Evolution of Human Intelligence

It’s possible but far from inevitable without intervention. It seems a confluence of unlikely (and still debated) factors combined to make tool-wielding + symbolic reasoning + language + culture etc an evolutionarily winning strategy. This is sometimes called the cognitive niche. But most species reach an evolutionary local maximum where increased intelligence offers no further survival gains; for example, sharks and crocodiles have been relatively unchanged for millions of years.

Please provide a simpler explanation than “species begins eating calorically dense food, increasing brain size, and becoming smarter”. Your supposedly simpler explanation must involve an unknown outside intelligence of some kind. I’ll wait.

"Because if it's possible to be more intelligent, why aren't we?"Because deep abstract thoughts about the nature of the universe and elaborate deep thinking were maybe not as useful while we were chasing lions and buffaloes with a spear?We just had to be smarter then them. Which included finding out that tools were great. Learning about the habits of the prey and optmize hunting success. Those who were smarter in that capacity had a greater chance of reproducing. Those

Because slower humans have intelligence?

I've been inclined to think it has something to do with communication and community-forming tendencies. It seems that a number of other species, including Octopuses and African Grey Parrots, have pretty significant intelligence for animals. Yet their greater intelligence than most other animals doesn't seem to get them a really game-changing advantage over them. Human intelligence, or perhaps communication and organization in combination with them, has given us a series of game-changin

Or, at the very beginning of when evolution reached a "high enough" intelligence to make us use tools (to make tools), it ceased to be of significance compared to the rate of civilization evolution we experienced. We domesticated fire 400,000 years ago, I don't think human level intelligence hasn't evolved much since. (Nutrition, education, knowledge sharing increased much though!) So, our current brain architecture is "one" reached solution (not an optimal) in the possible states of evolved int

Beautiful analogy! Human intelligence is an extreme on the spectrum of animal intelligence, and evolution by natural selection is the law of nature that made it happen.

I firmly believe that raw intelligence has little to do with our lead as a species, and it may even be the case that there are numerous animals with more raw intelligence than humans, especially predators.Our advantage comes from our ability to pass information on to eachother. A piece of knowledge that took 10,000 hours of thinking, observing, and experimenting to come by may only take 4 hours to pass on.Humans can do this much better than any other animal. That's a skill borne of co

Evolution gaves us very powerful brains. Why not use it?

I subscribe to the theory that our own bias as humans leads us to believe that human style intelligence is the pinacle of evolution throughout the universe. As one of the great old sci-fi writers said human intelligence has yet to be proven as a long term evolutionary advantage. It may be that less intelligent but more sustainable life is more typical. Look at the dolphins for example. They don't seem to have any interest in building radio transmitters or spaceships yet they are very intelligen