If there were a nuclear holocaust and the only thing to survive were cockroaches would man re-evolve? Why?

Question

If there were a nuclear holocaust and the only thing to survive were cockroaches would man re-evolve? Why?

Answer 1

No but Politicians Used Car Salesmen and Bankers would. The reason is really quite simple. All of these groups nearest ancestor is the cockroach.

Answer 2

Cockroaches can actually not survive higher levels of radiation than we can, so if we're dead, so are they. Thank you, QI...

Man is unlikely to re-evolve, as evolution is very much down to chance (chance that one mutation happened, instead of another). An equivalent creature might evolve though.

Answer 3

Eventually, assuming that the earth recovered and went back to its original state, those cockroaches would eventually evolve to become intelligent life.  It probably would not be the same as us, but if intelligence becomes a survival advantage for any life form, then it would happen.  Give it a couple of hundred million years.

Answer 4

evolution doesn't have a set path, its not a matter of time which decided that we would evolve, it was a matter of coincidence. now if only cockroaches survived than obviously they would evolve divergently, create new species with different functions. its and observed fact that when you have creatures disappearing there are new "job openings" for the surviving creatures to evolve into because there are less creatures eating the leaves for example so it becomes possible for a creature to evolve into a leaf eater because of less competition.

Answer 5

If that big comet had not hit Yucatan 65 mil YA, we would have reptile skin. Cockroaches would have to evolve lungs so their bodies can get big enough to house a bigger brain and nourish it. Other than that, they, and the ants are great candidates to exceed our capacities.

Answer 6

Something intelligent might eventually evolve but they wouldn't be human.  Evolution doesn't totally rework the entire organism but builds on what came before it.  If we evolved from a bird, we could still be smart but we would essentially be birds.  Cockroaches wouldn't likely evolve into something intelligent.  They are limited in size by an exoskeleton.  Some fish from the deep sea might have to start colonizing the land again.  There is no way that a nuclear war would kill all the fish.  It takes too long for water to make its way into the deep and the radiation would dissipate long before then.

Answer 7

Well, that depends on the severity of the nuclear war. Likely, if it was a war encompassing a significant portion of the surface of the land area, most higher life-forms on the land would have a serious struggle to survive over the 10-15 years after such a war.

Many bug species, Ants and some others which might not have significant exposure might survive better but that's very relative to their reproduction, bugs at ground zero of a detonation will be having just as crappy a day as every other organism.

Regarding Humans. Unless some population of humans survived and managed to eek out an existence for a couple of hundred years in some relatively unscathed part of the world, we would be done.

Also, the reduction of the number of other large land animals means that most other species would be seriously screwed as well.

Presuming some small number of humans survived, you might be able to make a fairly good assumption that they would not be like us in many respects.

They would KNOW the horrors of what we can only imagine. Ideas like mass wealth, modern conveniences and a standard of living better than medieval would be considered pretty much outlandish. Environmental devastation and scarcity of all resources would be the norm for many years afterwards.

If we were wiped out in a true planetary cataclysm, it's unlikely anything remotely resembling man would re-evolve. Among the candidate species to replace us , might be a higher order insect, such as bees / wasps or ants.

A higher order organism might evolve otherwise, such as raccoon, - if they survived our holocaust. Additionally, squids might be able to adapt to become sentient, as could some other animal we haven't considered change to fit a new evolutionary niche in our absence.

In a few decades, and certainly after the availability and mass production of semi-sentient autonomous robots, it's possible that machine intelligences could "survive" us in the event we destroy ourselves in a nuclear war or biological exchange.