This joke wanted to escape from my brain with the same tenacity of an extrovert forced to self-isolate for weeks on end.
The comic emerged in tandem with a string of thoughts, namely, questions without certain answers. Questions that don’t need to be answered, but I ponder them anyway. To funnel things down, these were the top two:
- If the meteorite hadn’t hit, would dinosaurs have evolved into intelligent lizards that one day may have invented capitalism?
- Were potatoes present at the same time as dinosaurs, and hypothetically, if they were, would dinosaurs have ever discovered them?
Dinosaurs and Potatoes — an unexpected combination, yet here we are. Let’s examine where they might overlap, and how capitalism insists on inserting itself into the hypothetical Venn diagram.
Possibility of Capitalist Lizards
Such a question really triggers a reference to the butterfly effect — what would have happened if that meteorite had never hit? Perhaps in a parallel universe, there’s a T-rex suited up for its next Stakeholder meeting. Although methinks, at least with the same laws of physics and what we know about evolution, such an alternate reality is unlikely.
According to a 2024 paper in the Journal of Comparative Neurology, the dinosaur brain simply didn’t have the architectural real estate to evolve into human-level intelligence.1 Basically, it seems unlikely based on dinosaur brain foundations that dinosaurs could have ever developed the level of higher-order thinking or executive functioning needed for complex planning, abstract reasoning, or — yes — capitalism. From this, we can also rule out the likelihood of dinosaurs ever evolving into politicians — not because they lacked motivation, but because the neural circuitry required for sustained mental gymnastics simply wasn’t available.
On Potato Dinosaur Coexistence
Before exploring this question, another question emerges:
When did the first potato emerge, and who — or what — was the first to pull it out of the ground?
We won’t be answering that. But we will consider the timeline of potato evolution and assess it alongside the timeline of dino existence.
When it comes to evolution in general, the definition of a potato itself is called into question. At what point was an ancestor of the potato no longer deemed an actual potato, but rather an evolutionary precursor to what we now call potatoes? Ignoring that line of thinking, we’ll broaden the definition of a potato to something likely to sufficiently resemble a potato.
In case you weren’t aware (and you still needn’t be), tomatoes and potatoes shared a common ancestor approximately 7 million years ago.2 So, we can safely say potatoes are younger than 7 million years. Now, when did the meteorite blast in and dampen the dinosaur dynasty? That’s estimated to be about 66 million years ago.3 So, unfortunately, even if the dinosaurs had somehow developed the capacity to engage in agriculture by some magical evolutionary glitch, there’s no way they would have found a potato.
Conclusion
In the end, dinosaurs couldn’t have developed capitalism, farmed potatoes, and therefore certainly would have never held stakeholder meetings where a bowl of potato chips could have been simultaneously present. Count yourself lucky you exist on the potato timeline, and not in the great dino-potato voidTM.
References
1. Reiner A. (2023). Could theropod dinosaurs have evolved to a human level of intelligence?. The Journal of comparative neurology, 531(9), 975–1006. https://doi.org/10.1002/cne.25458
2. Rodriguez, F., Wu, F., Ané, C., Tanksley, S., & Spooner, D. M. (2009). Do potatoes and tomatoes have a single evolutionary history, and what proportion of the genome supports this history?. BMC evolutionary biology, 9, 191. https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2148-9-191
3. Condamine, F. L., Guinot, G., Benton, M. J., & Currie, P. J. (2021). Dinosaur biodiversity declined well before the asteroid impact, influenced by ecological and environmental pressures. Nature communications, 12(1), 3833. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-23754-0