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