Dave Hone: belief

Transcript context

…But is it fair to say that they were mostly dumb? I don’t think so, because I think that comes down to A) That bit of kind of classic almost Victorian speciesism, and you get these insane hypotheses like dinosaurs as a species or as a lineage became senile so they forgot to breed. I know it’s literally a suggested idea. You know, the mammals ate their eggs and all of this kind of stuff. Dinosaurs only lived alongside mammals for 100 million years. It’d be weird if they all went extinct at the same time because suddenly egg eating evolved. You’ve got problems like this. But also, again, that general speciesism which, you know, even goes back to… Like Linnaeus and his taxonomic ranks, and even arguably stuff like Aristotle. You’ve got humans are superior in some way, and we’re superior to the other mammals. And of course, mammals are closest to us so they must be quite good. And then they’ve got to be better than lizards, and then lizards have to be better than frogs, and frogs have to be better than fish. So that gets you into the, “Well, reptiles must be stupid.” And they’re not. I wonder if a human intelligence level organism could have evolved from the dinosaurs.…

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