The featherless bipedwww.deviantart.com/concavenator/art/The-Featherless-Biped-775925572 (20

The featherless bipedhttps://www.deviantart.com/concavenator/art/The-Featherless-Biped-775925572 (2018; text somewhat edited here)  “… in any case, the possibility of advanced intelligence among mammals remains extremely speculative. Endothermy and brain cortex are in their favour, but their neurons are not dense enough if compared to ours. They would need an enormous head, and a proportionate blood supply. Which leads to their worst issue, viviparity. It should be obvious to anyone that egg-laying is a requisite for cerebral development; can you imagine the head of a sapient mammal passing through the mother’s birth canal? The problem is insurmountable.”   “Let us not overstate; harder problems have been solved by evolution. Clearly our sapient mammal ought to be a marsupial, which would complete its cerebral development in the mother’s pouch, relatively unconstrained as it sucks milk.”   “Call me a moralist, but the idea of a sapient being feeding on milk keeps repulsing me.”   “Our males regurgitate food in our children’s mouth; you think that so different?”   “You do not? Food is food, whether pre-digested or not. Milk is a bodily secretion – it’s like feeding on blood, on mucus, on semen. Mammals are born as parasites, and frankly I don’t believe they are worthy of upper faculties.”   “If you believe so. Myself, I see no reason an omnivorous marsupial, perhaps tree-dwelling, could not evolve organs of manipulation and an advanced brain. Tagra’s mutable environment would give it the necessary incentives. A prehensile-tailed tree-dweller could start using its forelimbs to handle objects, adopting a bipedal gait.”   “But having left the trees, it would have to walk on two legs, with its spine up straight, as a penguin’s, lest it falls forward. It’s not just very unseemly, it’s also extremely unstable.”   “Once the tail has lost its prehensile function, it could increase its size and balance the head’s weight, giving the marsupial a stance similar to ours. It would retain the furry coat, analogous to our plumage - there’s no reason to shed it, even in climates warmer than ours. The general result would be something much like an ‘ikra, although molded from different material.”   “Ah, such an image! Describe, describe us this thinking mammal of yours!”   “Well… our foremost sense is sight, as typical of the feathered beings of land and air. Not so among mammals – probably this being wouldn’t even see colours, fundamentally nocturnal creature that it is. It would find its way mostly with hearing and scent. I would expect a large wet nose proportioned to its brain, to sample the air with the precision worthy of a superior mind.  We know that mammals can discriminate more scents than we can hues. Communication… the vocal apparatus of mammals is a poor thing, it allows little more than screeches and bellows. Many communicate with their bodily stance, or contracting their facial muscles, which are well developed in furred beasts, and might even supplement the function of hands in holding tools. Lips, perhaps, nimbler than beaks…”   “What a sight would they be, the cities of the featherless biped. People croaking and howling, jumping on the spot, baring their teeth and squinting their eyes. Grunting noses, lips smacking and spraying spit. But if their eyesight is as poor as you say, perhaps they would rather trust olfaction in this field as well, and communicate by rubbing on each other their nether glands, as astrapotheria do. And to do so they would need to be always sticking to each other.”   “I don’t think that would disturb them. Mammals appreciate physical contact; the smallest species are always curled in their burrows. The greater risk of disease might be a price worth paying. They would have no concept of a respectful distance and, who can say, maybe they would not envy it to us.”   “A use for burrows is dubious, for a species that fears no predators. It’s well known that the metabolic activity of mammals is generally inferior to that of feathered species. The hypothetical creature would inhabit only a warmer and moister world, dominated by flower plants. They would leave the trees to live in a garden of giant flowers…”   “Might be, might be. But I think they would conserve an instinctual love of enclosed spaces, moreso as they would spend their earliest infancy in the maternal pouch.”   “Enclosed spaces that would soon be satured with the stench of their secretions. Is this a fancy of yours, that you wish to impose on us?”   “And still you confuse your aesthetic pleasures with iron laws of nature, even in a world of conjecture. I wager, for you even the caravans of Yakak'ratu would be unsufferably alien. This being has sprouted from another branch altogether of the delta of life. What is pleasurable to us would probably be disgusting to it, and viceversa; but if the selfsame happiness is achieved by different means, what makes a form of it inferior to another? Tagra, even our noble city of Grikaa, is hardly perfection embodied. I have counted more than enough beggars and cutthroats leaving my house this morning. Who can say whether the thinking mammal, in her garden-world, isn’t happier than we?”@cromulentenough​ -- source link

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