Jocariah said:
Alligators, if memory serves me correctly, have existed by most counts for more than 200 million years. In all of that time, their intellect has not evolved. They exist now as they were, so many millions of years ago.
An infinite number of creatures spanning millions of years, and only man has evolved intellectually.
That's just pure drenn. Alligators happen to have evolved to fill an ecological niche that they fit perfectly and that has not changed out from under them in all that time. They have not been subjected to the pressure of natural selection.
Other species that were also in existence at the time of the alligator were subject to that pressure of natural selection and they evolved greatly. Some of them evolved all the way into birds, all of which are far superior intellectually to alligators, and in fact to all reptiles. Others evolved into mammals, many of which are even more intelligent than almost all birds.
It's simply not true that only man has evolved intellectually. That's pure, arrogant anthropocentricity. The other apes are marvelously intelligent. They haven't developed civilization so they don't use their intelligence as assiduously as we do in their natural habitat, but it's there. We've seen both gorillas and chimpanzees master American Sign Language. How much closer do they have to get to us before you can crawl out from under your comfortable little shroud of befuddled wonder and admit that intelligence is a spectrum, not a binary thing that a species either has or does not have? Does an orangutan have to walk into your office and start typing on your word processor in language that you can understand, instead of language that only deaf people can understand?
We've seen Alex the African Grey, whose command of language is not yet as great as Koko and Washoe, but he has the P.R. advantage of speech organs. He's set a few anthropocentrics on their ears with his ability to describe objects in spoken English. And there's that dog that can't talk but can understand the meaning of one hundred different nouns.
Language is the primary indicator of intelligence. The gap on the intellectual spectrum between Koko the gorilla, who described the first zebra she saw as a "white tiger," and President Bush, who can't read a teleprompter or remember the punch line to a 300-year-old-joke that everyone he was speaking to knew by heart, is a pretty small gap.
Evolution alone does not create intellectual capacity – regardless of the time involved.
Yes it does. One of the vectors of evolution is pure chance. The laws of probability dictate that the distribution of systems that have advanced very far away from entropy will be much smaller than those that have developed less order. There's nothing mystical about the fact that this planet has only a few dozen species of animals with enough intelligence that we can communicate with them at a level more advanced than "come get dinner." Your casual dismissal of "the time involved" is the same cop-out that your entire community hides behind: the inability to grasp the full significance of time periods measured in hundreds of millions of years. That was long enough for the Earth to change from a ball of gas into a ball of lava surrounded by a thin crust of solidified lava, some liquid water, and an atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide waiting to nourish plants. Given that degree of change in inorganic systems, imagine what can happen in organic systems. Amoeba beget progressively more complex animals until primates show up. The changes in DNA sequences that represents is far more amazing than the truly miniscule difference in DNA between a chimpanzee and a human, or even the merely tiny difference between a human and a mouse. There's some awesome stuff in the evolutionary timeline, but it's at the other end. For an early ape to develop a modestly larger brain with a speech center isn't nearly as dramatic as a mollusc to develop into a warm-blooded, air-breathing animal with an internal skeleton and a placenta. And make no mistake, all evidence is converging on the speech center in our brain as the mechanism responsible for what we identify as our superior intelligence.
Humans have been shepherded - genetically altered at keys points – along their evolutionary journey, to enhance their intellect.
Statements like that belong in either the Paranormal forum or the Religion forum. We're scientists here and there just ain't no need to postulate no damn supernatural beings when perfectly unremarkable scientific causes explain the same things without requiring suspension of disbelief or cognitive dissonance.
The problem is, we are unaware of our shepherds.
No. The problem is, you do not understand how the laws of probability, the principle of entropy, and the concept of really huge numbers fit together to explain evolution.
There are no shepherds. That's a fairy tale for people who would rather believe in an utterly preposterous universe held together by faith in unrevealed secrets than do the hard work of progressing beyond fifth-grade science.
