How did intelligent life got so advanced on land (humans) than in the oceans considering how the ocean is the greater part of the world and has much more diversity in it?
In: Biology
or did it? dolphins and whales are pretty fuckin smart. smart enough to no perfection when they find it!
soft liquid to float in. no way for leaders to restrict your movements. no one trying to charge you rent.
every thing cool until uppity humans leave there nets everywhere and over fish you refridgerator.
There’s life in the ocean that’s at least as intelligent as the other intelligent non-human life on land. Dolphins and whales in particular are very intelligent, as are many species of octopi. As far as humans, we’re kind of an anomaly, and our vast social and technological achievements are largely possible because of 3 unique traits – 1) dexterity: by walking upright we free up our hands with opposable thumbs to fashion a myriad of tools and carry them with us when hunting and traveling; 2) language, enabling us to communicate arbitrary abstract concepts and allowing for the most flexible and adaptable collaboration in the animal kingdom, and 3) writing, allowing us to use text as a kind of “artificial memory”, enabling us to accumulate more knowledge than we can remember in our brains, and to communicate that knowledge from generation to generation without relying on it being orally passed down like a game of telephone.
Intelligence is generally only useful in an evolutionary sense when you have to tackle a wide variety of food sources and learn how to most efficiently tackle each one with a different technique. In general this tends to happen on land, but dolphins and some whales also do this and may match land intelligent animals.
It’s hard to make tools underwater, and basically impossible to make fire. A lot of what human intelligence is just consists of manipulating stuff, which in turn helps with intelligence. You can make stuff to record information, and you can make stuff to help you survive harsher climates, and you can make stuff to help you get more calories.
Doing any of that underwater is much harder.
Humans seem to be a fluke. A part that helped us along is fire and cooked meals. …which is a bit more complicated under water.
Cooking had profound evolutionary effect because it increased food efficiency, which allowed human ancestors to spend less time foraging, chewing, and digesting.
They have limited oxygen. Our brain uses too much oxygen and underwater creatures can only get it from water at low concentrations. Dolphins and whales do have lungs but they can’t constantly breathe air.
Likely the evolution of hands. If you are talking about advancements as in technology. In the ocean hands are not as useful as on land. Terrestrial creatures evolved to ambulate and eventually to climb – where hands are a great advantage. In the ocean there isn’t much you need to be able to grab and hold on to other than food that you can grab with your mouth. Being able to manipulate objects easily makes tool use and development much easier. Some birds (crows, parrots) have been shown to use crude tools but lack the ability to really modify and customize them. But when you have hands now there is an evolutionary advantage to having more intelligence. Not that hands drive the evolution of intelligence (see whales, dolphins, said birds, octopi etc.) but when you have them you can utilize that intelligence to greater advantage.
Basically, our society may not be more socially advanced than some whales and dolphins, we don’t really have a way to compare. However we can build stuff because we can easily manipulate our environment.
The answer is really simple fire.
You can’t have a fire under water.
Fire unlocked more useable nutrients and calories in food allowing for advanced brain development. We can literally divert more energy to brain development because we cook our food.
Humanity owes it’s intelligence to fire.
I think it’s mainly because the ocean is homogeneous and therefore less evolutionary mutations are happening, and also because ocean life, naturally, doesn’t develop hands – hands are essential for tools building and for “writing” to pass on information for the next genterations.
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