About 65 million years ago, an asteroid with a diameter of about 10 kilometers hit the Earth, causing the extinction of more than three-quarters of all species on Earth, including the dinosaurs, and ending the dinosaurs' domination of the Earth for more than 100 million years.
After the extinction of the dinosaurs, mammals gained a broader space for survival and development, and also laid a solid foundation for the birth of human beings in the future.
Today, human beings have become the overlord of the earth, standing at the top of the earth's food chain, and the dinosaurs are the former overlords of the earth. For two different eras of the earth overlords, it is inevitable that people will compare them. In the process of comparison, many people have such doubts: the same hegemon, and the dinosaurs ruled the earth for more than 100 million years, far more than the time that humans ruled the earth, why did the dinosaurs not evolve intelligence?
Any problem should not only look at the surface, but should look at the inner nature of the problem. First, let's take a look at how dinosaurs became the overlords of the earth.
To put it simply, the heavy rain that lasted for 2 million years about 230 million years ago, also known as the "Carney flood" event, sent the dinosaurs to the throne of the earth.
What's going on?
As many people know, about 530 million years ago, the Cambrian explosion occurred on Earth, and the organisms in the ocean showed a blowout explosion and evolved towards diversification. Later, as the earth's tectonic plates moved, plants were the first to land on land, which also prepared the energy for later marine life to land on land.
During the Devonian period, about 300 million years ago, marine life began to land on land. In the long process of time, reptiles have evolved, and reptiles have differentiated into many different species, but no reptile can cover the sky with one hand, basically all of them are mutually restricted, and no one has absolute dominance.
The key to determining the distribution of species on the Earth's continents lies in the major event that occurred about 230 million years ago: the Carney flood event, which lasted for 2 million years.
At that time, the continental structure was completely different from today, because the continent 230 million years ago was a "supercontinent", all the land was concentrated, and this structure easily caused water vapor to be difficult to enter the hinterland of the continent.
As the so-called "the extremes of things must be opposed", when the water vapor in the atmosphere accumulates to a certain extent, it will come to a critical point, tentatively called the "bottom line", once the bottom line is crossed, the air flow will lose its original order, and the result is like the boiling sea water, directly rushing into the depths of the continent, specifically manifested as: precipitation is like a demon that has been banned for a long time, rushing out of the sky and violently sprinkling the earth!
Many species on land could not stand the baptism of demonic rain and fell one after another. But there is one species that has "gone the other way", and instead of falling, its numbers have exploded: sauriformes, dinosaurs.
Why didn't the dinosaurs fall? It can only be said that it was "self-defeating", and their original evolution did not expect that it would become the key to making them stand at the top of the earth.
Crucially, dinosaurs had evolved to run on their feet and had long necks. So after the long rainy season, the grasslands receded, and a large number of plants began to grow higher, only to avoid blisters, and at the same time to get as much sunlight as possible covered by dark clouds, so gymnosperms began to grow rapidly.
And those animals that often live in low places and have short necks are extinct, and animals that can't digest gymnosperms are also eliminated by nature, and the chain reaction is that the predators who feed on those animals are not having a good time, and most of them are also going extinct.
Dinosaurs are almost not affected by anything, their original "front paws" of chicken ribs, but they did not expect to become an "advantage", intellectual running and long necks, can allow dinosaurs to enjoy all kinds of food, and therefore came to the top of the earth's food chain.
The abundance of food made the dinosaurs grow in size, and they had no rivals at all, only internal competition. Carnivorous dinosaurs had to grow larger in size in order to capture larger herbivorous dinosaurs, and herbivorous dinosaurs would also make themselves as large as possible in order not to be eaten by carnivorous dinosaurs.
As a result, the dinosaurs have been playing this boring "game" for about 170 million years! In this state, there is no possibility of evolving intelligence.
Many people have a misunderstanding about such a thing as wisdom, and always subconsciously think that any species should evolve in the direction of intelligence, but this is not the case, or even the opposite: wisdom is not only not the direction and goal of evolution, but even a burden!
So, don't force other species to be measured by the human mind. From an evolutionary point of view, human beings are actually "other" or "other", and intelligence should not have evolved, that is, human beings should have been eliminated, but we were lucky enough.
Why is wisdom a burden?
Because wisdom consumes too much energy. Taking human beings as an example, the brain only accounts for 2% of the human body, but consumes 20% of the human body's energy, from an evolutionary point of view, this huge energy consumption is not conducive to the development of the species at all, and without the promotion of strong external factors, it cannot drive the generation of wisdom at all.
Even if there is a strong enough external factor to promote, it needs to be matched by genetic mutations, and the genes happen to mutate in the direction of wisdom, and only in this way can wisdom be preserved.
The biggest problem is that general brain intelligence cannot improve the survival advantage of a species at all, it must be super intelligence and brains. The wisdom of monkeys is high enough in the animal kingdom, have you ever seen monkeys use their wisdom to fight lions with sticks?
The monkey is not stupid, it knows that its greatest "wisdom" is not the brain, but the flexible skills, so when the monkey encounters the lion, it obviously will not use its wisdom to fight with the lion, but will quickly climb the tree.
This is especially true for dinosaurs, as the top predators on the earth at that time, dinosaurs have long had the best and most powerful body configuration at that time, such a body configuration is their greatest "wisdom", although theoretically dinosaurs can provide sufficient energy to the brain, but a comfortable life can not drive the birth of wisdom at all.
And human beings are "living in the slit". On the one hand, after human beings came from the forest to the grassland, the environment has changed dramatically in a short period of time, and there is enough driving force for human beings to evolve in the direction of intelligence, and of course, it is inseparable from very random genetic mutations.
Don't just look at the fact that humans now rule the earth with super technology, and think that human beings are on the road to evolution. In fact, it is precisely because wisdom is a burden in the eyes of nature that nature has pushed human ancestors to the brink of extinction several times.
Look at the batch after batch of intelligent humans who have fallen in the long process of human evolution, and you will understand how much nature "hates" intelligence. In addition to Homo sapiens, many other intelligent races evolved on Earth, such as Heidelberg man, pioneer man, and Denisovan and Neanderthal, who coexisted with Homo sapiens for a long time, but eventually all these human races were eliminated by nature!
In fact, to some extent, it can also explain why human beings have not discovered aliens so far, because wisdom is originally a burden, nature "hates" wisdom very much, and only with a strong enough drive, coupled with near-perfect luck, wisdom can be preserved!