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"She doesn't produce a pretty, periodic sound when she performs these behaviors, like we do when we speak," Perlman says. "But she can control her lary
by mortenjorck 11y ago
"She doesn't produce a pretty, periodic
sound when she performs these behaviors,
like we do when we speak," Perlman says.
"But she can control her larynx enough to
produce a controlled grunting sound."
If the innumerable worlds within the billions of galaxies in our universe are indeed sprinkled with life, I can't help but feel my hypothesis reinforced that we must be within the top 0.01% of evolutionarily-developed planets. Gorillas themselves would have to be in the top 1%, maybe fish in the top 10%.
Of course, this doesn't discount the vaguely terrifying idea of a top 0.001%.
- jaibot 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
- bweitzman 11y agoHow are you coming up with these numbers? Humans, apes, and fish are all equally evolutionarily developed considering that our species have been evolving for the same amount of time (assuming we have a common ancestor).
- mc808 11y agoI don't think the concept of "more" and "less" evolved is really valid in general. Drop a human into the middle of the ocean and suddenly it will seem "less evolved" than nearly every living thing for thousands of miles. We could go with a purely information theoretic notion of genetic complexity, but that's not ideal because genomes with a lot of random accumulated cruft would seem more complex than they really are. Maybe with the benefit of hindsight, we could say an organism was more evolved if its lineage remained relatively stable over long periods of time or across different environments. By that measure, it's still too soon to say whether humans are more evolved than cyanobacteria or the crocodile, but at least we have a chance.
- bweitzman 11y agoComplexity, evolved-ness, and adaptability are three different things. Evolved-ness refers to amount of time that something has been evolving. Adaptability refers to the ability of an organism or a species to survive in a new environment. Complexity, like you said, more or less corresponds to genome size. Rice is actually genetically more complex than humans are, so assuming humans and rice have a common ancestor, we are equally evolved but not equally complex. It is debatable whether or not rice is more adaptable than humans.