Does God exist?

[spacemonkey]

[eric]

It's possible. It's also possible that we arrived on a comet. We're still trying to figure it out. Regardless though, over billions of years we evolved.

[John Galt]

what's mind boggling to think about is that if you ran this experiment again, if you could, it's extremely unlikely that humans would evolve again. something analogous could but we wouldn't be what we are now

as for dinosaurs evolving into birds, DINOSAURS did. the problem is that some people think that all prehistoric large reptilianesque creatures were dinosaurs. this is not the case. the dimetridon, for example, went extinct 40 million years before dinosaurs even existed. it belongs to the evolutionary clade Synapsida, along with mammals, while dinosaurs (and birds) belong to the clade Sauropsida. dimetridon is a proto-mammal. one feture is that it chewed its food -- reptiles do no such thing (aside from a few lizards in new zealand that saw their food like a steak knife from the top teeth by moving their lower jaw along it, but obviously unique evolutionary pressures caused this because of the isolation of NZ). the PT extinction event put them on the back burner and sauropsida took center stage for hundreds of millions of years, until the CP event, where mammals then were able to fill the niche left over by a lack of sauropsida

[Soloshaddai]

[John Galt]

also note, as for why a highly intelligent reptile never evolved, first it would need to be a proto-mammal. it needs high metabolism to sustain the brain function. while birds have high metabolism, they still do not chew their food. instead, they swallow stones so their gizzard crushes their food along with the stone, and are able to get nutrients out of it. the gizzard is present in aurchosaurs (birds, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, crocs and alligators) so dinosaurs had it but they still didn't chew. i think chewing itself is necessary before you start eating cooked food, and cooking is what made humans human. i think this is why after 100s of millions of years they never developed high intelligence, but mammalians did. they chewed which allowed for the high metabolism, which in turn allowed for greater brain function. eventually fire came around and the rest actually became history that we are aware of because of cooking (which was possible because also of our opposeable thumbs, something only 3 known auchosaurs ever had, and even then they were proto-thumbs). our ancient ancestors were reptilian but they sacrificed and spent energy on chewing food which brought us to this point. had that never happened i doubt any species on this planet would be analogous to humans

[eynon81]

[John Galt]

[Soloshaddai]

[John Galt]

[Soloshaddai]