Boisot and Bill McKelvey.
There's also the phenomenon of vestigal functions in biology, e.g., sightless insects, fish, and animals found in cave environments, and even of eukaryotic organisms in which mitochondria once existed (a near-universal characteristic of eukaryotic life), but have since disappeared. (Their earlier presence can be inferred by relic genetic traces.) These are cases in which a previously evolved capability no longer provides a fitness advantage, and revert, typically through a process of genetic drift.
In at least some cases, the mechanism for this appears to be that not having the capability actually affords a fitness benefit. The optical system in animals consumes a substantial fraction of neurological power, and in food-scarce environments in which sight conveys no advantage, the lack of a functioning visual system reduces overall caloric requirements. That is, there is a metabolic energy constraint on fitness and complexity. I'm not aware of a named principle that captures this.
And I've suggested a possible heuristic for distinguishing between rare, false (misinnterpreted), and faked (intentionally misleading) phenomena that seems somewhat related, though it's based on perception thresholds:
https://joindiaspora.com/posts/874e7c10d09c0139a7e5002590d8e...
The use of tools is relevant to building a civilisation after developing intelligence. To give an example why it matters, reflect how many tools are relevant to us today or centuries ago. For example, which a more efficient transport - an eagle gliding is more efficient than a human walking. But a human using a wheel (bicycle) is more efficient. The use of wheels, controlled fire, stakes, controlled microclimate through clothes derives from the use of tools.
Given the above list, we can see that sharks and dolphins do not use tools. They have some use of language and share knowledge. They do not use tools as they are not suited for it in the water. Humans have hands which enable them to operate on multiple surfaces. Perhaps an octopus can developer higher intelligence and a civilisation? Note civilisation requires an intelligence, but it is a superset of intelligence.
Note that for any species developing intelligence and civilisation is a very energy consuming process. In a human the brain is a very power-hungry organ. Its purpose is to enable a better survival for the species it operates in. On an evolutionary scale, for humans and mammals, the brain structure we see today developed over multiple millennia - it was not a one-shot change, but going from a local minima to another local minima, if we are using optimisation language.
Going back to the octopus - perhaps it’s brain does the job done; now and then an evolutionary change might occur to develop an even more organised brain. If it works for the species, the change propagates. But if the change lowers the survival rate of the octopus due to the higher energy usage or complexity of operating a high brain - then the change will not propagate to next generation.
There is a last question, back to the dinosaurs - perhaps there was a civilisation at one of the multiple dinosaur die-offs - but most of its artefacts are wiped out? What evidence do we really have that there was not a civilisation before ours?
References: 1. Antonion Damasio. Descartes Error. 2. Adam Frank. Was There a Civilization on Earth Before Humans? https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/557180/
3. A book on Aikido, which I cannot find.
"In Shark Bay, Western Australia, bottlenose dolphins Tursiops sp. carry conical sponges Echinodictyum mesenterinum on their rostra in the only documented cetacean foraging behaviour using a tool" - https://www.int-res.com/abstracts/meps/v444/p143-153/
Also, octopuses: "The use of tools has become a benchmark for cognitive sophistication. Originally regarded as a defining feature of our species, tool-use behaviours have subsequently been revealed in other primates and a growing spectrum of mammals and birds [1]. Among invertebrates, however, the acquisition of items that are deployed later has not previously been reported. We repeatedly observed soft-sediment dwelling octopuses carrying around coconut shell halves, assembling them as a shelter only when needed." - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098220...
Lastly, your terrestrial experience might limit your understanding of what a 'tool' might be: "tool users in water often use other animals (and their products) and water itself as a tool ... Octopodes, as well as squids and cuttlefishes, also use water as a tool for protection by using jets of water to aid in burrowing for camouflage ... Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) singly and collectively expel bubbles to create nets that encircle, contain and concentrate schooling prey for easy gulping " - https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.201...
https://www.thoughtco.com/crows-are-more-intelligent-than-yo...