Re: Suggestive, but nothing more
Homo sapiens are a very recent arrival on the scene - chimps were around for about 2 million years before we showed up. If they were going to evolve any further they would have done so. Ditto all the other animals.
Erm, nope. We share a common ancestor with the chimps. One of its descendants stayed in chimp-type habitats. Another of its descendants found that it could survive in the new savannah, and something about that environment required enhanced intelligence.
We were lucky that we exploted a niche where enhanced intelligence was somehow of benefit. If a plague wiped out all of humanity, one of the other apes could start to exploit new niches and advance towards human levels of intelligence. None of them are so specialized that it would be difficult for them to evolve into intelligent tool users.
Evolution evolves the fittest, not the smartest. If the 2 coincide very occasionally then so be it,, but its not an inevitable outcome.
Our level of intelligence may not be inevitable, but apes, whales and elephants are also intelligent. I think that's a large enough number to say that intelligence isn't a one-in-a-universe thing.
We got there first. That's all that prevented any of the others from exploiting environments where increased intelligence was beneficial.
Did we get intelligence unreasonably quickly or unreasonably slowly? We may never know. This planet spent most of its time in the unicellular stage, but maybe we're the slow kid on the block.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
