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
It is not a linear process towards a goal.
All animals are at the end desceded from a single ancestor. We have all had as much time to evolve as everyone else.
In fact if you compare animals that are shorter lived with less time between generations with longer lived animals, it could be argued that the short lived ones had more opportunity to evolve, but this is really not how it works.
Evolution is not goal driven. There is no such thing as more or less evolved.
Mutations happen more or less at random and are selected for if the give a benefit compared to what was before at the time when it happened.
Some traits and adaptations might be useful in some circumstance but not in others.
Being able to fly is certainly all sorts of useful, but there are flightless birds whose ancestors could fly and who evolution pushed away from that ability again.
As far as we know, human level intelligence is a trait that only evolved once and we don’t know how useful it is in the grand scheme of things for survival.
Asking why other animals haven’t developed human level intelligence yet is why other animals haven’t developed elephant like trunks yet or learned how to weave webs like spiders.
You can’t think of evolution going towards a goal like that.
A picture like the classic Descent of Man that shows a clear progression of more and more human like figures from ape to man suggests that this is a linear progression with a purpose towards a goal.
It is much more chaotic than that with each link in the chain branching of in other directions, but all the lines that went extinct aren’t shown.
It is much more comforting to think of ourselves as the pinnacle of creation rather than just a random one-off fluke freak of nature, but the truth is that we may be just that.
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