In
an
early episode of the original Star Trek, aliens
put Kirk on a rugged planet to duel with the captain of a rival Gorn
ship. Kirk wins as the dinosaur-like
Gorn
was
intelligent
but really slow.
On
Earth, dinosaurs never became intelligent. Arising
240 million years ago, they
survived some
175 million years and for 135 million of those were the dominant land
animal. By the time they became extinct, dinosaurs had perfected two
ways of living: eating
plants or eating each other.
The
plant eaters
were excellent at converting plant matter into animal bulk and
could grow very large.
The carnivores
were very good at using tooth and claw to eat the vegetarians.
Some carnivores – such as the raptors – may have hunted in pacts
and perhaps
had
some wolf-like intelligence. But in general, brain power doesn’t
seem to have been
on the dinosaurs’ primary evolutionary path.
Mammals
arose just
10-15 million years after the dinosaurs. But
for
most of their first 160 million years, they
lived underfoot
as squirrel-sized,
nocturnal plant eaters and insectivores. For
this life style,
relatively larger brains gave
an
evolutionary advantage. So under the feet of the dinosaurs, mammals
got smart. Still, even with their brains, they could not compete
with tooth and claw.
Enter
the six-mile wide
asteroid that found the earth 66 million years ago. That
asteroid – nudged out of its distant orbit by a chance encounter
with another rock or after swinging too close to Jupiter or Saturn –
had travelled silently on its way for perhaps a million years to
arrive just seconds before the earth moved just beyond it in its own
orbit. When
it hit, it set the earth on fire and after
it had burned away, caused a long dark winter that left most
creatures dead and many extinct, including the non-avian
dinosaurs.
This disaster was,
however,
good news for the mammals. Perhaps because they were small, lived
underground and could eat anything, some survived (along
with birds, who are smart flying dinosaurs).
Within a million years, the earth had recovered and mammals were the
dominant large land animal. Some of those eventually evolved even
further in reliance on brains, eventually producing us.
That
asteroid wiped the slate clean, resetting the course of animal
evolution in favor of the brain and intelligence. There is no reason
to assume that an additional 66 million years would have led the
dinosaurs towards the Gorn as in
175
million, it
had not done so.
It’s
as if the
universe has
a bias in favor of intelligence and sent a “do-over” to set
things right.
