What prevents other animals/species from evolving and developing cognitively the same way humans have?
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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.
One thing to keep in mind is that our big brains are really expensive from a food energy used perspective. The brain burns 20-25% of the total glucose used by the human body. So having it has to supply more benefits than the increased food need cost. This turns out to be something that doesn’t get selected for that often.
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.
Nothing. But there needs to be a reason that the smarter ones survive and reproduce more than the dumber ones.
For humans, the ones that could figure out fire were able to stay warm and cook food. The ones who were too dumb to figure out fire were cold and hungry. So they died without reproducing.
The ones smart enough to figure out spears were able to hunt bigger game and have more food. More food means you can sustain a larger family. So more kids with the smart genes.
Most animals don’t have a reason to be smart. If you’re already the apex predator in your niche, there’s literally no reason to change anything. That’s why sharks and alligators have remained unchanged for millions of years.
If your kind only die when they get too old (elephants, buffalo, hippos etc), you’re doing really well. You are formidable enough when young to not have issues, so you get to reproduce and that doesn’t really change the gene pool.
There’s not really a reason for most things to evolve right now.
Also, evolution is a slow ass process. Dozens of generations before a meaningful or even noticeable change.
they all have cognition on pare with humans, their thought streems just go in that specific animals own unique world view
just because you dont see horses working 60hrs a weak to eat at mcdonalds doesnt mean horses are unintelligent
I would not be to sure that humans are very intelligent. We are animals, we show animal behaviour, and we like to call ourselves intelligent. Ask a dolphin how he thinks about us.
Evolutionarily, I’ve always heard that it was diet. Humans eat a lot more fat and protein from other animals such as birds, for example. It allowed our brains to grow larger over time and got us to a point where our brain to body size ratio is a bit of an outlier.
You could also check out this wiki article:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient)
While brain size alone isn’t a perfect indicator, the bit above accounts for some other factors and puts humans way at the top, followed by dolphins, crows, whales, etc. Pretty much what you expect when you think of “smart” animals.
I had a great science teacher way back in 10th grade who told us that evolution does not care about improving. It is just cares about being good enough to survive. Every now and then, a mutation occurs at the right time, allowing certain traits to exploit the world around them much better than other species. Sentience itself only has a limited role in preserving a species. While we might appear to be the smartest creatures around, able to harness the world around us at will, and apparently at the top of the food chain, make no mistake – if a worldwide nuclear holocaust was to occur, those stupid insects crawling around the ground will make it millions of years past the human race on the scale of time. I loved that teacher – he opened our eyes but kept us humble. God I feel old now.
The harnessing of fire which enabled us to cook our food. This in turn is thought to have developed our pre-frontal cortex allowing us to create complex language / writing making us the dominant species on this planet.
Cognition is power and for a long time we’d kill anything showing enough power to challenge us.
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