Why are humans the only species on earth to become intelligent?
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You’ve never heard of gorillas, dolphins, or elephants?
They aren’t. Other creatures simply have different levels and types of intelligence, which they use in different ways to serve their individual needs and wants. When I tell my dog to “sit,” he sits, because he remembers the word and understand that it means that I want him to sit. A creature without intelligence would not understand that.
I think a more relevant question is “are there any species on earth that are not intelligent”
Humans are the only species with human intelligence.
The question should be, what is “intelligence”?
If intelligence is being able to talk, a lot of animals (and even plants) can do that, although they talk in ways we don’t understand.
If it is about being able to memorize, many animals can memorize pictures and numbers.
If it is about being able to make your home, we know a lot of animals can do that, including bees.
“Intelligence” in the human sense evolved, as far as we know, only in one branch of the hominidae family – the family which contains humans and also great apes. Some of these early apes evolved in a way that having a bigger brain and using tools and communication became very important to their survival. We don’t know exactly what these evolutionary pressures were. There were many branches to this sub-family, all of which shared these ‘big-brain’ adaptations but evolved in different ways over millions of years. For one reason or another, eventually all these branches went extinct except for one branch from which two or three new species evolved: the first anatomically modern humans, another species called Homo neanderthalensis (which we know were quite similar, but somewhat anatomically different from modern humans), and perhaps a third species or sub-species called the denisova people. These three groups existed at the same time and probably had levels of intelligence similar to modern humans. For one reason or another, the homo sapiens out-competed and/or interbred with the others and the rest is all of human history.
Took a course on this. Basically, language and “collective learning.” Being able to pass information on to the younger generation through speech and writing is new to the animal kingdom, to this degree. What you learn in your life, you can teach your child before they would ever begin attempting to solve said problem
Evolution tends to favour quick wins, like physical or behavioural adaptations. Human level intelligence requires so much energy it took a very specific set of circumstances and environmental conditions to arise. Once it did it’s obvious evolutionary benefits became a huge selective pressure, where even slight improvements allowed one set of proto-humans to out compete others. Rinse and repeat for hundreds of thousands of years an we are all that’s left.
If you look at the animals closest to us in intelligence, they tend to be in environments where humans don’t thrive (oceans and jungles) so we weren’t able to out compete them as easily, at least until our technology improved
There are a lot of very glib answers in the thread. Humans’ cognitive experience of “intelligence” seems to be heavily connected to our language. Animals communicate and some have complex systems for it, but as far as we can tell no other species has discovered *reconstructable* language (meaning it can be reassembled independently by individuals to express original ideas.) I don’t actually know that much about this, and I definitely can’t speak to the evolutionary theory of it, but you might want to start there. I wouldn’t normally try to answer with this little expertise but the replies so far are all some form of “Are they though?” which isn’t an answer to your question even if it is a decent point. Animal intelligence is callously ignored and denied, but humans do have unique cognitive abilities that correlate to our (unsustainable and ill-advised) “dominance” over the planet.
To bastardize a quote, “if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
There are animals with the intelligence of 7 year old human babies (octopuses, crows, etc). There are also animals that are incredibly intelligent in the way they’re required to be to survive. Plenty even use tools.
As for our level of intelligence, to make it simple we evolved like: forming tribes for safety -> using tools to get enough food to feed the tribe -> using tools to defeat threats -> clothing to allow us ru survive as we migrated to more environments -> building structures to live in those environments -> creating rules to keep the tribe safe -> agriculture
I cant remember how it works and it could be BS but I’ve read in a book that cooking food made it useless to have a better digestive system and somehow our brain was able to develop way more because of this
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