[eli5] Why did humans advance so far so fast while other intelligent animals did not?
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It’s important to remember that intelligence isn’t necessarily a good thing, evolutionarily speaking.
The most intelligent animals needed to evolve to have sex for pleasure because once you are smart enough to know sex->babies you may decide to avoid sex enough you really enjoy it.
There are certain tasks that chimps are better at than humans, like quickly identifying numbers. Humans may be smarter but that is not an advantage if life’s tasks don’t need it. Less intelligence and more instinct may mean better hunting or fast identification of threats.
Humans must have had intelligence at the right time to take advantage of it. We were walking upright and using language at the right time to use tools and teach our offspring to use them too.
Octopuses use tools but don’t seem to have language to pass on knowledge and develop sophisticated tools.
Ravens use tools an have some language but don’t have the dexterity to develop more complex tools.
Perhaps in time another species will do it but it hasn’t happened and we haven’t seen evidence of it happening before. We haven’t seen any fossils of raptor tools or giant sloth villages.
With a sample size of one we can’t be sure what is needed to develop our level of technology so we can only speculate on the reasons.
Well, there are a lot of theories, but the way I understand it it comes down to 3 things. (1) Being adaptable instead of specialized. This has to so mostly with diet and habitat. We can eat anything: meat, grains, plants, etc. Other animals can only eat certain things (Panda bears being an extreme example of this). Being adaptable means when the climate changes, you can move to a new area and be fine with a completely different diet. Intelligence is required for this because you need to figure out what is edible and what isn’t. A panda bear requires zero intelligence to figure out what to eat. It’s just instinctual to eat bamboo. Pandas would also go extinct quite easily if the bamboo went away due to changing climate, loss of habitat, introduction of a new predator, or whatever. It takes intelligence to adapt to a new habitat.
(2) being a pack-based predator species. Eating meat of course is far more energy dense than eating plants, and promotes the development of a bigger brain. Furthermore, that bigger brain facilitates communication between pack members during a hunt. Communication means increase tactics and strategy and allows for a more successful hunt.
(3) We are not strong individuals. We need to work together to survive. We need to improve our habitat. We need to strategize, prepare, and make tools. The ability to do these things developed from much simpler roots, but over time, those individuals who could do these things slightly better tended to survive and reproduce, leading to slightly smarter offspring. The fact that we really need a group/pack/community to survive means that those individuals who work selflessly with others for the best interest of the community will tend to survive more because they are valued by the community and protected by the community. Whereas more individualistic members who steal from the community for their own gain will probably be ostracized and ejected from the community— and most likely die. This is the origin of ethics. Good will and good behavior towards others. Putting the interest of others ahead of yourself. It ultimately helps you survive and helps your species survive.
P.S. Opposable thumbs really helps.
Language enables us to do something no other animal can*: remember things after the death of the discoverer. This means that we’re not stuck where animals are stuck, spending a lot of effort and taking a lot of risks discovering, individually, a whole shit-ton of relevant information about the world.
At first, this effect looks marginal, because a lot of animals have more powerful and specific instincts than we do. And it would have been. Things would have moved very slowly. But then we get to “how to use a rock and a stick and teamwork to kill a predator” and shit, you just upended part of the local food chain in an afternoon.
Language allows discoveries (which, evolutionarily, are basically specific behavioural changes) to be propagated on non-evolutionary timescales, giving our rivals, prey and predators no time to respond. That’s how we moved so fast. We’re a natural disaster.
There’s a brilliant set of lectures called The Ape That Got Lucky that postulates mostly how we became linguistic animals, too – very much worth a listen.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ape_That_Got_Lucky
*there are very very weak and specific counterexamples of animals passing on knowledge about specific tasks; that they don’t do so linguistically but by action-copying is relevant here
If you mean animals like chimps and dolphins, I think one of the first driving factors was cooking meat. It takes something like 70% less energy to digest cooked meat than raw. This executed energy went into building the brain which led to everything else.
Cooking! We learned to combine and consume much more nutrients in faster sittings than other animals. While others spend most of their day grazing or searching for food, we collected it, combined it and consumed it while staying mobile. More nutrients equals more calories for our brains to use.
Another thing to add to the other reasons why we are successful is that we have domesticated ourselves. We underwent changes similar to the dog during its domestication. The fact that we are able to trade and cooperate with groups outside of family is one of the pieces of the puzzle of human dominance of Earth.
Here is an article that explains it better than I could. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/how-humans-maybe-domesticated-themselves
There are a lot of reasons, one being that we developed a language to do more complex communications compared to other species.
Also, fire, agriculture and many more.
I’m pretty sure you will love Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.
Our social intelligence was the most important factor *by far*. Groups of humans meant that many more babies could actually survive delivery and adolescence which is exceedingly rare in nature, because youngsters are the most vulnerable. It allowed us to coordinate with each other and combine our ideas. If one of your friends notices that fire makes food taste good, you don’t need to fight with him like wild animals would. Instead, you two take your ideas to others and say “Hey, spread the word that fire is good!”, and before long you would have a flourishing community of healthy people as opposed to competition with another group *over* fire. This allowed our intelligence to increase tenfold. No other animal on Earth even comes close to matching us in intelligence, the best averaging no more than the intelligence of human babies.
As for why this developed, we’re not really sure. Few species of animals exhibit social cooperation. Our guesses indicate that the African environment was harsh enough that those that didn’t band together died, while those that did survived and promoted social interaction.
There’s another famous animal that is well known for its social skills. Can you guess what it was? Wolves. And we made them our pets. The hardy auroch is another example, but they didn’t take our “food tame” approach as well and would instead attack us on sight. So, we hunted them into extinction.
There are also some other physical traits, like sweating. Humans are the most heat efficient animals on the planet, because we use water to cool off. Nearly every other species has to rest or sit in shade. So it’s no surprise that humans are the best endurance runners on the planet. You don’t need to be as fast as a cheetah, but if you can run 10x further than it on the same day, you’ve got pretty good odds.
Modern warfare created most if not all the technologies that are used commercially today. All other animals kill to eat and survive
Not really if you think in absolute terms. For a long time we didn’t do much in terms of advancement 4.4 million years ago the first human descendant showed up. That dwarves the last 6000 years of recorded history and the 300+ years of rapid scientific achievements.
But to answer your question there where a few things that combined brought us a lot of benefits compared to other species:
* bipedal (standing up)
* Opposable thumbs that allow us to grab on to things like tools.
* Very big (compared to body size) and rugged brains (meaning more space for more brain cells)
* Brain that dwarfed on some areas to allow for speech (probably biggest advantage imo)
* omnivorous diet
* having the ability to domesticate animals and plant plants
* pattern recognition and curiosity
* (later on)symbiosis with wolves
* history telling, writing, books, press and internet
All of these combined gave us a pretty decent ability to adapt to various scenarios. But in the end the advancements come from being able to learn and build on top of previous knowledge. We wouldn’t be able to come this far if we had to reinvent the wheel every time. That is what makes advancement
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