On evolution, fantasy and autism

Being the biologically illiterate fuck that I am, I only recently learned that there's a certain theory of evolution that's called Structuralism. From my limited understanding, what this basically dictates is that the random mutations that drive Neo-Darwinian evolution aren't (entirely) random but follow some kind of system that we may not entirely be knowledgeable of. This would explain convergent evolution among certain species even if they have different ancestors (such as the fact that dolphins and sharks having similar 'builds' despite one having fish ancestors and the other landdwelling mammals as ancestors, or the fact that various reptiles, birds and flying mammals have the same wing structure). What's especially interesting to me is that some biologists who subscribe to structuralism even go as far as to say that if humans hadn't evolved in their modern form, another species very similar to humans with different ancestry would evolve to become the dominant species.

Putting aside the validity of structuralist evolution vs neo-Darwinian evolution for a moment, this got my noggin' a-joggin'. What if structuralist evolution is responsible for the diversity of humanoid races in many fantasy settings? That is to say, what if elves, dwarves et cetera aren't subspecies of the (no) homo genus, but instead have entirely different ancestry and through structuralist evolution came to have features and intelligence very similar to humans? Wouldn't that explain certain traits? For example, gnomes in 3.5e are deemed expert burrowers to the point where in 3.5e one of their racial traits is the ability to communicate with burrowing animals. What if this is because gnomes aren't strictly "humanoid", but simply an advanced sapient species that evolved from burrowing animals rather than primates to become on par with the primate subspecies homo sapiens?

What are your thoughts on this? What possibilities for alternate faux-humanoids would this open?

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See
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation

So Pig orcs are confirmed?

Are you saying we might have catgirls AND elf waifus at the same time?

I was under impression that we do understand convergent evolution pretty well. Anyways, convergent evolution by itself is plenty enough to create humanoids in fantasy.

Feathered humanoid reptiles and humanoid pigs/boars sound pretty good

>From my limited understanding, what this basically dictates is that the random mutations that drive Neo-Darwinian evolution aren't (entirely) random but follow some kind of system that we may not entirely be knowledgeable of.

Well there's physics. If you want certain performance with a certain biological system, you only have a limited range of options as far as shape goes, which probably explains why in the smallest possible size for the species', a lot of moths and flys and butterflies ended up looking exactly the fucking same.

Hmm, I don't know. Of course, a sapient species needs manipulators, but do they really have to be humanoid, or even bipedal?

Probably not, if their environment was suitable. In fact, if some neurobiologists are to be believed, they wouldn't even necessarily have to share our own brain morphology. Think just how incredibly alien or, worse yet, how uncannily similar a more complex, human-like version of such thought patterns would be!

So... my elves and dwarves should look like crabs?

The thing is structuralism ignores exterior inputs, which dictate which forms/mutations best suit the environment and thus drive evolution. You can see structuralism in the end stage because various factors dictate that this shape is the best, but the mutations that are initially tested must still be random. If they aren't random, then there must be an intelligent hand in their evolution and appearance.

Hmmm, I wonder

Intelligence above a certain level is not naturally selected for, so it’s highly unlikely that something would fill the niche we blundered into.

For a tetrapod it is very likely, though, of course, not necessary. Elephants have trunks and are pretty smart.

I suppose it doesn't, but if talk specifically about convergent evolution, then it's literally about species independently evolving into similar shapes and structures, with similar capabilities and to fill in the same niche in their respective time and place

Pic related is an ancient amphibian who looked like a crocodile and did the same things as the crocodile in the environment similar to where crocodile lives but that obviously did't have crocodiles.
He, essentially, through evolution took upon the "role" of a crocodile.

While commendable as a way to explain the diversity of races in the game I think you start on a slippery slope when you start throwing in random modern scientific theories into a fantasy setting with god's, magic and many things like monsters and races created thematically to invoke a certain abstract idea or set of ideas.

The answer that the various gods created the various species is often more than enough unless you plan on literally building your setting from the ground to be a modern one based on enlightenment era science rather than mythology.

Our intelligence was naturally selected for.

asking the important questions

Human level intelligence was very much naturally selected for, why do you think a species whose only physical excellence is in endurance runnibg conquered the world and wiped out almost all megafauna? Intelligence, and from that tools. It's why we are everywhere and Pan troglodytes still throw their shit around in only a small part of central Africa: the random mutation of our intelligence was adventageous and selected for in the spread of our species.

>Intelligence above a certain level is not naturally selected for, so it’s highly unlikely that something would fill the niche we blundered into.
>Our intelligence was naturally selected for.

I think what this user is saying is that we got INCREDIBLY lucky in having a mostly-bipedal form with neonatal features already set up before we switched to a big-brain diet and lifestyle. If it hadn't been for a bunch of convergent factors, we never would have gotten the natural advantages that allowed us to bootstrap ourselves upward past the point where we could have gone without all those factors working in conjunction.

>tl;dr something else might have filled the niche of "large upright scavenger" but it would be a long shot to reach the point of intelligence we're currently at

I mean, guys, it's only as unlikely as human race. Which happened.

Also, we are talking a made up world here, so we can also just say that it happened.

neanderthals were a thing

Ok, I see, that makes sense.

I just came here to Reeee at the Fish -> Shark connection

He's talking about a much earlier divergence, between australopithecus and the rest of the hominins.

Bird actually ARE reptiles. Not just reptiles actually, birds are Dinosaurs.

>In the beginning, when man was first made by the hand of the All-God in order to serve Him, the Gods of the other races sought to deny him
>And so it was that He allowed the other Gods to take a single animal and shape it into the form of man
>But since none had been there to see the growth, the birth, of Man, they had to shape their animal blindly
>And so the lizards were shaped by the Elven Gods, the moles by the Dwarven Gods, the frogs by the Orcish Gods, and so on

Of course, this line o' theological fuckery was buried under a pile of self-congratulationary wankery once trade routes with the other races were established.

Bipedal movement is very efficient. When Octopodes need to get somewhere in a secretive hurry they will 'walk' on about/primarily two legs with their others bundled up. YOu probably have seen that nopenopenope gif, right? Same thing.

The brain is an energy hog, esp. if you're a sophont, so more body mass in a species that needs fuel means less on average less for the brain.

So that's why we're so freaking fast and easily outrun all those four-legged losers.

Someday I will run a game in this setting.

We were built for long term running. Hence the whole efficiency thing.

He didn't say quickest.

>and wiped out almost all megafauna?

We mainly wiped the megafauna by having a negative impact on the enviroment it required, both in quality and in quantity. Big burds don't breed fast enough to survive the annual firestorms the Ozzies used to create an enviroment conductive to hunting and to growing their staple crops, to name something.

Other animals, like Mammoths and wooly rhinos were first put under stress over generations by climate change before humans fucked their enviroment and them.

It's fantasy. Don't try to apply real life science in it

Waifus as far as the eye can see.

My Father, The Sun

>From my limited understanding, what this basically dictates is that the random mutations that drive Neo-Darwinian evolution aren't (entirely) random but follow some kind of system that we may not entirely be knowledgeable of.
Thats wrong. Its just form follow functions. If a body part doesnt work, his offsprings wont reproduce that much. So this threat will be less common under that race till its replaced by others. The only thing it follows is physics and being fit.

Sharks didn't evolve from fish. They predate the first appearance of proper fish by a considerable margin

>what if elves, dwarves et cetera aren't subspecies of the homo genus
they aren't, dumbass

Can't believe nobody mentioned this: This prevents half-orcs and half-elves.
Personally, I like the "everything is in genus homo" approach. Just look at Neanderthals, Denisovians and stuff. Shit, we even had real life Hobbits at one point.

Sad.

*Disclaimer: By "proper fish" this user meant bony fish, a different group of fish from cartilaginous fish

All of the manipulators I can think of
- Hands
- Prehensile tail
- Tentacles
- Tongue/ mouth
- Trunk
Did I get them all?

> forgets muscled penis

Spotted the virginfag

>Being the biologically illiterate fuck that I am...

You are certainly that.

>>.. I only recently learned that there's a certain theory of evolution that's called Structuralism.

It's not a separate theory, it's part of the theory.

>>From my limited understanding, what this basically dictates is that the random mutations that drive Neo-Darwinian evolution aren't (entirely) random but follow some kind of system that we may not entirely be knowledgeable of.

No. You don't understand at all.

Mutations are entirely random. Whether those random mutations prove to be beneficial, neutral, or inimical depend upon the environmental pressures the organism exits within. Evolution thus "sorts" mutations into categories. Mutations which help are preserved in a population while mutations which don't help - and the vast majority do not - are not preserved.

Structuralism is merely a fancy way of saying "form follows function" in biology. In the picture you posted, you can see that certain body shapes are beneficial for large, free swimming, aquatic predators. The environment those animals live in thus "selects" via the evolutionary process those body shapes. This has been understood since Darwin and was a central part of his thesis.

D'Arcy Thompson quantified all this back in 1917 in his classic book "On Growth and Form". While free copies are easily found online, your obviously shit tier education will make it hard for you to both read and understand it.

tl;dr - You are biologically illiterate. Structuralism is an integral part of Darwinian evolutionary theory and not an alternate one.

Dude, don’t be a dick. This is relatively subtle, high-level stuff.

This debate is frequently cast as “structuralism vs. adaptationism.” It centers on the relative strengths of natural selection and architectural constraints in determining organismal form.

The stereotype of an adaptationist is someone who believes that organisms are essentially putty, endlessly malleable before the force of natural selection. Other factors are weak by comparison. This style of thought lends itself to the positing of adaptive hypotheses: if you’re convinced that natural selection is far and away the most important causal determinant of organismal form, then it makes sense to interpret traits as having adaptive value. The adaptationist position is related to the Neo-Darwinists inasmuch as they tend to be hardcore functionalists who ascribe very little significance to evolutionary forces other than natural selection.

Structuralists, on the other hand, tend to ascribe a great deal of importance to the way organismal form is generated, emphasizing developmental and phylogenetic constraints; in the more “extreme” cases, they talk about form as being shaped by attributes other than (strict) inheritance, such as self-organization, or the direct outcome of physical properties. In evolutionary terms, the most important assertion of the structuralist position is that organisms are *not* putty shaped by natural selection; rather, the manner in which they are constructed limits the avenues natural selection can take, or makes certain types of changes easier than others. Structuralists are more inclined to regard organismal attributes as spandrels, the necessary architectural byproducts of adaptation which arise indirectly from natural selection, or as entirely neutral features that arise from development and persist because natural selection is limited in its capacity to alter developmental (or biophysical) processes.

We may not outrun them but we will be able to follow them until they fall asleep.

Dude.

It was literally aboriginals burning down the forests.

To be fair, I would have done the same.

>Dude, don’t be a dick.

Telling a dumb fuck he is a dumb fuck, isn't being a dick. It's simply speaking the truth.

The explanation you posted is well written and entirely correct. Sadly, you and I are the only ones in this thread who can or will understand it.

That's not me being a dick either. It's just the truth.

I like this concept. I would play in this setting.

(In practice, people who lean in this direction are also likely to invoke population-genetic limitations on the power of natural selection, although this obviously isn’t a part of structuralism per se.)

The developmental version of structuralism is exemplified fairly well by the concept of parallelism. Parallelism sits somewhere between convergence and homology— it refers to the independent acquisition of a trait in different lineages as a result of a developmental (or genetic, although the two are obviously related) predisposition to its emergence. Similar selection pressures produce similar traits by acting on similar underlying architectures. Eye development may be a decent example of parallelism: the high-level genetic regulatory networks that control eye development are very strongly conserved across the animals, even though they direct the construction of wildly different kinds of eyes.

I think that where you stand depends a lot on what you study. If you’re in developmental biology or paleobiology, you’re deeply concerned with the question of *how* evolution proceeds; you want to know the path evolution took to arrive at contemporary organismal forms. This emphasis naturally lends itself to structuralism. If you’re in ethology, on the other hand, your main objective is to figure out what the traits contemporary organisms possess *do*— their adaptive value. This perspective lends itself to adaptationism.

(Population geneticists don’t have a side, IMHO.)

Adaptationists and structuralists snipe at each other all the time. The former attack the latter as denying the importance of natural selection; the latter attack the former as deluded fools who insist that every feature of any organism must confer some sort of fitness benefit. Nobody actually lives at these poles, of course: like the nature-nurture debate, the argument is all about the relative importance of these factors to the overall process of evolution.

The problem with structuralism, for me, is that you have sea cucumbers, jellyfish, starfish, anemones, and all manner of differ body types than sharks, cetaceans, and ichthyosaurs.

Those body models are the most efficient for free swimming and that’s why they evolved that way. But it’s not the only way to live in the ocean.

Same with the “dominant species” have to be humanoids. There’s more than one way to dominant the planet and, hell, intelligence isn’t even the only option.

>Telling a dumb fuck he is a dumb fuck, isn't being a dick. It's simply speaking the truth.

Not knowing this stuff doesn’t qualify you as a “dumb fuck.” There are many ways to misunderstand evolutionary biology, and this is hardly the worst of them.

Anyway. It is not correct to say that this was all established in Darwin’s time. Darwin was, of course, the original adaptationist, holding a strongly function-oriented view of organismal form. Although the scientific community swiftly adopted Darwin’s ideas, fierce debate about the role of natural selection continued into the early part of the 20th century, with other mechanisms like orthogenesis or saltation set forth as being the dominant processes by which evolution occurred. These ideas were discarded during as the Modern Synthesis took shape, and nobody takes them seriously today. Thompson is (sort of) in this category: he maintained that organismal form was directly determined by the biophysical conditions organisms were subjected to, as opposed to being indirectly specified through the action of natural selection on inheritance. I’m really not sure about it, but I don’t think too many people bought into this part of Thompson’s thesis, even though “On Growth and Form” is regarded as a classic work in biology.

Also: it is important to note that the evolutionary sense in which mutations are random refers to their effect on the fitness of their possessors— it’s similar to the observation that evolution is incapable of foresight. “Mutations are random” does NOT mean that all mutations are equally likely— they aren’t!

>Also: it is important to note that the evolutionary sense in which mutations are random refers to their effect on the fitness of their possessors— it’s similar to the observation that evolution is incapable of foresight. “Mutations are random” does NOT mean that all mutations are equally likely— they aren’t!

If any of the dumb fucks in this thread take anything away from the excellent information what you've been posting, those two sentences should be it.

When will they learn?

You’d be surprised how many actual biologists fuck up that one.

nah man, you are pretty cunty.

Don't be a cunt

>I think what this user is saying is that we got INCREDIBLY lucky in having a mostly-bipedal form with neonatal features already set up before we switched to a big-brain diet and lifestyle
Sure. A lot of things about humans go hand-in-hand (ha) with higher intelligence to make it all "click"... opposable thumbs are originally for climbing, but enable tool use; binocular vision is originally for hunting, but also makes shit like drawing and writing possible; nurturing parents are good for any critter with a high initial energy investment, but also allow the older generation to teach; bipedal locomotion is good for persistence hunting, but also lets you wear pants; and so on.

But a lot of that may not be as much "happy accident" as it initially appears. As a for-instance, binocular vision and high intelligence are both much more likely to appear in predators, for fairly obvious reasons.

>Bird actually ARE reptiles. Not just reptiles actually, birds are Dinosaurs.
I mean, if we're just going to stop arbitrarily drawing lines, let's just say we're all protozoans or archeans or some shit and be done with it, yeah?

Bipedal movement isn't as FAST as quadruped movement, obviously, but it's way more efficient. In a 100m dash, a deer or dog or cheetah can outrun you effortlessly. But over a long distance? A human can crush any of them. There isn't another animal on earth that could run a marathon without stopping, for instance. There are at least... some.. humans that can do that (probably not on /tg, but still).

was memeing don't worry

Our intelligence has probably nothing to do with the tools we developed at all. You see, for a runaway evolutionary process like the rapid increase in intelligence during human evolution to occur, there must be some factor that allows you to be a LOT more successful than your peers for every little incremental improvement you have over them. Tool usage does not fulfill this criteria. If you make better tools, all your peers can just imitate you, heck, your tools can survive you for generations of less intelligent peers that would never be able to come up with them on their own. Tool usage give HUMANS as a whole an edge, but it does not give YOU the edge you need that would enable YOU SPECIFICALLY to produce significantly more living, successful offspring that could carry on and improve your mutation.

In fact, most anthropologists will tell you that humans probably didn't develop tools or even rudimentary spears for tens of thousands of years AFTER they became this intelligent.

So, what DOES facilitate a runaway evolutionary process in a pack animal where your social standing decides how many children you will father and how many nutrients are left over for you to nurture them, HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.

Humans probably became this smart by accident, because the mechanisms that would allows us to scheme, build alliances, genocide other groups, steal women and suck up to power just so happened to be pretty universal, and even then it took us THOUSANDS of years to make use of that universality. Incidentally, while our intelligence was meant to facilitate the worst that humanity has to offer, it probably also lead to the evolution of or nicer sides, because if your entire thing is fucking each other over, always holding grudges and being a dick all the time are a pretty destructive practices and hinder your group as a whole, so greater social cohesion, better bonding, generosity, etc likely developed as a counterbalance, so we could have our cake and eat it too

Not that user, but yeah, you were being a dick.

So in essence, we don't really fill some kind of role that is inevitable or even likely, but depends on a lot of outside factors and a lot of dumb fucking luck. Our intelligence is SO accidental that I find it hard to believe that it could be some point of convergent evolution. You have to jump through so many hoops that give you no benefit at all and thus provide an evolutionary roadblock before you can get to a position to cash those in that I basically had to happen as a dumb side effect.

Also the reason why we didn't develop even further is because at some point the social complexity meant that our social networks and hierarchies became so big that being on top didn't really help anymore. Being Marchiavellian helps when your tribe has 40 people, but not when it has hundreds of thousands. After all, the real Machiavelli didn't have significantly more fit children than his contemporaries.

>This would explain convergent evolution among certain species even if they have different ancestors
So validating Dragonboobs then?

Human intelligence is retardedly excessive for any practical use we can think of. Social bullshit, tool use, pack hunting, we've tried it all and it doesn't add up. The only thing left is the same lovely process that gave us peacock feathers and fiddler crab claws:

Sexual selection.

Smart humans were sexier than dumb humans, so they bred more, became standard, and were replaced by the next wave of hotness. It's a runaway arms race in the absence of actual pressures, which happened to be in a direction that led to a lot of other interesting developments.

Incidentally, it also makes your insistence that you "can't talk to girls" absurdist-tier comedy.

>You see, for a runaway evolutionary process like the rapid increase in intelligence during human evolution to occur
Not an expert on this, so somebody educate me. I assume by "rapid" and "runaway", you're saying that the increase intelligence was weirdly fast, implying some kind of positive feedback mechanism. As opposed to just "some intelligence is an advantage, and more intelligence is a bigger advantage" normal evolution pressure. Is this what the physical evidence tells us actually happened?

I get what you're saying about tools, but I don't see the two as mutually exclusive. Humans aren't lone wolves, they are pack animals... so when you're tracing evolution, you're not talking about individuals only, but also the evolution of tribes and nations. In prehistoric society, entire tribes getting wiped out probably wasn't that uncommon, so you'd get the same sort of pressures on a grander scale. And while humans or ancestors would certainly share tool-knowledge with their family and friends, they definitely might NOT do so for the tribe from the other side of the mountain, for example. So it's possible the brains and the tech evolved in tandem, each helping the relevant populations to become ever-more successful.

I'm just talking out my ass, really, I'm a programmer. I don't know shit about bio.

>The only thing left is the same lovely process that gave us peacock feathers and fiddler crab claws: Sexual selection.
So what you're saying is, if I want girls to like me, I need to grow some feathers and work out until one of my arms is waayyyyy bigger than the other one.

OP the thing you need to understand is that 80% of all Vertebrates are based on a handful of ancient ancestors who survived one of the super-exinctions (I mean the 99% of all life getting wiped out Cambrian shit) and had a very basic structure to suit.

All vertebrates no matter what have a backbone, a head and 4 limbs. That's literally just how we're biologically designed. At most for variation you might have a tail with some poseability.

>After all, the real Machiavelli didn't have significantly more fit children than his contemporaries.
TBF, he didn't really practice what he preached either. Dude talked a big game, but in terms of number of actual enemies destroyed he doesn't even rate.

And the princes that adopted his philosophy whole-cloth had a bad habit of getting themselves and all their fit offspring stabbed in the face. Turns out, people get kinda defensive once they notice you're going no-holds-barred on literally everyone.

Structuralism’s kook science, m8. Form follows function is why animals from different evolutionary lines can look similar.

>crocophibians
I am so using that in the future.

For these reasons, the basics of convergent evolution, I always thought the universe, if it had other intelligent life, would very likely have intelligent life that resembled humans. Star Trek universe is explained pretty easily by it. The specific anatomy of blood veins in necks and brain structure may change but the value of 2 eyes, head up, bipedal, broad hands that can punch... all of that is something that would be sexually selected for. Hairless for swimming and flea management, etc etc

>For these reasons, the basics of convergent evolution, I always thought the universe, if it had other intelligent life, would very likely have intelligent life that resembled humans. Star Trek universe is explained pretty easily by it. The specific anatomy of blood veins in necks and brain structure may change but the value of 2 eyes, head up, bipedal, broad hands that can punch... all of that is something that would be sexually selected for. Hairless for swimming and flea management, etc etc
Well star trek had to explain away their budget issues. The explanation is cute, but not exactly plausible. For instance, it assumes that every planet hosting an intelligent species is basically earth-like... which is a big damn assumption.

A slightly better exploration of the same basic idea (where intelligent species are varied but not TOTALLY alien) would be something like Mass Effect... which is appropriate, since that franchise is basically star trek without the budget limitations.

Personally, I tend to side with Lem - it's even odds whether, upon encountering other intelligent life, communication will even be possible. We may be so different as to not even recognize each other as BEING intelligent life.

Genghis Khan has millions of ancestors, was brutal barbarian if not Machiavellian

You have no idea what you're talking about.

Point 1. Machiavelli had no power. Talking about what enemies he did or didn't destroy is silly.

Point 2. The Prince was largely based on his observations of how others behaved; Cesare Borgia, specifically, but also others. They were not new ideas, and princes did not "adopt" them and get "stabbed in the face."

Worst thing about this board is the pretentious undergrads who think they know everything...

came here to say this

>There isn't another animal on earth that could run a marathon without stopping, for instance.

can't birds fly farther than that though?

The Prince was widely misunderstood during its time and still is today. Many of the scholars who claimed to understand it, and the rulers who were thought to practice it, did not. As a side note, Much of the advice it offers is actually surprisingly humane. Also, some people who've actually read the book speculated that the Prince was a satire, because practicing all the advice offered at once was practically impossible and would render you a mental wreck, meaning being a prince is a crapshoot. But what do I know? I've never read it.

The Prince could've also have been a satire because it was presented as a gift to the Medicis, the family who condemned Machiavelli to exile.

The people who've speculated that the Prince was a satire mainly did to cover themselves. They couldn't openly say "well, you see, I hate our king, and our king is shit" but they could very well say "Well, the Prince was OBVIOUSLY a satire, let me tell you why..."

Fun fact, beavers know how to build damns without ever being taught.

>The Prince could've also have been a satire because it was presented as a gift to the Medicis, the family who condemned Machiavelli to exile.

It was a satire, a resume, and a job application all in one.

During the city states era, courtiers who had the "balls" to insult their patrons were admired by said patrons. Of course, there was a limit on just how far you could insult a patron.

If you're interested in more accurate peek into Machiavelli's political thinking, read his "Discourses on Livy".

If you think I was being cunty and a dick when I said most of the people discussing evolution in this thread were dumb fucks, read the discussions in this thread on the development of human intelligence.

Dumb fucks is being kind.

Nah, you aren't kind.

You are a cunt.

stop being a cunt

I don't know mate, looks like you were kind of being a dick. Did you knwo you can correct people without being a dick?

You're a dick

He is being an asshole, but this is Veeky Forums. There is no need to be offended.

Dragonboobs never really needed validation, reptile is strictly an Earth-centric classification that doesnt necessarily applies to other planets where animals similar to reptiles but with divergent characteristics such as mammary glands could emerge

This is Veeky Forums, and Veeky Forums used to hold itself to a higher standard.

To be fair, you probably already had the latter completed before this thread user.

Alternatively, it's a possibility that we could meet an alien race that is basically human because of convergent evolution.

> How Rabid
For context we seperated from the common ancestor of lobsters about 360 million years ago, the genus homo has only been around for around 2 million years. In biological terms we evolved our modern intelligence really quickly.

I like this thread. This is a nice fucking thread.

And I wish it still was this way, but reality is reality. I was just saying that probably he wasn't trying to offend, and that you shouldn't feel offended by him

And if he was, don't feed the Troll.

I'm not offended, he's just being a cunt. he should stop being a cunt.

birds don't fly on four legs, and make a lot of concessions to be able to fly in the first place

The Permian was very, very weird.

Way I see it is that the more unnecessary things you have, the less energy there is to go round.
So if you’re not bipedal, you’d either have a vastly larger energy requirement, which would restrict your habitats and population size, or you’d have to sacrifice size/other functions.

So centaurs might be a thing, but they’d be in limited ecosystems or be manlets

For 300 million years, there has been an evolutionary arms race between Diapsids and Synapsids.
Diapsids dominated throughout the entire Mesozoic Era due to the Permian-Tertiary extinction.
The Synapsids on the other hand, dominated the Permian, but were shut down because of the extinction event, BUT, they came back later, during the Cretaceous Extinction event, and eventually, gave rise to the human.
Pic related, human with one of his probable ancestors, or else a close relative.

I love it when these kinds of pictures include a human (for the sake of size comparison). You just have to wonder what's going through that dude's mind at the moment. In this case he looks like he has just seen everyone and has run out of fucks to give. The wikipedia dinosaur guy looks like he's at the zoo and waving to a loved one who's taking a picture of him.

A theory I read recently is that human intelligence evolved to be so "excessive" because it makes childbirth troublesome for a biped. Basically, people with bigger brains have to be born earlier in order to fit through a woman's hips without crippling her (and maybe some other similar factors, like the capacity of the placenta and the nutrient share given to the developing brain compared to the developing body I don't remember exactly), and the parents have to be smarter to keep babies who can't do anything but shit themselves for a year+ alive long enough to pass on genes. Once early humans got past a certain level of brain size, having a more effective brain was directly correlated with the survival chances of their children and a more effective brain is often a larger brain, so it caused a positive feedback loop where the smarter the parents were the smarter the children needed to be to take care of their children who needed to be even more helpless in their first year or two. I don't recall a mechanism being suggested for how babies with bigger brains would get born earlier instead of just dying in the womb, but if that worked out (the placental capacity thing might be how) I think it's fairly convincing.

This explanation could work to a significant degree to explain the svelte, highly intelligent elves, and the large, strong, tough, dumb orcs.

>he wasn't trying to offend
So what? He's still a cunt.