prase comments on Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease - Less Wrong

236 Post author: Yvain 30 May 2010 09:16PM

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Comment author: prase 09 June 2010 01:40:13PM 0 points [-]

And dinosaurs stayed around much longer than us anyway.

Dinosaurs weren't a single species, though. Maybe better compare dinosaurs to mammals than to humans.

Comment author: cousin_it 09 June 2010 01:55:51PM * 0 points [-]

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 :-)

Comment author: prase 09 June 2010 03:05:46PM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: Ganapati 11 June 2010 07:23:01AM 0 points [-]

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?