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On Plausibility; mulling on the nature of criticism
Topic Started: Aug 19 2017, 03:37 PM (630 Views)
kusanagi
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Dragonthunders: I am challenging people to create a plausible sophont, without references to primates, higher land birds or anything with a parallel evolutionary past. And then to consider how its culture and history are affected by its evolutionary inheritance, such as no grasping appendages evolved for life in trees. Si?

Looking at mammals and other tetrapods especially odontocetes and elephants, simian and even hominin intelligence and high sociability may be inferred present in animals quite unlike human ancestors, including tool use and even a degree of object modification like that seen in elephants.

Meta-tool use is only seen in arboreal clades, and a lack of grasping hands means limited dexterity for tool use/making, no weaving, and no safe use of fire which in turn would mean no agricultural production. Depending upon the level of dexterity that would be needed, some kind of architecture as is seen in beavers is not impossible, but this leaves the question of why. And the question of why jaws, teeth and claws weren't used instead of technology.
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kusanagi
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Without examples like dinosauroids and spinks, it is more difficult to communicate plausibility itself: what is plausible and what is not. And yes thought exercises like the rights and wrongs of sophont designs. I still say a man analog (manalog) needs a human-like evolutionary history behind it. An elephant or a cetacean can never qualify, though they might have complex societies and problem solving abilities, and even be sentient in the sense of human self-awareness.

Follow through my challenge with an intelligent and omnivorous mammal, like Mellivora, as the starting point and without just-so stories like having it evolve grasping organs for the sake of a narrative. So close and yet so far...
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Rodlox
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kusanagi
Aug 28 2017, 11:12 PM
Follow through my challenge with an intelligent and omnivorous mammal, like Mellivora, as the starting point and without just-so stories like having it evolve grasping organs for the sake of a narrative. So close and yet so far...
i look forwards to seeing your response to your challenge. (and no you can't go "but i can't!")
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kusanagi
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If someone couldn't it would prove a point. But Mellivora is intelligent, adaptable and uses tools such as levers as well as breaking through substrates to extract hidden resources. Taxidea, a superficially similar mammal from North America, will block prey animal burrows as a premeditated act, and will also cooperate with other animals such as coyote and birds of prey. Mellivora already is smart, successful and unlikely to go extinct very soon.

Sociality in carnivores drives intelligence, and guarding carcasses from kleptoparasitism drives sociality. Indulging in kleptoparasitism itself also drives the evolution of intelligence as it did in Crocuta and Homo. Therefore hyena evolution provides a useful analog for what I am now hypothesising, because Crocuta intelligence and sociality have been compared to that of catarrhine primates, the clade to which Homo belongs.

Then there are the analogs for the origins of technology and problem solving coming from the living mammals and diapsids, other than the excluded clades which have arboreal evolutionary histories. The most obvious are cetaceans and elephants: dolphins are tool users that use sponges and conch shells to find fish buried under substrates: so this is an example of both tool use and resource extraction. (In non-social animals like the aye aye and the woodpeckers, complicated resource extraction correlates to encephalisation and intelligence.) The other obvious comparison to make is the elephant, an animal that is not a habitual tool user but nonetheless can recognise and use them, and even modify objects for use as tools. Not to mention that elephants display a degree of reverence for their deceased. More widely animals make use of objects as bait to lure prey, take advantage of geographical features to cache food, or use natural resources for medicinal or entheogenic purposes. Unlike meta-tool use - which our sophont will not have, because there is no analog for it - all these last three "human" attributes are common in the animal kingdom.

Social behaviour is common in mammals and birds, but humans and some papionins have the Dunbar number or some equivalent to it. It is uncertain how ancient or universal this number is in humans today, seeing as hunter gatherer groups existed in groups of no more than 50 people, but this is still a large number of individuals to share a social network. I can't think of any large land predators or omnivores with packs of such size, excepting hyena clans of c. 80 members. There are some further parallels of interest, for example killer whales are large predators that have female menopause, inherited cultural traditions and localised vocal behaviours. They live in pods of up to 40 members and these in turn form clans, and clans may mingle. By way of comparison lion prides, wolf and African hunting dog packs and dhole clans may all have c. 30-40 members in their social group.

Dhole (and the African hunting dog) are both more advanced than wolves because pups are allowed to feed first at kills, and food is brought to both mothers and young by regurgitation to increase their chances of survival. As a result of this altruism being under positive selection, dhole are tolerant of scavengers at their own kills despite the origin of carnivore sociality as protection from kleptoparasitism. Dholes are especially likely to cooperate with individuals of other canid species, even when there is enmity between them. Though this is known of ie. coyotes and American badgers, it is especially known in the dhole. Although dhole live in larger groups than wolves the accuracy of regarding them as pack hunters has been questioned because small numbers of dhole hunt together. This has parallels among human hunter gatherer societies.

This is about as human-like as animals without a monkey-like stage in their evolution can get. This scenario doesn't rule out future evolution towards a manalog, but the whole experiment was to test how manlike animals have become without a pre-human, primate-like stage and its evolutionary legacy. Man-like trends arise from two overlapping factors: increased intelligence, and sociability as relates to carnivorous mammals esp. the spotted hyena, killer whale and the Lycaon-Cuon clade.

What about the form and function of this manalog, and what might constrain its evolutionary future? Without a primate or higher land bird ancestor, it is not equipped to manipulate tools any better than its ancestor Mellivora. The inheritence of claws, teeth and powerful jaws is unlike the shortened primate face that mandates man's dependence upon his grasping hands, or the lack of claws that also drove man the hunter to compensate by inventing weaponry. A honey badger cannot throw like apes nor does it have a precision grip, and there is no reason for it to evolve either ability, nor to walk upright. In all this great mustelid resembles Gulo, though with a larger body size and tropical rather than boreal proportions of its postcrania. Outwardly it is just another mustelid with a large body size.

Yet depending on how dexterous they are, it might be worth remembering beaver sets and dams are examples of architecture. Though the functions would likely not be the same, packs of carnivores could plausibly erect wooden constructions as shelters in open spaces. Just as beavers they could possibly create and maintain water holes: unlike beavers they are predators, so this might overlap with bait behaviours. And then even without a stone age, or the use of fire (which is unsafe without hands), honey badger cultures would possibly be shaping their landscape to secure their own food supply.

Is this a sophont? I don't know: most sophonts tend to be whimsical anyway. But if you have suggestions, or criticisms, fire away. (Remember I excluded humanlike traits found in primates or primate-like animals, and nothing is evolved to make it more humanlike, other than analogies from disimilar animals that parallel humans.)
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kusanagi
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Actually if you feel classically Dixonian... try that with Rattus. Rats are social animals, and they will display altruism toward unrelated rats at cost to themselves. So again there is a very good manalog/sophont in waiting, if you accept that they become increasingly social, increasingly carnivorous, and increasingly apt to solve problems by way of cognitive complexity. Murid vocalisations have even been considered relevant, like passerine song, to the evolution of human speech.

Did you ever think Amphimorphodus could be some sophont...?
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Rodlox
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kusanagi
Aug 29 2017, 02:41 AM
If someone couldn't it would prove a point.
what point??

most of us have already made sapient and-or near-sapient species in at least one project along the way. I for one certainly look forwards to seeing what projects you devise and give flesh to.
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kusanagi
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I explained my point as an experiment in plausibility. How do you do a reality check on a sophont? By checking its traits.
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kusanagi
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If you look I didn't justify the sophont post hoc. I started with a premise that it not have a primate-like ancestor and chose a possible ancestor. Then I attributed it with the traits of animals known to be socially or cognitively convergent upon genus Homo to see how far as I could get, or not get.

Do you see the premise? And yes these animals do converge upon Homo all the same, but I couldn't get them more manalog than I have laid out because their own ancestry creates constraints for them. The way constraints often force unrelated animals to take different solutions whilst becoming similar ie.plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs.

Demanding entire worlds because I made a thought experiment at your request is just catty: they are built outwards from spec-tids unless you have enough knowledge of plate tectonics and climatology, and then its spec-tids after that. If I make an unfair criticism then say so.
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Dragonthunders
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Without examples like dinosauroids and spinks, it is more difficult to communicate plausibility itself: what is plausible and what is not. And yes thought exercises like the rights and wrongs of sophont designs. I still say a man analog (manalog) needs a human-like evolutionary history behind it. An elephant or a cetacean can never qualify, though they might have complex societies and problem solving abilities, and even be sentient in the sense of human self-awareness.

I was not trying to say that you can not use creatures or rather the tropes about them as an example, but rather than try to mention the entire projects as such are not relevant in this discussion, since the conclusion in most cases is that some organisms or concepts they present may work and are possible in other timelines, but as a whole and the context in which they exist, they will always be implausible, just not impossible or improbable in others worlds.

About the sophont thing... You have made it too much elaborate of what it would have to be, in addition to the fact that this is not the first time someone makes sapient species or with advanced cognitive development from non-primate species, have been made elephants, dolphins, corvids, dinosaurs, ect, and I still dont understand what you mean to be "convergent to homo", we are not a homogeneous species in terms of culture, society or behavior, besides it is obvious that due to the different origin and the different morphology of such non-primate sapient organisms, convergence will not be possible in some aspects.
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kusanagi
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Rather than using spinks or dinosauroids I could have chosen reedstilts as an example of how plausibility should be checked, to the conclusion some spec-tids are more probable than many people assume; I should perhaps have balanced this with something improbable like whale-like birds but that one has been discussed to death. I didnt want to evaluate entire projects in this thread, merely to illustrate plausibility by examples most people here will be familiar with.

I think you are missing the point about my rat and honey badger sophonts. All their attributes are found among mammals and archosaurs other than euprimates and higher land birds so as to examine the probability of man analogs evolving from an animal with a different evolutionary history. There is nothing hominin-specific like fire management, and no anatomical or psychological traits are invented simply because of the narrative: a honey badger has none so its descendant will have none. The barrier to non-primate manalogs isn't things like tool use, or sociality: its things like grasping or dietary constraints.

How convergent are other animals to Homo? Intelligence is driven partly by social behaviours, and elephants use tools without resource extraction demonstrating tool innovation can be a side effect of sociality. Similarly the aye aye and woodpeckers are problem solvers and laboratory tool users, without complex societies or wild tool use, because they have to reckon when finding food. Dolphins are all three. Chimpanzees are all three, and capuchins are highly sociable tool users. These three things in any amniote seem to overlap in terms of cognitive functions, reminiscent of the factor known as G (general intelligence). With reference to rats, as they are one of the hypotheticals I used, they have a G factor the same as man, suggesting they have evolved specifically toward general problem solving explaining their adaptability in new environments. Now think about rat intelligence, and altruism to unrelated rats, and the similarity of rat and mouse vocalisations to bird, whale and primate songs. Can you look at the falanx the same way again...?

But in any case there are human universals that are in part inherited from earlier ancestors. Humans nest within a small clade of primates that build nests, which most monkeys do not (dourocoulis are a little convergent upon apes on this, as it happens). So humans of all cultures display bedding behaviours evolved perhaps into shelter construction. All humans primitively built the beehive hut, a complex structure unlikely to have appeared more than once but it is found on every inhabited continent. The manufacture of a beehive hut uses techniques reminiscent of ape nests, just as human weaving behaviours resemble the techniques used by nesting mammals and birds. So a sophont descended from a macaque or a capuchin might not have artificial shelter, bedding or clothing, for as alien as it may sound to us, they lack behavioural precedents for them.
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Empyreon
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Are you plausible?

Whoa, what brushfire did I start? Four pages of argument at the mention of Dinoman?

Tartarus
 
Well, a major issue with Dale Russel's dinosauroid is not just the implausibility of humanoid dinosaurs but also the fact that he based the evolution of this speculative being on depictions of Stenonychosaurus (now Troodon) that are now known to be false. For example, we now know Troodon had a full coating of feathers and that its arms were wings. It looked nothing like the naked leathery skinned version of it shown standing next to its speculative descendant.

Regardless of the species origin (or its nomenclature), the details of the source organism matter less than the logic that led to the end product, at least as far as this thread is concerned. Russell makes several assumptions about evolutionary processes (that sapience is an inevitability at all, let alone that a sapient dinosaur would have to take an upright posture to support its brainy noggin) that aren’t as likely as other evolutionary outcomes, but it doesn’t make Dinoman impossible, only highly improbable; the series of evolutionary accidents leading to this creature are extreme, and other forms are more likely to come about than this one, but that doesn’t mean it could never happen. That’s the point here: separate “implausible” from “impossible” in your lexicon, and you can help other speccers refine their projects instead of dismissing them out of hand, you can see possibilities to improve your own work, or you can get new and interesting ideas from otherwise scientifically spurious efforts.

Little
 
Well, if we're coming at speculative evolution from not just a hard-science ("if it's too implausible it shouldn't be explored") viewpoint, but a more open and artistic viewpoint, I'd say the dinosauroid fails on the level of creativity. It's blatantly boring and unimaginative.

Allow me to disagree. While it’s true that Dinoman is a largely far-fetched and “suspiciously human” speculation, and it’s also true that it lacks much of the speculative flash and theatricality we often see, that doesn’t mean there’s no creativity behind it, or that it can’t inspire as much in others.

Take its apparent belly button, for example. It’s very easy to point to (or poke) and laughingly wonder what Russell was thinking in including such an obvious amniote trait, but turn the analysis around for a second and consider things apologetically. Birds hatch with small yolk sac scars that fade to almost nothing (a similar feature could be presumed for dinosaurs) and yet you have this creature before you that seems to defy conventional understanding; its evolutionary lineage must have undergone some profound reproductive and developmental changes somewhere in that alternate 65 million years. Explanation could run the gamut of plausibility, from “an alien/creator god named Dale Russell came down and gave them all wombs” to “some transitional lineage had sufficient pressure to carry its eggs, eventually developing some form of ovovivipary that results in a more umbilical-like scar”, or some other explanation. Is considering novel paths of development for reproduction and gestation "boring and unimaginative"?

Little
 
Perhaps more important, no attempt was made to explain it properly.... so the speculations of Dale Russel are distinctly a scientific and artistic failure.

Except that he did. Fifty two pages explaining not only the rationale behind the dinosauroid features, but the rationale behind the species of origin. Yes, we could go through each one of them and talk about how they fall short of modernly held scientific views, but there's no point to that. The only point for this discussion is to realize that dismissing something like this as a failure only reflects your inability or unwillingness to appreciate the effort despite-- or even because of-- its mistakes. Dinoman has inspired the minds of many, who have then gone on to speculate scenarios more in line with modern scientific understanding; in effect, this is more like "Dinoman was interesting, but I'm doing it right". Is it then appropriate to mock predecessors while standing on the shoulders of their effort? Especially when Russell and Seguin conclude by recognizing the possibility of bias in their work, and that the last line of their article is, "We invite our colleagues to identify alternate solutions"? So Russell's 52-page "whack explanation" invites others to challenge and respond, and we dismiss it as a failure.

Setaceous Cetacean
 
Speculative biology is all about finding a balance between realism and a suspension of disbelief.

Indeed. I'm reminded of James Cameron's Avatar, where the Na'vi were designed the way they were for plot-related reasons, but that doesn't stop people from enjoying the surrounding environment or the movie itself, or even responding to what they see by redesigning the species to better match Pandoran bauplans. Even a mistake-laden project (like Dinoman or Avatar) can still be a valued contribution. Not worthless, not stupid, not failures.
Edited by Empyreon, Aug 29 2017, 06:13 PM.
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Tartarus
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Aug 29 2017, 06:07 PM
Regardless of the species origin (or its nomenclature), the details of the source organism matter less than the logic that led to the end product, at least as far as this thread is concerned. Russell makes several assumptions about evolutionary processes (that sapience is an inevitability at all, let alone that a sapient dinosaur would have to take an upright posture to support its brainy noggin) that aren’t as likely as other evolutionary outcomes, but it doesn’t make Dinoman impossible, only highly improbable; the series of evolutionary accidents leading to this creature are extreme, and other forms are more likely to come about than this one, but that doesn’t mean it could never happen.
But the point I was making was that even if you look aside from any problems with Russel's assumptions the fact still remains that his dinoman was descended from something that never existed- a featherless leathery skinned Stenonychosaurus.
Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that Russel had used a more accurate Stenonychosaurus depiction for his speculation, but used all the same assumptions in coming up with its sapient descendant. What he would come up in this scenario with would certainly look very different from the lizard-man-like creature he actually did come up with. Indeed, it would probably look more like some sort of bird-man. Such a "bird-man" version of the dinosauroid could be subject to the same sorts of criticisms as the "lizard-man" version (e.g. its seen as too humanoid) but it would at least be derived from something accurate.
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kusanagi
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Homo type behaviours and morphology might not be inevitable, but intelligence and encephalisation are repeated trends in the Tertiary. Some people seem in denial of the fact brain size has increased in several mammal and bird lineages.
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Rodlox
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Tartarus
Aug 29 2017, 07:40 PM
Empyreon
Aug 29 2017, 06:07 PM
Regardless of the species origin (or its nomenclature), the details of the source organism matter less than the logic that led to the end product, at least as far as this thread is concerned. Russell makes several assumptions about evolutionary processes (that sapience is an inevitability at all, let alone that a sapient dinosaur would have to take an upright posture to support its brainy noggin) that aren’t as likely as other evolutionary outcomes, but it doesn’t make Dinoman impossible, only highly improbable; the series of evolutionary accidents leading to this creature are extreme, and other forms are more likely to come about than this one, but that doesn’t mean it could never happen.
But the point I was making was that even if you look aside from any problems with Russel's assumptions the fact still remains that his dinoman was descended from something that never existed- a featherless leathery skinned Stenonychosaurus.
Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that Russel had used a more accurate Stenonychosaurus depiction for his speculation, but used all the same assumptions in coming up with its sapient descendant. What he would come up in this scenario with would certainly look very different from the lizard-man-like creature he actually did come up with. Indeed, it would probably look more like some sort of bird-man. Such a "bird-man" version of the dinosauroid could be subject to the same sorts of criticisms as the "lizard-man" version (e.g. its seen as too humanoid) but it would at least be derived from something accurate.
ah, but accurate now, or accurate then? were Troodonts seen as feathered *back when Dinoman was designed* ?
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Rodlox
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kusanagi
Aug 29 2017, 09:16 PM
Homo type behaviours and morphology might not be inevitable, but intelligence and encephalisation are repeated trends in the Tertiary. Some people seem in denial of the fact brain size has increased in several mammal and bird lineages.
is there a reason why you're obsessing over this? nobody even replied to your last post (and I don't look at falnxes anyway), and you think we're bashing your views?
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