Why weren't dinosaurs more intelligent?

[herpguy]

I would like to hear Mokele's take on this.

[Mokele]

Unfortunately, I don't have the time to read through the thread, but I can offer some obervations:

 

First, intelligence isn't always useful. Brains are expensive, and if you don't reap enough reward, big brains will be selected against. It's useful to humans and we value it, but we're also biased towards thinking of big brains as 'absolutely good', rather than just another survival strategy.

 

Second, "intelligence" is a meaningless term. It's nothing but a weighted average of things like memory, spatial reasoning, logical reasoning, social perceptions, etc, with the weighting determined by social (or species) preferences. The individual components, like memory, can vary without an increase of general intelligence; a dinosaur species may have had poor reasoning but great memory for finding ambush sites, for instance, or good problem-solving skills but low social intelligence on account of being solitary.

 

Third, dinos were a high-diversity group. We see major variation just in mammals, so generalizing across a group that has everything from raptors to sauropods and more is probably a very bad idea.

 

Fourth, while cranial endocasts give us a clue, it can be difficult to figure out the actual intelligence of an animal without observing its behavior. Based on sheer brain size, lizards would be expected to be pretty dumb, yet I've personally witnessed problem-solving, rapid operant conditioning responses, even training (I potty-trained my tegu).

 

So the punchline is that each dinosaur species or family would have had specifically tailored brain functions that were relevant to their ecology, were independent from other such functions to an appreciable degree, and are hard to infer from fossils. Chances are we'd see the same range we see in mammals, with a wide range of mental abilities between species, and accurately assessing their intelligence requires nothing less than a time machine.

 

Mokele

[cambrian_exp]

they may be intelligent , but they were not able to use it, just like dolphins who have no arms to hold things. we got intelligence plus free arms to make our imaginations a reality:rolleyes:

[Mokele]

Actually, all intelligence *is* used, just not necessarily on tools. If the intelligence was going to waste and not being used in spite of the high cost of that brain matter, it would be selected against.

 

Mokele

[GutZ]

Thanks for your thoughts back. It was just one of those things I think about during French or Maths. Its just strange to think that over 165 million years they probably(!) couldn't have built a boat or even a semi-stable structure like a building. Whereas within our 200,000 years, we have gone to space. Funny.

 

Think of it this way. Think of it from a means of surivival only. What parts of the body does a dinosaur use to surivive? If it didnt need to be smart or intellegent, it didn't need to exercise it's brain, It was happy with "Me hungry, Me eat", It wasn't till it got to the human line where using the brain became an advantage. The first of the line didn't have big teeth or claws, its skin was not scaly, Small enough to be target or meal, too big to hide from the predators. Evolution does take a long time, but thats because the genetic mutations are random (hense you can have similar species but different) as I keep hearing bascule says, but natural selection isn't so where a human uses it's brain alot, it's more likely going to naturally evolve then something that doesn't because there is no need for it.

 

Atleast thats how I see it. I might be totally off HAHAHa...*nervious laughter*

 

I can't express it in words but I know that evolution flows logically.