What prevents other animals/species from evolving and developing cognitively the same way humans have?
In: 145
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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