Why haven't other species on Earth evolved high intelligence

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Why haven't other species on Earth evolved high intelligence, the ability to use complex language and the ability to create complex technology? It seems like it would be a large advantage to their survival.

It seems there's only one niche for creatures with human-like intelligence, and it's taken.

I've been asking myself that question my entire life.

Relatively speaking, humans haven't been around very long. If we manage to kill ourselves of at some point, even if it takes a few million more years, our "intelligence" will not have been so "successful" after all. We are still vastly outnumbered by birds, insects, single-cell life-forms etc., many of which have been around in approximately their current form for much longer than we have. Currently, our technology is consuming resources faster than they are being replaced; no species which does that is ever going to be "successful" in the long term, and if we don't sort that out, our intelligence and inventiveness will no longer seem like such a good survival strategy after all!

The only definition of "success" in evolutionary terms is that the gene line continues. The idea of "higher" and "lower" life-forms is a completely human invention, irrelevant to "mother nature" herself, and none of our "superior" (totally species-centric assumption) qualities intrinsically make us "better" life-forms. Bacteria may not have high intelligence or technology, but in evolutionary terms, we have a long, long way to go before we have demonstrated that we are more "successful" organisms than they are.

So the answer could well be that "intelligence" and "consciousness" (again, defined entirely by ourselves) is simply not an evolutionary advantage at all and turns out to be an evolutionary dead-end. Assuming that we are the first species to have evolved these traits, you could say that we are the "test case" for the hypothesis that they really are "superior" qualities.

If this is a subject of particular interest (and possibly baseball too!), I recommend reading Life's Grandeur by Stephen Jay Gould (published as Full House in the USA.)

When I was a kid it was still common to believe dinosaurs were slow, stupid beasts because of their tiny brains, and yet they survived for tens of millions of years. So either their reputation for having low intelligence is largely undeserved, or the whole intelligence thing is overrated.

Gary Larson once made a Far Side cartoon captioned "The real reason dinosaurs became extinct" that was popular with his readers - it showed the dinosaurs all smoking cigarettes. Maybe I'll draw a "modern" version of the cartoon where they're all eating Tide Pods.

What makes you think animals don't have high intelligence?
I think they're much smarter than us.
A lot of human behaviour is useless and destructive.

Our intelligence will prove to be a definite survival advantage if we eventually spread beyond the Earth and escape its demise as a habitable planet, in about a billion years, which all other species are doomed not to if left to their own devices. Yes, I know this is a big if.

I agree.
Some animals are very clever and most of them more clever in at least one field.

Appart from that is being clever the most important? Or are other stuffs more important?

Because I will catch it and make it my pet.

It's difficult to compare intelligence between species at some point because of different environments and needs. For example, whales and dolphins don't have hands and their environment does not support fire so while they can and do manipulate their environment to some extent, they do not have a need or the physical ability to do so as much as humans, so one would expect they would not have the level of intelligence in that arena either. However perhaps one might argue that in some sence dolphins are more intelligent than humans, because despite not having arms and hands, they still are able to learn sign language and read human non verbal body language. We, on the other hand, are not so well versed at picking up dolphin body language or dolphin language in general which they seem to have. Dolphins and whales can communicate over very long distances and may very well have social IQs higher than our own. An interesting thing about dolphin culture, social hierarchy is not as fixed as it is among humans. It's more complex For example, with dolphin A and B alone, A might out rank B. But when dolphin C comes along, B might then out rank A.

Chimpanzees have better short term memory than humans and better visual pattern recognition. They are also better at solving certain tasks and puzzles.

What humans are are social, specialized tool makers. We lack a protective coat of fur and we are weak, slow, and have poor hearing and a poor sense of smell compared to other animals. In our environment, we can't survive without tools, andcour ability to conceive of them and makes them and use them and it's difficult to survive without other humans.

So it's not so much that other animals aren't necessarily as intelligent. Sometimes they're just intelligent in different ways and those ways that they are intelligent are dictated by the environment in which they evolved and have to survive in.

Agreed.

This kinda reminds me of the book "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?"

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In the grand scheme of things, humans have only really just developed into an intelligent species so maybe we are just the first. Food, and the cooking of food, was a big reason why we became more intelligent. Dogs are the only other creature that have been measured as getting more intelligent, and that is down to humans interfering with their food.

there's no need

birds have been around for many millions of years, looks like they're doing better than us.

^ Nobody suspects birds...


Link to the original: SMBC

I wonder if apes and monkeys will be at our level and living like Homo Sapiens sometime in Earth's future.

I wish I could catch a bird and make it my pet.