What prevents other animals/species from evolving and developing cognitively the same way humans have?
In: 145
There’s a growing hypothesis that primates may have had sustained exposure to psilocybin mushrooms. Over time, this could have caused new synapses to form, which may have led to our consciousness.
https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/evolution/stoned-ape-hypothesis.htm
Animals as well as humans/early humans can’t control the how fast they evolve, what/if they evolve at all, and evolution takes millions of years/generations to evolve lasting changes, its not a 2 week process then that’s it
Fire, it enabled the predigestion of food. That extra energy went to our brains instead, making up over 20% of energy usage. You also need a evolutionary pressure for it. Predators and omnivores need hunting tactics for example and are as a rule smarter than prey.
There is actually have a specific mutation that makes our brains consume half the energy for the same processing vs most other animals. As a result, we can actually compute much more efficiently on less food, and with less heat. If say a dog were to be as intelligent as a human without that mutation, their brain would cook itself from overheating.
Cetaceans have a benefit in that their brains are effectively water cooled.
Figuring out how to produce fire and then discovering cooking food with fire played a large role. Cooking releases proteins that assist in brain development. Cooking also softens food, so we see jaw muscles shrink the same time we see brain growth
Nothing, really, but the human brain is a very, very specialized organ that uses a massive amount of calories, meaning that the evolutionary forces that lead to its selection were probably pretty extreme.
Prevents? Nothing they just havent had the time and havent had the right lucky mutations
It’s us. There were other hominids with comparable mental capabilities, and our ancestors killed them all. (Well, we crossbred a little bit, but mostly we killed them all.)
I think the answer to your question of why nothing else evolved to compete with humans is because of humans. There were other hominid species evolving along with us but we either out-competed them for resources or just straight up killed them off. Once we took our place at the top we’ve done a hell of a job with making other animals extinct before they can evolve to really compete with us.
Hands or something that allows you to manipulate the environment like hands. Hands combined with a big brain allows us to collect information by writing. This means we can collect a lot of information and don’t have to learn it anew every time, and we accumulate knowledge. Dolphins appear smart by a lot of measures but they lack the ability to collect information like this over generations. If they did have things like hands they may well have done the same things humans did, acquire knowledge, collect it, build on it, next thing you know you have technology to build cities, planes etc. Without hands you are limited to passing down information verbally. There is only so much one person can keep in their mind and pass along in this way. And it appears to be as far as dolphins get for example. They teach their offspring some things but really cannot collect vast sets of knowledge as they cannot write with flippers. If we ever find some technologically advanced alien life, it will have something like hands or something that can function like a hand along with the big brain. Orca’s, dolphins, elephants are pretty intelligent but can only pass a limited amount of knowledge from one generation to the next. We had encyclopedia’s of information a thousand years ago that the next generation could learn an build on and it accumulates. We can’t remember all of that with one brain, so we write it down with our hands. Hands beyond writing also allow technology development being able to manipulate our environment with our dexterity. A dolphin really can’t do much of that with just a mouth and fins.
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