What’s stopping other animals from reaching our level of intelligence where we have the ability to create technology?
In: Biology
Nothing. It simply has not happened. The development of our own technology was achieved through random mutations that created benefit for us, but it did not happen because intelligence is “good” or “wanted”. Evolution’s selection of a trait is brutally simple – did it increase chance of survival to the point of reproduction and did those that came from that reproduction also get too reproduce. On that scale, intelligence is only one of gazillions of ways to create that sort of survival.
It’s easy to see the mutations in evolution in human terms – e.g. we often think about “when will humans evolve to fly”, which us saying “we want to fly therefore evolution will recognize that idea that it’s good and wanted and eventually we’ll evolve to have it”. There is no _direction_ in human terms of evolution – doesn’t work like that.
The definition of “fittest” in “the survival fo the fittest” is nothing more than circular – the fittest are those that survive.
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