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?
In: 27
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?
Latest Answers