[ExI] Asteroid destroyed the dinosaurs AND 93% of mammals also

[John Clark]

On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 2:03 PM, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:

​> ​
> Maybe if another few per cent of mammals had survived, intelligence
> ​ ​
> might have evolved in a very different species.
>

​
Maybe, but more likely no mammal or any other animal would have developed
intelligence if the asteroid hadn't killed those specific species; a
surviving species would have outcompeted one of our tree living ancestors
and today nobody would
​
be very smart.
​
Intelligence probably needs a very unusual set of developments to happen.
Life has been around for nearly 4 billion years and there have been
hundreds of millions of species, but only one has had enough intelligence
to develop technology, and that only happened about ten thousand years ago.
​ That tells me that the Evolution ​of intelligence is far from inevitable,
I think we just got lucky.

​ John K Clark​
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