What caused humans to become the top species on earth, and why is there such an intellectual gap between humans and all other species?
In: Earth Science
Nobody knows for sure because we weren’t around back then to study it.
It appears that higher intelligence is *sometimes* extremely beneficial, but usually it isn’t.
If some mad scientist made a tiger 10 times as intelligent as it currently is, well the tiger probably wouldn’t get that much out of it. It’s already a great hunter, it doesn’t really need to be smarter. It might be able to sit down and scratch out math equations in the dirt with its paws, but that doesn’t help it be a better killer — not by enough to make a difference. What it would do is dramatically increase the calories that the tiger had to eat every day. Brains use up a bunch of calories anyway, and the smarter you are, the more it uses. Our poor super-tiger might starve to death if it didn’t have enough food available.
So it seems that you need the right environmental conditions. A species has to at least survive okay with its existing level of intelligence. Then you get some random mutations where some of the offspring are a little smarter. And in the right environment, that intelligence makes a survival difference. The smarter ones survive at a higher level than the baseline creature does. It might be the idea of picking up a rock, or maybe it’s primitive communication, but we aren’t sure what that first discovery was.
So the smarter descendants do a lot better than their dumber parents. Maybe the dumber creatures were barely scraping by, but the ones who could grasp the idea of picking up a rock suddenly thrived. “Oh, this is waaay easier…” they discover. The thing is, you probably need several consecutive versions of that to get to humanity.
The biggest intellectual leaps are probably “make stick sharp”, “me can talk some”, and “fire make food taste good”. Each of those is a giant leap forward in survival ability. But increases in intelligence that *don’t quite* get you to those break points… man that’s just extra calories you need for not much benefit.
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