Animals Not Advancing

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Long ago, humans learned to use fire. We invented the wheel, and learned how to farm and domesticate animals. We've discovered levers and pulleys and all sorts of tools. Over time, our advancements have become more and more complex. We've learned about physics and math, electricity and engines.
During all this time, we have shared the Earth with many other species. Some of them are not very bright, but others have at least moderate intelligence (dolphins, elephants, and apes, for example). So my question is: why does the life of a modern ape look exactly the same as the life of an ape that lived 1000 or more years ago? Why aren't they constructing villages and growing food? Why aren't the elephants writing words in the sand with their trunks? Really, why are humans the only ones who seem to be advancing as a species?

Well, in the case of elephants and dolphins, even if an elephant or a dolphin had a amazing idea, or some sort of epiphany, what could they do about it? They lack hands, fingers and thumbs. So if an elephant somehow conceptualized a wheel, for instance, how could it make that idea a reality?

The other thing is, I think that the intelligence of these species just doesn't quite rise up to the level of humans. If you look at humans today and figure out what our average intelligence is, I imagine that the average intelligence wouldn't be high enough for us to have evolved so far if the only humans that existed had this level of intelligence. Average humans have the ability to learn, and even to apply ideas once they've been learned and to adapt ideas to solving different problems. But an average human doesn't have the ability to come up with a solution to a problem that they have no background in and no basis at all to understand. It takes a more special mind

Animals also have the ability to learn - dolphins can be trained, chimps can be taught sign language, dogs can be taught some commands - but the most intelligent members of these species still fall short of an average human, never mind the sort of human that can invent solutions to problems with no basis for knowing the solution in advance.

Finally, its also a bit about natural selection. All of these other species have the physical gifts necessary to survive without all of these advancements. Humans do not - we're weaker, slower, more poorly sighted, have worse hearing and smell, are less well protected from harsh environments when naked, etc. Natural selection favored the more intelligent who could survive and adapt. Weeding out the less intelligent favored the breeding of people with more and more intelligence, since the genes for lower intelligence were removed or at least repressed in the gene pool. Chimps, dolphins etc. don't have environmental pressures making these natural selections. Chimps, dolphins and elephants of average intelligence for their species can survive perfectly well because their physical attributes are well adapted to the environments in which they must live. Maybe they're still evolving, but in a way they've hit an evolutionary dead end - as a species, from a reproductive standpoint, they have no need to evolve more intelligence. But for humans the evolutionary path necessary for our survival, to make up for our lack of physical gifts lead us down the path of intelligence.

First of all animals do and have advanced. This is seen in birds of the same species living in different environments, chimps in different side of Africa, it is to do with environmental challenges.

Our intelligence is due to the extreme environmental challenges, that required it. We were once like chimps but our habitat rapidly shrunk, we were exposed. We were very vulnerable in the Savannah with dangerous apex predictors. Some theories point to the fact we scavenged an ate bone marrow and brains (because flesh was eaten by apex predictors, and the sun, hyena, and vultures took the rest ), in order to access this we had to to break open bone an use tools, our entire existence depended on cunning. However our chimp cousin are also very adapted as were our ancestors. This was the running start we needed.

Generally speaking the more challenging the conditions, the more the animal has to adapt to survive.

Some Birds and dolphins not only understand word association, they understand the order of words has significance. From personal experience with African grey parrots they can form their own composite words, using related things, which shows that it is not just a primitive response to a command. They can even think laterally to use a word to manipulate a response other than what is a direct association. They have problem solving capability in both physical manipulation and language. These are pretty similar skills they use in the wild.

Also some animals are not concerned with the individual, ants for instance, they are basically nodes in the colony organism but the group intelligence is very good.

Folks often ask 'why dont apes evolve into being more like humans?'

The answer is "compare a modern chimp to a neanderthal man".

The Neanderthals were alot more humanlike than are modern chimps.

What good did it do them?

It brought them into competetion with us- and they got wiped out.

Chimps survive preciesly because they dont evolve towards being like us.

We become so good at what we do that we drive away the competition.

If chimps started to play around with fire, and starting plowing fields for crops, they would be signing their own death warrants ( they would have to steal cropland from humans and fight wars with humans- they couldnt possible survive). We got to the goal line already.

Now if humans vanished via some catastrophe ( asteroid, supervolcanoe, or by own our hands in a nuclear holocaust) that would be different. The niche would open up and one of the many bright non human mammals on the planet would enventual take our place.

The raccoons, and the meerkats, are both much like us 30 million years ago- they could end up dukeing it out for the planet after were gone.

In one of the "Life After Humans" episodes on cable there was speculation that some of the chimps who escaped from the nearby zoo (no humans left to guard them or keep them in) developed a culture in which they carefully husbanded the egg production of birds. Instead of gobbling up all the eggs they could (thus dooming the birds) they showed restraint and even protected the birds to assure long range production of eggs. Then they taught their bird husbandry to their offspring.

ruuveyn

Why? Because even a smart animal like a dolphin, elephant, or chimp is no where as smart as a human. Sure, chimps and otters have been seen using sticks or rocks as crude tools, but when have any of them been observed expressing creativity in art of any kind? And I have to think, innovation comes from the same place in the brain that artistic expression does.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Current thinking is that it all comes down to Chromosome #2.

We have 23 pairs of chromosomes, unlike all the other Hominids, who have 24 pairs. The end-to-end fusion of two chromosomes gave human brains something that the rest of the hominids' brains don't.

And so, we develop fire, tools, agriculture and writing, and then make sure that no one can compete with us for those.

I would say that a certain kind of spider expresses creativity in art. I forget what the species is called but I read an article about a kind of spider that creates decoys of itself. It crafts something that looks like a spider to fool prey and predators. Whether you classify that as art or not is a grey area but I would consider it artistic even if it isn't meant to be art.

It takes hundreds of million of years to produce intelligence by means of natural selection.

Even if it happens it will not happen in a 1000 or even 10,000 human life times.

ruveyn

You're assuming that intelligence is a trait whose survival value outweighs all others, and that isn't true.

There is a species of shark that has remained unchanged for 100 million years. There are "living fossils" like that whose 'design' is so good that haven't needed to change. They're already very, very optimized without great intelligence.

You could say that they are even more well adapted than humans, since our species has only been around for ~300,000 years. If we make it to 100 million years then we can brag, but until then sharks have us beat.

Also, a human with zero technology will likely die quickly, as opposed to a tiger who doesn't need tools to survive.

We´re the only truely bipedal species of all the quadrupeds. These anatomical changes allowed our brain to increase in volume. `Lucy` was bipedal, but had little more brain volume than a chimp, so the brain development came later. Having a pair of hands free gave early hominids the opportunity to do something with those hands other than carrying things around. From there on, it´s a cascade of developments that eventually led to our big and complex brain.

It was probably the invention of cooking (or was it an accident when one of the early hominids accidentally dropped a piece of scavenged meat into the fire?) combined with hunting that spurred on an enormous increase in brain size. Raw food takes longer to eat and takes more calories to digest. The other great apes have to eat throughout the day. That leaves little time for inventing crafty things like spears.

I'm a bit bothered by the term 'advanced'. This is a very anthropocentric view. Understandable since we are the top predator on this planet, but this bias can make us blind to intelligence that expresses itself in other ways than building pyramids and computers. The sounds that dolphins produce is very complex and non-repetative. How do we know they don't have a language that approaches ours in complexity?

Last edited by NewDawn on 22 Mar 2013, 4:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.

This is the best explanation. Human-style intelligence would not give a survival advantage to any other species and in fact would doom any other species that got it as long as we are around.

Not necessarily. Our extinction wouldn't create a vacuum for intelligence that something would be bound to fill. Life has not been building up towards intelligence. In the same way, we haven't seen the evolution of giant predators to replace T. Rex and fill the "giant carnivore" niche, or pigeons losing their flight to fill the "dodo" niche.

Life on Earth started about 3.6 billion years ago. Animals have lived on land for 400 million years. Modern humans have existed for roughly 200,000 years. Nothing filled the "intelligence niche" for the first 3.6 billion years of life on Earth and there's no guarantee (or even reason why) something would come to fill it if we went extinct.

Lions, tigers, and bears ( oh my!), HAVE taken over the T-Rex niche. And to a certain degree we humans have also muscled into that niche as well. So thats a bad example for you to use. Grizzlies may not be as big as T-rex, but niether are its prey. Relative to modern organisms- it is today's T-Rex.

I used to think of intelligence as a freak occurance, but more likely the way life evolved it now seems more likely that the niche for intelligence did not exist until the end of the cenozoic- but once it opened up there was no way to leave it vacant. A certain primate happened to step in and fill it.

And if it gets vacated again life will continue to fill it from this point in geologic time on.


A scientist named Jerison ( I believe) did a study on the ratio of brain size to body size in both modern and in fossil animals.

He concluded that at first there was little change over the eons among either invertabrates, nor among cold blooded vertabrates in the overall averages of brain size to body wieght.

But then around 300 million years ago two branches of land vertabrates seperately invented endothermy (warm bloodedness) the mammals, and some dinosaurs ( those that lead to the birds). Then there started to be a slow but steady growth in relative brainsize to bodysize in those two groups through the age of the dinosaurs.

And the pace increased during the age of mammals. Having warm blood enabled brain growth. Brain growth got selected for because fliexibility in behavior got selected for in both birds and mammals. Flexibility in behavior meaning ablitity to modify behavior due to experience ( ie learning, ie inteligence) .So today on average both mammals and birds have bigger brains relative to thier size than did birds reptiles or mammals have in the days of the dinosaurs.

So non human animals (atleast birds and mammals) did, and still are in fact 'advancing'- but they are advancing at the same glacially slow pace that our own ancestors did tens of millions of years ago.

But if we vanished tomorrow then some opportunistic organisms would rush in to fill the void and would speed up their evolution because we wont be around to stop them, and they would be forced by competition with other contenders to speed up more. Maybe a contender would find ways to teach it children and evolve language, and maybe later even fashion tools to store knowledge outside its brain cells ( ie in books) and so on. So the pace of change will feed on itsself and amplify. And in a heart beat of geolgic time- a new animal takes over the planet in our place and our niche will be filled.

I suspect that now that we are 300 million years into the age of warm blooded vertabrates there is no turning back. Intelligence is here to stay. But because of the nature of the 'intelligence niche'- it can only be filled by one species at a time for the whole planet. So there is an illusion that its a freak occurance happening to one species.

Where is your proof that we are truly more intelligent than say... the panther who eats hallucinogenic plants in the jungle?
The panther doesn't speak human languages or have 'technology', but he may have insights into nature which we could never understand. Who's more intelligent?
Food for thought.

That is true. Our species is an accident rather than an inevitable or necessary outcome.

ruveyn