What prevents other animals/species from evolving and developing cognitively the same way humans have?
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Intelligence is expensive from a biological/evolutionary standpoint. And our species is really, *really* extreme case of it.
Intelligence, at least in the extreme, just isn’t the most efficient answer to any normal evolutionary question. Dolphins, chimps and crows may be smart, but none of them will ever have a space program.
That may sound self-congratulatory, but look at the other side of it; we pay a very high price for it. Both in everyday life and also in opportunity cost. Every evolved trait is functionally a trade-off. And at some critical point, our own evolution favored intelligence over the possible alternatives leaving us biologically implausible from a survival standpoint; there’s just so much we can’t do, so much we have to do, and so many uniquely human ways for everything to go horribly wrong. We probably should have gone extinct long before our history ever got started.
We became exceptionally intelligent because we *had to be*, or we would die. We had selective pressure pushing extremely hard on this feature. This almost certainly means there was something in our ancient history that was actively killing every sub-population except for the smartest, generation after generation after generation.
I’ll give you 3 guesses who it probably was.
There’s something called the “red queen effect”, running as fast as you can just to stand still, where a species has to adapt faster and faster just to survive. Generally a pair of species do it together; the rabbit gets better at evading, so the fox gets better at hunting, so the rabbit gets better at evading, and so forth.
The intelligent species is almost always exclusively the hunters. Being intelligent helps you catch prey, but rabbits can instead simply out-breed their predators. Foxes only ever have to be smarter than rabbits. Intelligence helps, but only so much. Unless… unless…
Imagine a scenario where the fox was dead-set on hunting the rabbits to extinction, where the rabbit needed to be intelligent enough to defend, even to fight back. Imagine where both were co-evolving on this one trait, and each generation the least intelligent groups would die off, and only the smartest survive.
One species in particular stands out that followed this pattern. The didn’t have much in the way of natural defenses, so they actually hunted everything they saw as a threat purposefully to extinction. In fact, we know that they also hunted down their evolutionary relatives, probably for the same reason. The fossil record suggests the others did the same to them.
As best we can tell, this seems to have been a species caught in a “red queen” race with itself. Each generation, presumably the clan that was the most capable of defending itself and destroying the others was far, far more likely to survive. The clans that couldn’t strategize as well were killed by the ones that could. That clan would fracture once it reached a certain size, and the pattern would repeat. For hundreds of thousands of years this apparently continued.
It’s a sobering thought: It’s possible, even likely, that the trait that we appreciate about ourselves the most was probably directly caused by the trait that we are the most ashamed of.
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