how come other animals haven’t come to the same stage as consciousness as humans? Some animals have lived longer than humans did.
In: Biology
The energy to power a human is considerably higher than a mammal of equal mass. The reason for this is how many calories the brain burns. So if you were to have a super intelligent and a dumb as rocks animals of the same size, all things being equal one would need way more calories to survive as your brain gets first billing on the food front. The smart animal would need to hunt more often and be more successful just to stay at the same population size as the dumb one. If we put an evolutionary pressure on both creatures like a famine, all the smart ones are going to die first.
The is an evolutionary anchor against intelligence.
Once intelligence has grown to the point where it is conscious and uses tools etc then they become super successful because they can change their environment to better suit their needs. But every step on that ‘ladder’ is a risk as keeping individuals alive is harder.
This implies that the road to human domination was pushed by an evolutionary advantage that overroad the increased calorific intake requirement.
The jury is still out on exactly what that reason was.
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