Why didn't intelligence evolve in any other species?
We're the only species that are "intelligent", if you can use that word, to me there are tiers of intelligence, depending on the size of the brain, I mean cats can feel emotions and make plans and have free will, etc. they are just at the level of our toddlers. But anyways, what I'm getting at is that intelligence must not be very important for survival, because no other species really evolved it, and the ones that came the closest (still pretty far behind), are very few. So I'm thinking intelligence really must be a fluke of evolution, just a random mutation that happened and then took off, and so we are not really "evolved" or rather more evolved than other animals, we just happen to have this thing that after hundreds of thousands of years we have figured out how to put to good use in a way that nature certainly didn't intend. I mean it's not like 100K years ago we evolved brains so we can have computers, we probably did it to fight off predators that other species just evolved bigger muscles to do and in our case maybe the environment wasn't conducive to that, so our evolution happened in the brain. What I'm saying is, I think it's wrong to say we are more evolved than other species, look at a gorilla from the same subcategory as us - it is bigger, it is stronger, faster, lifespan not much shorter than ours, so which species is more evolved really, the only area we are more evolved in is the brain. And as much as we like to think that is the most important thing, no evidence really points to that. I think it's just tiers of evolution, and some species just have certain things more evolved than others, but evolution is not a ladder, it's like a tree. Does that make sense to you or is my logic flawed? It's why I think we are alone in being "intelligent" and why we are not special. Yes, we might have technology, etc. but when you think about life on a universal scale, does that really matter? The difference between swinging from trees and peering into the universe from space is pretty miniscule, in the end the point of life is self-sustaining survival.
Which animal is most likely to evolve intelligence equal to our own?
With humans occupying the top spot? None.We are here already. Any animal which shows up and tries to light fires, or make tools will suddenly find itself at the wrong end of a mass extermination program.Nature is red in tooth and claw. And despite short teeth and feeble claws, human beings are pretty nasty when it comes to competition.Here are some people competing with dolphins for fishing rights.However, were we to introduce some deadly virus and wipe out all the humans, then the seat would become vacant, and some other species might evolve to take the spot.Chimpanzees seem to be the best candidate. Certainly one of the large apes could make the transition. What’s holding them back is mainly a heat management problem. You can’t grow a big brain unless you can dump 20W in all conditions. Humans shifted to endurance hunting, which required sweating. And as any gaming geek will tell you, liquid cooling means we can run the CPU hotter.So the answer is one of the apes or another primate.If the virus took out all the primates too, then it would get more interesting.The basic requirements would be …Advanced social structures.Bipedalism - to free up hands and forelimbs. Or some other way of doing manipulation for tool development.Big enough to fit a 2 kg brain and the means to cool it down.So….Aquatic mammals are in a good place from a brain point of view. But being aquatic and requiring flippers means ineffective hands for tools development.Bears might be able to move in a primatey direction. Intelligent ursines would need to become bipedal and turn the forepaws into hands. Following the human roadmap, that would require them to go completely arboral. Which would mean losing claws, gaining fingers. And then get back out of the tree to become bipedal hunters. Seems a stretch.Elephants could be a another candidate, especially if they could bifurcate the trunk into a more general purpose manipulator. Smaller elephants could support large brains, cool them with their ears, and undertake tool use with trunks.A civilisation of herbivores might be quite pleasant too.If we rule out the primates, I reckon elephants would get there first.
Will apes eventually become sentient?
Will great apes like Gorillas , Chimpanzees , Orang Utan and Bonobos eventually become sentient? There have been records of Chimpanzees from western Africa using makeshift spears to hunt. Would they eventually become as smart as humans are? Being around humans would certainly make them smarter right? It has also been recorded that some Orang Utans using spears to catch fish -- after observing humans doing it. I understand that this may take millions of years , but is it possible eventually? Also , Dolphins are pretty smart mammals too , could they evolve into sentience as well? Thanks
Would other sentient species be similar to humans (at least physiologically)?
I’ve actually already addressed this on my personal website just about one year ago:What Would Technologically Advanced Aliens Be LikeI did my best to make educated guesses, based in part on the assumption that these are intelligent aliens, and there are probably certain underlying requirements to evolving intelligence. But that’s already a big assumption, since there’s not really any reason to believe that alien life will necessarily evolve intelligence. I mean, life did fine on Earth for billions of years without multicellularity, and then hundreds of millions of years without anything as intelligent as us. The type of intelligence we possess seems to be an evolutionary rarity.Anyway, here was my summary of what an intelligent, technologically advanced alien would be like. Go follow that link if you want to see my full rationale.“So to summarize, my best guess is that intelligent technologically advanced aliens will probably be carbon based, with some type of polymer genetic chemical, though not necessarily DNA, terrestrial, either similar in size to us or much larger, have some type of hard skeleton, either internal or external, warm-blooded with some type of fur or feather like insulation covering their bodies, oxygen-breathing with iron or copper based blood, with various sensory organs similar to ours and either compound or camera-type eyes with a slim possibility of reflector eyes, mouths that we can only narrow down to being some type of orifice to take in food though a hinge of some sort is possible, have at least four limbs if not more, and will be social with language. Now, take all that and try to imagine what it would look like coming together, and there's a near limitless number of possibilities.”
Would it be possible for other primates to evolve to sentience in billions of years?
There are very few definitions of the word "sentience" that would not include apes. Sentience: the ability to feel or experience subjectively. No scientist today, who works with apes, thinks that they do not do this. Perhaps you mean ability to reason, have a more human like intelligence and have a verbal, more human-like culture? If so, your question has several assumptions about how evolution works embedded within it, that are incorrect. The first is that the issue is time. Apes are not less evolved than us. We both have evolved the same length of time from a common ancestor. They are highly adapted to their environmental niches. We evolved verbal cultural intelligence very rapidly in evolutionary time. More time will not make chimpanzees more like us. We experienced different environmental and cultural evolutionary pressure and adapted to different more generalized niches and went through different bottle necks.The second assumption is that evolution is directional. It is not. Animals are not striving to evolve towards higher intelligence. There is variation of genetic traits across a population. Some genes, in some environments, cause some in that population to leave more surviving offspring and those offspring have higher likelihood to have those genes. They have more offspring that survive to have more and so on. Soon that gene is in a larger percentage of the population. There is no direction. If the environment changes new genes of that remain in the pool will be selected for.The last is perhaps that intelligence is a highly desirable trait. As far as we know, no other animal has our sort of verbal intelligence. That tends to suggest either it is usually not very useful or the trade offs are tot great or that it is exceedingly hard to get the right combination of genetic traits. Most things that are very useful have evolved many different times, like flight. Bats, birds insects and pterosaurs have completely independently evolved powered flight. Many others have evolved gliding. This implies it is a very useful thing to evolve. Billions of years had nothing to do with it.
Will Chimpanzees and other great apes eventually evolve into humans?
This is an interesting question and I have wondered about it myself. Of course, no species will ever become human in the strictest sense but other species may well become "humanoid". I read about a paleontologist who published a speculation about how the velociraptors (dinosaurs) were evolving in a definite human direction, with greater and greater brain size and intelligence and better and better hands with more and more upright stature. Had they not gone extinct at the great K/T extinction event, they may well have become "humanoid" and developed space travel and digital computers and radio telescopes and the whole nine yards, many, many millions of years ago. But generally, once a species specializes into a particular environmental niche, no other species can get a foothold, unless something like an asteroid impact intervenes, as with the dinosaurs. Your question could also be asked in many other ways, such as why don't modern day fish evolve into amphibians? The answer is that there are already a plethora of land adapted vertebrates that would view any such attempt as "lunch" to put it mildly.