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prase comments on Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease - Less Wrong
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I will side with Ganapati on this particular point. We humans are spending much more cognitive capacity, with much more success, on inventing new ways to make ourselves extinct than we do on asteroid defense. And dinosaurs stayed around much longer than us anyway. So the jury is still out on whether intelligence helps a species avoid extinction.
prase's original argument still stands, though. Having a big brain may or may not give you a survival advantage, but having a big non-working brain is certainly a waste that evolution would have erased in mere tens of generations, so if you have a big brain at all, chances are that it's working mostly correctly.
ETA: disregard that last paragraph. It's blatantly wrong. Evolution didn't erase peacock tails.
Dinosaurs weren't a single species, though. Maybe better compare dinosaurs to mammals than to humans.
Or we could pick a partciular species of dinaosaur that survived for a few million years and compare to humans.
Do you expect any changes to the analysis if we did that?
Nitpicking huh? Two can play at that game!
Maybe better compare mammals to reptiles than to dinosaurs.
Many individual species of dinosaurs have existed for longer than humans have.
Dinosaurs as a whole probably didn't go extinct, we see their descendants everyday as birds.
Okay, this isn't much to argue about :-)
I love nitpicking!
Mammals are a clade while reptiles are paraphyletic. Well, dinosaurs are too when birds are excluded, but I would gladly leave the birds in. In any case, dinosaurs win over mammals, so it wasn't probably a good nitpick after all.
No dinosaur species did live along with humans, so direct competition didn't take place.
I can't find a nit to pick it here.