seedload wrote:Chris, let me help you out.
Thinking about this way too much, I think a better case can be made for Dolphins being decedents of aliens.
The premise being the opposite of yours in that it is the lack of a need to adapt that makes em stupid rather than a need to adapt.
When the aliens get here and settle in our waters, they soon find that their technology, knowledge, and even their intelligence is pretty unimportant on this planet. Rather than having to adapt, they are confronted by the fact that they DONT have to adapt. They have no natural enemies here. Just swimming around and eating fish is a pretty good and safe life. Their biggest worry, sharks, prove to be not much of a threat. Cruising around the world, eating fish, and doing a few back flips is a great way to spend a lifetime. It is a hippy lifestyle. And they don't have to be that smart to do just fine, thank you very much.
Over time, the original cities they foolishly built crumble due to lack of care and swimming around enjoying life without technology becomes the norm. No worries, man. Intelligence is no longer selected for and over hundreds of thousands of generations; modern dolphins emerge, still with the atrophied vestigiality of their alien ancestor’s high intelligence, but no real need to use it.
The scenario works pretty well until you start looking at DNA and all of that other silly science stuff - so don't do that – not that you have so far.
A truly bad example. I'll leave this exercise in happy-chatty with a Douglas Adams quote;
“Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much, the wheel, New York, wars and so on, while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man...for precisely the same reason.”
Thanks for all the fish, guys, the debate was fun and has run its course. Of course you're not descended from extra-terrestrials... (everyone from the rest of the galaxy that comes for a visit on earth is briefed on that and told not to discuss it, so as not to confuse you!)