: If I supported the /therapsidia myrkridia/ theory, I
: would say the same thing happened to the Krids, with
: the younger races growing bigger brains, and as their
: use for size, fangs, and claws decreased, those became
: less of evolutionary advantages and were discarded
: from later forms.
I didn't mean to imply that there's never a reason for an evolving race to sacrifice certain physical advantages to gain others. But a myrkridia is a *lot* tougher than a great ape, and so there would be a lot less impetus to evolve away from such a successful form. Modern (in the Myth sense of the term) humans with armor, shields and swords can't outfight unarmed Myrkridia; how could an early hominid whose only tools are rocks and sticks outcompete one? What good does it do you to be smart enough to spend an hour digging a camouflaged hole and then another hour luring a deer into it when your unevolved cousin can spend five minutes running the deer down and decapitating it with one swipe of his claws? Krids are dumb because it wouldn't help them to be any smarter.
Further, human evolution was spurred by the imperfections of apes at that time; a constantly shifting climate, predators that were physically far superior in many ways (like the great cats), and the ten zillion other ape species competing for resources meant that no ape was ever ideally suited for his environment, and the only way to adapt to all possible enemies and catastrophes was to increase their intelligence. The Myrkridia, on the other hand, are at the top of the food chain in pretty much every locale we've observed them in. And successful species are much less likely to change, because any mutation will almost certainly decrease their fitness. Sharks, for instance, have been around in more or less their modern form for hundreds of millions of years, and in all that time have not produced a new class of creatures as, for example, theropod dinosaurs produced birds. Although sharks certainly *could* evolve into something even more successful (like human beings), they're not going to because any transitional forms (a shark with a human butt--no I'm not serious) would be less successful than the original and would not survive. In the same way, even if civilized humans are more successful than the Myrkridia, the Krids couldn't temporarily evolve into something less successful (as almost any semi-Krid form would be) just because they know that if they keep evolving along that line, eventually they'd be doing better than they were originally. There would have to be an immediate payoff, and I don't see that happening.
I can't believe I'm writing this much and not getting paid for it. Want to get together and write "The Science of Bungie?" We couldn't write anything siller than that "The Science of Star Wars" book.
--SiliconDream
