Why haven't other species on Earth evolved high intelligence

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NewTime
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27 Mar 2018, 11:56 am

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.



Spiderpig
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27 Mar 2018, 12:28 pm

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


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CockneyRebel
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27 Mar 2018, 12:29 pm

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


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Trogluddite
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27 Mar 2018, 12:54 pm

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.)


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lostonearth35
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27 Mar 2018, 1:07 pm

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. :lol:



Raleigh
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27 Mar 2018, 1:29 pm

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.


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27 Mar 2018, 1:51 pm

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.


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LaetiBlabla
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27 Mar 2018, 2:00 pm

Raleigh wrote:
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.

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?



SH90
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27 Mar 2018, 4:10 pm

Image

Because I will catch it and make it my pet.



Chronos
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28 Mar 2018, 7:45 am

NewTime wrote:
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'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.



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28 Mar 2018, 1:56 pm

Raleigh wrote:
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.

Agreed.

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

description:

Quote:
What separates your mind from an animal’s? Maybe you think it’s your ability to design tools, your sense of self, or your grasp of past and future—all traits that have helped us define ourselves as the planet’s preeminent species. But in recent decades, these claims have eroded, or even been disproven outright, by a revolution in the study of animal cognition. Take the way octopuses use coconut shells as tools; elephants that classify humans by age, gender, and language; or Ayumu, the young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University whose flash memory puts that of humans to shame. Based on research involving crows, dolphins, parrots, sheep, wasps, bats, whales, and of course chimpanzees and bonobos, Frans de Waal explores both the scope and the depth of animal intelligence. He offers a firsthand account of how science has stood traditional behaviorism on its head by revealing how smart animals really are, and how we’ve underestimated their abilities for too long.

People often assume a cognitive ladder, from lower to higher forms, with our own intelligence at the top. But what if it is more like a bush, with cognition taking different forms that are often incomparable to ours? Would you presume yourself dumber than a squirrel because you’re less adept at recalling the locations of hundreds of buried acorns? Or would you judge your perception of your surroundings as more sophisticated than that of a echolocating bat? De Waal reviews the rise and fall of the mechanistic view of animals and opens our minds to the idea that animal minds are far more intricate and complex than we have assumed. De Waal’s landmark work will convince you to rethink everything you thought you knew about animal—and human—intelligence.


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29 Mar 2018, 2:07 am

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.



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29 Mar 2018, 2:38 am

there's no need

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


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29 Mar 2018, 11:37 am

^ Nobody suspects birds... :lol:
Image

Link to the original: SMBC


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CockneyRebel
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29 Mar 2018, 12:30 pm

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


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CockneyRebel
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29 Mar 2018, 12:33 pm

SH90 wrote:
Image

Because I will catch it and make it my pet.


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


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