What prevents other animals/species from evolving and developing cognitively the same way humans have?

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What prevents other animals/species from evolving and developing cognitively the same way humans have?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Nothing inherent, but if there’s no selective pressure for that then those traits are incredibly unlikely to develop. Evolution doesn’t have a goal, so it’s not like everything trends to evolve towards greater intelligence and cognition.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The start is the requirement for a really smart brain, so it would need to be an omnivore or a non-specialist carnivore. The more types of food they eat the more likely there is a requirement for the brain to develop a special hunting technique or a method of harvesting the food and judging the ripeness etc. On top of that would be a need for social interaction with others of the same species and a method of communication and detecting mood changes in others.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Personally I think the main difference humans how is how ability to predict outcomes. There are plenty of animals that use tools, have complex hunting strategies, and some even have a form of communication. Humans are able to see the things at play and accurately predict what will happen next.

I think we gained this ability through our long distance tracking and hunting method. When we chase a gazelle or something, it runs off and we track it until we scare it again. As ancient humans were pretty much built for long distance running and cooling ourselves off with our unique sweet glands. Bipedal movement was also very efficient for distance travel. Basically we tracked and predicted where animals were and that lead humans to being able to predict a lot of things at the cost of sometimes our assumptions being wrong.

Anonymous 0 Comments

There are a number of quite intelligent species, displaying a range of human abilities. Octopuses, corvids (ravens, crows and that family), true parrots, other primates etc.

They display advanced problem solving and predictive skills, tool usage, language, complex social behaviours (crows seem to tell eachother about “bad people” they haven’t personally met). Some animals are significantly better than humans at certain complex tasks and features (memory, navigation, cooperation etc.).

There’s even the apocryphal joke from a Yellowstone Ranger how there’s “a significant overlap between the dumbest tourists and smartest bears” (in the context of bear-proof but human-accesible bins).

So the fact is that there isn’t one single thing that elevates humans over animals, some single hurdle to clear. To the best of my knowledge, what allowed humanity to surpass animals is complex speech and dextrous hands.

One for allowing ideas to transcend any single individual and allow progress of a group. Again, species like crows seem to have the same ability (mind, this is still being researched). Other species, like chimps, have rather limited language, so a limited ability to pass on ideas.

The other for complex interaction with the world. Making complex tools, and eventually writing (which ties in to complex soeech, I suppose). Even other toolmaking species don’t have a human’s capacity.

Anonymous 0 Comments

There was a similar question asked here yesterday, actually.

The simple answer is that they don’t need to.

Evolution has no end-game. It’s not trying to evolve towards some goal or ideal final form. Being smart isn’t the point, surviving well enough to produce large numbers of offspring is and there are a lot of ways nature lets something do that.

Put another way, if evolution had any point produced particularly intelligent bears or piranhas that cleverness didn’t help them outcompete everyone else for resources the way it did us. There is no rule that says swimming really well or having powerful and fast jaws can’t also grant success.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Adding to what others said, intelligence doesn’t necessarily correlate to better survival for a species. The other hominid species all went extinct, and for most of human history, we weren’t all that different from animals behaviorally and socially until the development of agriculture something like 12k years ago. We also weren’t that much more successful than them until around then. In a detriment to us, our brain costs us significant resources, around 20% of energy the body uses per day. It also requires a long development period where babies are completely dependent upon their parents for survival for years. The large cranial size increases complications of birth, and decreases offspring per reproduction cycle, and the human gestational period is fairly long compared to most other animals, though not the longest.

Evolution is blind, and by the rules of mathematics, optimizes for survival of a species, though not necessarily an individual.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Others have talked about the fact that there is no “goal” for evolution and whatever trait moves you to survive and reproduce will win out and that is true. But let’s also look at it from the weird path that humans have taken. We were able to survive with the singular physical dominating trait of endurance. Pound for pound we are amazingly weak and slow but we can cover distances without rest like no other. The physical traits that allowed this to happen were lack of hair, sweat, and losing a lot of our digestive track to become lighter and more calorie efficient. Those features could not survive and propagate without the cognitive traits being there. The cognitive traits most important were pattern matching for tracking (because we are slow), communication for coordination, and abstract thinking/memory for teaching so we could prepare food that shorter digestive tracks could manage and make shelter and clothing against the cold.

As others have said, lots of these traits are shared and recognizable in other animals. So what prevents other animals from cognitively developing? I think the answer is that the process is slow, we got here first, and we did and will kill off anything that competes for our dominance and control of resources. So unlike other answers, I say that humans are the environmental factor that prevents other species from developing cognitively. We have a long history of exterminating creatures that are getting too clever for their own good (ie. impacting our plans.). There are very few environments where cognitive improvement would not significantly improve your survival chances. The only drawback is increased calorie use. I think that given enough time, cognitive improvement will happen (two steps forward one step back) unless you are in a non-competitive environment or go extinct.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Intelligence doesn’t have an inherent value. It’s a useful tool but it also causes some problems (e.g. large brains need a lot of energy to function). It’s not a “you win at life” card. The other animals are doing just fine without it.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I think that the fact we have evolved to walk upright freeing our hands has a big influence. Being able to walk and carry tools and weapons over long distances without the need for using our hands for transport. We could find a broken branch with a sharp end. Carry it to hunt. Kill our game and return with it to our safe camp. Because our hands were not used to support us we developed better fine motor function so if we discovered a sharp Stone we could take it with us to use to skin an animal and figure out how to use sinew as string to make axes and so it goes on.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Like everyone else said there isn’t any driving force that necessarily steers a species in this direction. However it happened at least once so scientifically there is nothing preventing another species from evolving to be more like us cognitively. I’d say realistically it would be us humans that would prevent it, because you better believe if a species started organizing farms and developing complex social structures we’d be jumping in to interfere, study them, try to “help” and we’d most likely mess it up for them if not cause their extinction.

Humans already split up the entire Earth and assigned ownership to different groups. Imagine some other species starts building a society and using resources, well some humans already decided you can’t do that here because this is Ohio and somebody owns that already.