soc.women

On Sep 23, 3:52 pm, collectio...@ wrote:
> On Sep 23, 10:07 pm, Robert Cohen wrote:
>
> Please don't listen to Robert. He is not a nice alien, just one of
> them bad human things, and so should be disregarded.

If the theory goes that reptiles and dinasaurs would have evolved the
"humanoid form" if humans hadn't evolved and the basic elements are
the same everywhere in the universe and the molecules necessary for
life processes are all similar, then humans are aliens and most aliens
look and experience like us?

/2006/11/
/wiki/Reptilian_humanoid

The Third Challenge: Why Only Man?

If correct, this blend of theory and factual evidence has brought us
closer to an understanding of what is truly distinctive about human
change and why it has been so quick. But there remains the nagging
question of why man alone took the fourth great step of organic
evolution. The fossil beds are dotted with the remains of large-
brained animals that might have achieved the same thing earlier. One
hundred million years ago, fifty times farther back in time than the
appearance of the earliest true men comprising Homo habilis, large
ammonites and other archaic relatives of the squid and octopus swam
the Jurassic seas. Their large saucer-shaped eyes surveyed the water
around them, and their tentacles played over the coralline and mud
surfaces of the ocean floor. What might they have been thinking?
Perhaps there was a mind of sorts, and their brains worked to enlarge
and exploit the limited amount of information already stored in their
associative nerve cells. On the land lived human-sized dinosaurs who
walked semierect on their hind legs. They possessed relatively large
brains and might have manipulated objects in their three-fingered
hands. Surely they were prime candidates for the ascension to high
intelligence and culture. "Dinosauroids," as the paleontologist Dale
Russell has called their imaginary brilliant descendants, could have
beaten man to the tape by a hundred million years, but the opportunity
passed. The great cepha-lopods and reptiles became extinct, and large-
brained mammals proliferated in their place. Ten times farther back
than the origin of man, the African savanna on which that unique event
was to occur swarmed with numerous elephantlike forms, hyenas,
monkeys, and apes. None managed to enter the self-propelling circuit
of gene-culture coevolution. Millions of species passing through
hundreds of millions of generations comprised of uncountable billions
of individuals, faced by every conceivable environmental challenge and
opportunity, shuffling astronomical numbers of genes in
microevolutionary experimentation-all this immense ferment managed to
push exactly one species across the threshold and into the
autocatalytic climb to advanced culture. Something very peculiar and
powerful must have been holding the evolving systems back.

Promethean Fire: Reflections on the Origin of Mind
by Charles J. Lumsden, Edward Osborne Wilson
/7hx6