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Even Malay bears have convergently evolved to resemble apes, if the conditions for tree-like plants are the norm in habitable planets, then humanoid aliens must be common too
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>>16262481
Bears had a pretty close starting point to monkeys though. 4 legs, fur, 2 eyes, a nose, a tail, etc. Having an alien become humanoid just from climbing tree like organisms would be a bigger stretch than having a praying mantis become humanoid just because it lives in trees
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>>16262481
Obviously the average sapient ayylien will be humanoid. If you doubt you have no idea how evolution actually works.
>elephant-like sapient race?
Possible but not the average case, this is the entire crux.
>quadrupedal but without a manipulator organ like elephants
How will they develop a civilization? Nonstarter.
>more limbs than 4
Highly unlikely, evolution minimizes useless waste. What megafauna would need 8 limbs for what it can’t also achieve with 4? That said, 6 limbed Centaurs are plausible, but it’s not very plausible for a megafaunal evolutionary lineage to decide on 6 limbs to begin with.
>dolphin analogues
No fire. Lives in a shitty medium. Civilization is a nonstarter.
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>>16262481
Don't care. I'd still choose the bear over the man.
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>>16262481
bears are ape and dog mixed
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>>16262532
This is retarded.
>not the average case
How do you know?
>more than 4 limbs is unlikely
We only had 4 because of a gay fish that had 4. If the fish had 6 or 8 we'd also have 6 or 8
Why do you think pretty much every animal you can think of is in the tetrapod (four foot) clade?
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>>16262968
>We only had 4 because of a gay fish that had 4. If the fish had 6 or 8 we'd also have 6 or 8
What can 6 or 8 limbed terrestrial animal achieve that 4 limbed cannot?
Flightless birds do fairly well with essentially 2 limbs. 6 or 8 limbs offers no obvious advantage and obvious disadvantages. Each extra limb is a considerable investment of energy and makes the animals that much slower - 6 or 8 limbed prey would be easier for predators to run down than 4 limbed equivalents, and 6 or 8 limbed predators would have a hunting disadvantage compared to a 4 limbed equivalent.
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>>16262481
>>16262481
Those are called sun bears.

>even Malay bears have convergently evolved to resemble apes

[citation needed]

Listen here you fuck stop spewing you rambling psudeoscience theories with nothing in the back them up
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crabs are gay, everything should involve into a primate instead. that would be way cooler and more efficient. I'm working on a petition to Mother Nature to get this oversight corrected.
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>>16262995
>What can 6 or 8 li
6 limbs can be an advantageous when climbing. One set of limbs could also be used solely to dig/for manipulation while the others are for walking. Life on other planets might also go the octopus route, where each limb is replaceable and having spares is therefore beneficial.

>6 or 8 limbed prey would be easier for predators to run down
Not necessarily. 6 legs can exert a lot more force than 4.
>6 or 8 limbed predators would have a hunting disadvantage
There are a lot more different ways to hunt than to run down prey. Many animals are ambush predators. 6 limbs could help securing a kill.
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>>16262481
Intelligent life will only take the form of a humanoid because we are all made in God's image: He designed selection pressures just so.
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>>16262968
Seethe. Everything he said was truth.
No reason to have more than 2 eyes. Eyes will be on the front for dexterity and perception; only meat has decent energy density for wasting time making tools.
No reason to have 4+ limbs, with 6 the middle pair would get in the movement arc of the others. Couldn't make them into wings because human sized things are too big to fly usefully.
Not going to be much smaller or larger than a human because you can't fit a human level brain in a house cat. Won't be much bigger because that costs too much energy to run.
Will only have 2 hands because 4 limbs max and you need feet, no point increasing dexterity of feet more than we have.
More hair than we have just gets in the way.

Most differences would be unobservant internal organs; might have bird-style lungs, or have non-nephritic kidneys, or a more evenly distributed liver.
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>>16263206
>6 limbs can be an advantageous when climbing.
How's that better than a monkey? Why would'nt the 6 armed monkey vestigalize it's 3rd limb pair to save energy?
Also consider your creature won't start off climbing, it's ancestors have to go from being fish to land critter.
>solely to dig/for manipulation while the others are for walking
Being a Taur isn't good for climbing things, if you're not climbing, why have manipulator limbs?
>Life on other planets might also go the octopus route, where each limb is replaceable and having spares is therefore beneficial.
Ignoring water problem. If ribs/limbs grow back, you still only need 4.
If your strategy to surviving predation is not to be faster and agile to avoid damage (like mammals), but instead to have enough redundancy to weather the damage, doesn't your creature resemble a lower form of life? It's a strong possibility that the mammal strategy gives rise to selecting for intelligence.
>Many animals are ambush predators.
This idea of having your body specialized into a tool, rather than making a tool, seems to go against intelligence selection.
Having 6 limbs doesn't help you chuck a spear.
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>>16263225
>Couldn't make them into wings because human sized things are too big to fly usefully.

They could if they had hollow bones like a dinosaur you moronic pseudo-intellectual
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>>16262481
>gazillions of species on earth aren't bipedal
>literally only a few of them in two families are bipedal
>wow, aliens must exist and must be bipedal and look like chimps.
lol, lmao even.
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>>16262551
>bears are ape and dog mixed
and pig too
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>>16263107
Primates are too much like niggers. Crabs are better.
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>>16262532
>>16262995
>>16263237
You’re making a whole lot of assumptions that alien life would have limbs or bones or eyes in the first place. For all you know they could have tentacles and a band of photoreceptors instead of a pair of eyeballs
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>>16263414
>For all you know they could have tentacles and a band of photoreceptors instead of a pair of eyeballs
If they're going to be an intelligent species performing complex tasks in a changing 3D environment they are probably going to evolve something like an eyeball, given that eyes have independently evolved multiple times at every scale of organism on Earth.
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>>16263415
God I fucking love eyes. They are so unbelievably overpowered.
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So much ignorance ITT by Anons trying their best not to be ignorant. Most intelligent life is humanoid. It's painfully obvious that it's the perfect shape for the ultimate all-rounder.
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>>16263437
>elephants
>whales
>corvids
>parrots
Primates are the only ones that are humanoid
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>>16263483
>elephants
>anything except trotting

>whales
>anything except diving

>corvids, parrots
>anything except flying

Pick one of each.

Humans can swim, dive, crawl, walk, jump, climb and most importantly, run.
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>>16263415
>>16263421
nature abhors the blind

though i do wish we had cephalopod-style retinas, since they don't put the nerve fibers out in front of the retina like those vertebrate bozos. eyes are just so fucking good that it doesn't even matter much if you do that.

>>16263414
i actually mostly agree with you here, but the selection pressures that are likely to be universal are more common than many people think.
>bones
possible to avoid, especially for marine life, but you need some kind of structure on land. exoskeleton evolution is very likely. endoskeleton evolution is less common but appears to be advantageous as creatures become more mobile.

tetrapods, are, like the number of digits in extant tetropods, largely a coincidence. just because it's the minimum for bilaterally symmetric limb specialization doesn't mean it's inherently optimal - tetrapods aren't a result of limb loss from hexapods, and insects seem rather insistent on six (sometimes more if you count wings), and have been consistently through MASSIVE body size changes across their evolution. it's REALLY hard for selection to change limb count when it's ~10 or less: atrophy of existing limbs only generally proceeds if the size is actively detrimental, and increase generally requires similar structures to already exist.

>tentacles
great in water, not great on land without internal structure, even if soft. also, still limbs.

>but who says land?
not me. just pointing out that there are certain convergences that aliens are unlikely to avoid. light is light. geometry is geometry. hydrodynamics is hydrodynamics. chemistry is chemistry. we haven't fully characterized it all, sure, but we know some things that are (likely) universal.

some things, like cephalization, are non-obvious universal pressures (high fidelity senses close to the sensory processing structures to minimize urgent information transit times) that result in body plans that are much more familiar than one might expect.
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>>16263483
i take it you've never seen a plucked bird



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