do we just rot? or turn to ash, then nothing else, OR is there another plane of existance out there?
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Technology Details
williamsjohn333

Hey there, thanks for the kind words and public airing!

On the evolution of the dog, one of the books I recommended, “The Greatest Show on Earth” by Richard Dawkins has some interesting stuff (he mentions the Russian fox experiment too). The thinking is, the original dogs/wolves more or less domesticated themselves by hanging around the edges or our settlements eating our garbage. The ones that were the most tame got the biggest helpings of table scraps, and that turned out to be a lot better deal for them than hunting things in the forest.

One thing I wrote has been nagging at me and is probably wrong. The bit about human races being in the process of “branching.” Independent populations generally have to be isolated from each other by geography for speciation to occur, e.g., on islands or on opposite sides of mountain ranges or continents drifting apart. It probably was the case that our species' branching was proceeding on schedule, with everybody holed up in their separate continents, Africans, Norwegians, Aztecs, etc. But that's surely out the window now, with global travel being the norm and regular inbreeding between formerly isolated groups.

All the better, imagine the wars we'd have it we WERE really separate species!

Cheers
Keith Owens

Fortunately, my post wasn't about trying to disprove evolution. I was just simply trying to express some thoughts I have about it that seem still very mysterious to me. And kind of funny, to tell the truth. I think it's interesting that we imagine (via films like Star Wars) this huge diversity among humanoids, but so far there is very little diversity at all.

I like Keith's description as the brain quest as a sort of race, and the first one to get a brain worth using earns domination over the planet. I hadn't thought of it that way.

Here are two very interesting evolutionary tidbits. I'm providing them from memory, so if you're academic you're gonna have to find the references on your own. Sorry.

1) There is archaeological evidence that wolves became dog-like in a very short period of time, and I'm not talking in geological time. Human time! The evolution of a wolf into a dog very likely occurred in less than 70 years. Yup. A human could have been born around wolves and died around dogs. That's what the fossil record suggests anyway.

2) A Russian researcher devised a simple test for domesticatability among foxes in the 1950's as a way of making it easier to produce pelts en masse. He would put a thick glove on his hand and stick it in the cage with the foxes. The foxes that attacked it were destroyed and those that were curious or friendly were allowed to breed. Within a few short years, he was able to domesticate foxes, but in the process they took on rather dramatic physical changes. The shape of their ears changed, and they began to have previously unseen variations in color and markings on their pelts. They also began to bark, much like dogs.

Isn't that crazy? Sometimes, evolution happens very fast. To Keith's point about evolution not seeing more than a generation ahead, I think it's very possible the intelligence lightning struck very fast.