Why are we smart, i mean smarter then other animals or living creatures?
In: Biology
Than*
Cooking allowed us to get more nutrients from food. More nutrition led to bigger brains.
We value the sort of smartness we have more than we value the sort of smartness that a whale has.
We don’t have particularly impressive physical skills, and without our brains, evolution would have ended us. It’s all that keeps us in our niche.
Are we smarter? We’re definitely better at making and using tools, but we’re killing our habitat and animal neighbors with full knowledge, rapidly. We’re having more and more breakthroughs in animal intelligence each year, finding that animals have more capability than we thought each time. Our wisdom as humans is highly overrated, but we do have the greatest intellectual capacity known, sure.
Why are we better at accumulating and applying knowledge? Consider that we are evolved from persistence hunters, which caused us to need to be able to track and follow prey over long distances while working together as a group. We became upright and suddenly had access to so much more information from our eyes. We developed the ability to record and preserve lessons learned, so we could survive more easily. The mind is not dying with the body any longer, but persists in a way beyond generations through storytelling, religion, philosophy, and technology.
Bigger brains, more brains together, better vision, immortal ideas, technology and lots and lots of competition.
People like to think of a brain as though it were a general purpose computer that can just do anything and making a brain bigger makes it “smarter” – but that’s not true.
Brains are actually made up of a number of different components, similar to a desktop computer. But unlike a desktop computer, your brain doesn’t have CPU that can just do anything. Instead, your brain has a number of discrete, specialized components.
In that same way that a video card can only process video, the visual cortex in your brain can only process visual information. Likewise, in the same way that a soundcard can only process sound, the audio cortex in your brain can only process audio information. Most of your brain is concerned with interpreting sensory data and moving your body around and those functions are all controlled by special purpose parts of your brain that can do only the one thing that they’re responsible for and nothing else.
Human brains are different from all other animal brains on Earth because human brains have two distinct areas that no other animal has. These are called Wernicke’s Area and Broca’s Area. These two parts of your brain are essentially special purpose computers that deal with using language and making logical associations between things. And its ultimately the abilities to use language and make logical associations that separates humans from all other animals.
There are animals that do have equivalents of either Wernicke’s or Broca’s Area, but the animal equivalents are usually very rudimentary and are slaved to some other function that the animal’s brain is performing. Some birds, for example, have a rudimentary Broca’s Area equivalent. But the bird Broca’s Area appears to be functioning more as a music processor than a true language and/or logic processor.
Birds, such as parrots, that can mimic human speech and have a very rudimentary understanding of logical associations are those that have a better developed Broca’s Area equivalent.
Humans have a large brain compared to their body size.
Having a large brain has two major downsides: 1. It requires a lot of energy and 2. It takes a long time to develop.
For #1, humans have the unique ability to cook our foods. Cooking helps break down foods, making the food easier to digest. Humans don’t need to devote as much of our bodies to digestion. This higher energy diet helps support our brain.
For #2, human babies are born quite premature because if a baby’s head is too big, they wouldn’t be able to exit mom’s pelvis. It takes quite a long time for a baby to develop into an adult. Our intelligence helps make up for this downside. Farming allows us more food per size of land. Language allows us to pass down knowledge from our ancestors. Tools give us more power than we have with our bodies. All of this allows us to raise our babies and continue reproducing.
There are two answers to this:
1) God created an intelligent being with a conscious and complex reasoning for whatever purpose.
2) We evolved from the three fundamental tools of intelligence. These are (in order) access to information, storing it in memory and learning. Organisms that couldn’t process information (**i.e**: sight, sound, touch etc) probably died almost immediately. Organisms that could process information and recollect it in memory would also die rather quickly, but may have been able to reproduce through chance. Lastly being able to process information and learn from it had the highest chance of survival.
We are simply beings that have considerably evolved from that ancestor through millions of years.
The current scientific consensus leans towards something called the “Machiavellian ape hypothesis”.
Basically, something happened a few million years ago, where pre-human competition started getting really nasty, and the males started outcompeting each other through clever plots and schemes. At which point, the proto-humans who were better at plotting and scheming, and better at seeing through the plots and schemes of the other proto-humans, survived to have more successful children than the ones who were just happy to be monkee. Once that pattern started, becoming the smartest proto-human (and having more kids) just means that your level of vicious genius becomes the baseline for the next generation, so anyone who wants to win has to be *even smarter*. And we’re off to the races.
Tldr: at some point a few million years ago, shit went all Game of Thrones.
We are smart because it was an evolutionary advantage. That’s the only real answer here. Smarter humans for whatever reasons were more likely to pass their genes on and so a gradual increase in intelligence resulted.
The biggest difference between humans and other mammals is language. Language gives us a medium by which we can create complex thoughts, which are the stuff used for smart making.
Thumbs allow us to apply our thoughts to reshape the environment, which gives us drive to keep thinking and making improvements.
We likely are not. The different between humans and other animals is likely that we don’t ask the right questions in the right way of animals.
Take the mirror test for example. It’s a test where they anesthetize an animal, put paint on it, wake it up, and see if it uses a mirror to study the paint. Humans, orcas, dolphins, magpies, and an elephant have passed this test but most other animals tested have not.
The easy explanation would be that humans are smarter. However, it’s now believed that animals have other non visual ways of identifying themselves and each other like scents or birdsongs. Humans are a visual species so the mirror test makes sense to us. An animal like a mole likely would be seen to fail it simply because it lives in the dirt and doesn’t use its eyes as much to travel their world.
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