What prevents other animals/species from evolving and developing cognitively the same way humans have?
In: 145
Language.
There are a lot of intelligent species, some more intelligent than others, obviously. What sets humans apart is our ability to transfer knowledge to the next generation.
An octopus is intelligent, but each octopus has to start at the beginning, knowledge wise, and learn everything from scratch. They have no way to learn from their parent or pass knowledge to their child.
A human can learn from their parent. Humans have access to the collective knowledge of multiple generations before them. Since the invention of writing, a permanent form of language, we have access to thousands of years of knowledge.
Multigenerational knowledge allows us to build on the success of those who came before us. Consider human knowledge in 1900. Compare that to what was built on top of that by 1925. Compare that to 1950, 1975, 2000, and today. Knowledge is increasing at an exponential rate.
Latest Answers