I was wondering about alien life, and it got me thinking that on earth have 5-10 creatures that show signs of intelligence that at least seem likely to “progress” as a civilization if they just had better organs for tool use. Theyve been with us for long time but only we progressed, and while we share a lot with apes, they havent even if they have same organs for tool use. Are Apes dumber than crows, orcas, octopi etc.? Or was human intelligence (before we got to civilization levell) really unique and that different than other animals?
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Not an evolutionary biologist. Focusing on great apes I think the answer is competition. There were many parallel lines of evolution towards human level of intelligence. The vast majority didn’t make it, being outcompeted but what eventually evolved into Homo sapiens sapiens (and its ancestor may have been, at times, not even the most successful Homo species around). Humans have been exercising so much pressure on the environment it’s difficult to imagine another line of evolution getting to the same level… unless humans go extinct.
The answer to progression is actually free time, combined with the ability to reason in a safe environment.
Humans were only able to make progress past a certain point when the availability of food and water became abundant through agriculture. As permanent cities filled with humans that now had extra time on their hands, they could spend greater time experimenting, practicing, and learning how to better manipulate their environment (and those around them).
Because humans continue to ravage the planet, most other species will never attain any sort of stability over the generations needed to progress a similar manner. Those that do- the animals that live with us as pets or livestock- have their breeding, lives, and activities so restricted by humans that they cannot progress, either.
Some birds, apes, cetaceans, and cephalopods are all candidates if we weren’t here. I’d vote for the birds, apes, and cephalopods having a better chance due to their body type adaptability.
Well, what does it mean to “progress to a civilization”? Human civilizations are characterized by the use of tools. So trivialy you can’t have a civilization if you don’t have tools. If you were to define “civilization” some other way, you wouldn’t need tools. But I can’t really think of anything right now.
Let’s also talk about inteligence and progress. The important thing to understand is that those things don’t work like in a video game. There isn’t an intelligence score that different animals have which unlocks certain things on a skill tree. “Progress” also doesn’t work like a tech tree in a game. There isn’t really any progress, in that way of thinking, because there isn’t really any “goal”. This goal oriented way of thinking is called “teleology” (look it up, I think it will clean up a lot of things about evolution for you). It’s very popular when teaching people about evolution, but it’s not exactly accurate, and when there are no disclaimers, it will do more harm than good to people’s understanding of those things.
You might have heard things like “humans are bipedal because it allowed them to carry stuff in their arms when walking”. The implication is that we evolved bipedalism in with the goal of carrying things. This is a simple way to talk about natural selection and evolution, but it’s not accurate. There isn’t a player behind the screen thinking “well, if I put those monkeys on two legs, they will be carrying more food, let’s do that”. That goal was never there. It’s the other way around: humans already had predispositions for walking upright, and when some did, they were able to carry more (or see further or whatever). This caused them to be more successful in natural selection, so those traits got passed down. Now that we had our hands free, we had the predisposition for using tools, so we did and it happened to be beneficial as well, so the tool use got passed down. We were already hunting small animals for food, and being able to throw sticks at them made us better at it. It’s just a coincidence that this also become usefull for killing humans (which is also something we wanted to do, in fights over territory). We were already eating grains that grew around the place, so consolidating them to a single place, bringing water for them and so on, just made one of our survival plans better. But there wasn’t like a tech tree checklist that we were following. Those things just happened to lead to one another.
Dolohins won’t suddenly evolve hands and start using hammers. The first reason is that they don’t really have predispositions for that. They can’t just trade their fins for hands in one generation, like you can do in Spore. The second reason is that they won’t really benefit from it. First of, getting rid of fins will make it really hard for them to swim. Second, carrying things isn’t really conductive to the way dolphins get food. They don’t have a habit of carrying large amounts of food home and stockpiling it for their young or old to eat. They also don’t live in permanent shelters, and weapons won’t directly benefit their main plan of catching fish. So there’s no evolutionary benefit to starting to use tools for them, which is why they won’t do it.
Let’s talk a little about inteligence. It’s not an abstract quantifiable or comparable stuff. Chimpanzees aren’t “dumber” than dolphins. And humans aren’t really smarter than ants. You have to first relate those things to something. Humans are better at counting stuff than mice, so in that way, they are smarter. Chimpanzees are better at tool use than dogs. But dogs are better at reading human faces, following their eyes for example. Dogs understand that when you look at something, it means that thing is important (like there’s food there, for example, or you want them to interact with it). Chimpanzees don’t have this ability, in fact, very few animals do. Does that mean dogs are smarter than chimpanzees?
I’m not an evolutionary biologist by any means, but I always figured complex language is the biggest difference between humans and other intelligent species. Some dolphin genius could figure out the secret to life and it wouldn’t matter if they got eaten by a shark before they could find a way to tell other dolphins.
That said, we do know other intelligent animals do have language, maybe it’s suitably complex and we just don’t understand it. But none of them have a written language, which seems like would be a big factor in making sure any innovations are carried on into the next generations.
That is one of the reasons why there have been many studies trying to teach apes language, to see if they are perhaps as intelligent as us but just need to be taught. But while there has been success in teaching apes sign language, and spoken language to parrots, they never seem to progress much past the skills of human toddler, and that’s with a lot of effort.
It depends on what you mean by civilization I guess? There are things you obviously can’t do without tools, like make more than minimal changes to your environment, or become explorers and colonizers.
But for example if dolphins developed language and intelligence they could have oral history, create works of art involving singing and drums, develop intricate ways of using language to describe and explore the world that might dwarf our own, and they could have highly developed inner spiritual lives.
I would think it’s at least possible that they could be the most meaningful artists, the deepest philosophers, and most profound spiritual explorers, entirely without tools.
Yes.
You could have an underwater animal that is smarter than humans, but since they don’t have hands they will never be able to make tools to advance society.
Even if they had something like tentacles like octopusses do, they will never have the type or resources a land dweling species has. They will never be able to use fire, or electricity. Water makes it significantly harder to make tools for example. You wouldn’t have an eay way to make a hammer with a rock, wood and some algae. Also some things float and others go to the bottom of the sea, where there is more pressure and no light. It’s not like you can use a rock as a table.
So for all we know dolphins could actually be smarter than humans, but they’ll never get the chance to develop their society.
There is also no way for them to “write” or mass knowledge other than verbal knowledge, which is another massive issue.
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