Re: Yep, Here goes..........................................
Unicron said:
I dunno. I agree that evolution is not very easy to predict, but that doesn't mean we can't make some fairly accurate predictions. There are a lot of variables to consider, but if you were to look at human evolution based on the parts we know now, it would be hard to say that we'd have evolved into anything else. That would only occur if the environmental variables were to alter radically from what they were throughout history. If all of the major variables were in that much flux, the whole theory wouldn't really be applicable.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by "human evolution". If you're talking about the changes humanoids have gone through in the tens of thousands of years that we have been around, then maybe the changes seem somewhat predictable.
But what this episode is talking about is evolution over 65 millions of years, and that is definitively unpredictable. Take human evolution for example. If you traced the path of human evolution backwards 65 million years, you would get a creature called Plesiadapis (Wikipedia it). It was about the size of a squirrel, had eyes on the side of its head like a cow, and had claws and a tail.
This would have been the human ancestor that lived at the same time as the dinosaur that Janeway does the holodeck evolutionary extrapolation on--so, by the show's logic, you could have done the same extrapolation on the plesiadapis, and come up with a human being.
The problem with that is that the plesiadapis is *also* the ancestor of chimpanzees, gorillas, baboons, monkeys, and every other modern primate. 65 million years of evolution could turn that one squirrel sized animal into any one of the modern primates, because there is no one preset path that evolution follows. As populations split and adapt to fill different niches, evolution produces different creations--sometimes radically different.
The situation becomes even more marked if you go back another 20 million years. Somewhere between 100 and 85 million years ago, an animal lived that was the ancestor of ALL mammals--mice, rabbits, cats, dogs, cows, horses, wolves, tiger, monkeys, and human beings. How could the holodeck computer extrapolate what this "supramammal" would have evolved into in 100 million years? The same animal, given different environmental pressures, evolved into lions, lambs, and Woody Allen.
The same would be true of the dinosaur Janeway analyzed on the holodeck. If the dinosaurs hadn't been wiped out by a catastrophic event 65 million years ago, they would doubtless have continued to evolve--and, assuming their line didn't go extinct, they could have thousands or millions of totally different species as their descendants. There is no one correct answer of what they would evolve into, because evolution is all dependent upon the environmental factors that each population happens to face, generation by generation.
