The Paradox of the Elephant Brain

I think I would consider the dog brain to be generally inferior, sufficiently so that I would simply label it as inferior. With sufficient general intelligence, you can delegate tasks that your brain is inadequate to accomplish to technology (or possibly other entities, like dogs!), something dogs cannot do and something that makes the human brain clearly superior.

You can argue against human brain superiority without access to technology, but then we're comparing the two in more specific scenarios. Without any particular constraints, the human brain has sufficiently superior general intelligence to make it superior overall.

This view of evolution seems to be surprisingly widespread in my experience, even among those who consider themselves scientifically minded.

In colloquial terms, think we'd find few who'd argue humans flying around in helicopters shooting elephants with high power rifles are not more evolved than said elephants.

> Consider it a big parallel hill-climbing problem with each animal being a local optimum for its environment.

There is rarely "its" environment. Because environment is shared. Especially shared with humans, who have great ability to manipulate said environment (usually for the worse). They will polute it, introduce other species which would end up dominating the food chain, completely change the physical form (built a dam and alter the course of a river), end up enslaving species in order to provide food for themselves. Would you say chickens have evolved and got to an optimal point? Or have they been evolved by humans so they can turn into dinner.

> Consider my dog: ... would you really call one of them "inferior" to the other?

I would call the organism which types on the computer, connected to an artifically created world wide network, and who is able to contemplate the fate of the universe, evolution and other concepts, a bit more evolved ;-)

Clearly a mutual ancestor of chimps, gorillas and humans did develop human-like intelligence. I'm not sure it's meaningful to ask why, say, chimps didn't develop in that way since they ended up being a subgroup subject to different evolutionary pressure.

Evolution isn't magic, it's just in an inherent process of an adaptive system. Like I wrote above, I think of it as a huge, loosely coupled hill-climbing computation, but the different nodes run at different rates and interact. You could also think of it as a neural net without a directed training system.

I think your second question is very interesting and I have wondered about it too. Ignoring the case of the neanderthalers for a moment, it's likely there were lots of variants who just suffered some environmental issue (e.g. a drought where they lived, or an invasion from some carnivore) that impacted a population too small to survive the threat. (and for purpose of discussion we presume this group were legitimately speciated from us). This happens to animals all the time. So we look back with survivorship bias.

The neanderthalers are more complex since they did survive until very recently and may not have been a completely different species. My guess is the threat they faced was homo sapiens sapiens. Is that an inherent property of humans? Seems like it :-(.

BTW by "human-like intelligence" I assume you mean "able to make complex tools that multiply its own functions in a non-linear fashion, support a complex society, and develop the capability to live apart from the earth". Since a cockroach civilization would have different objectives and metrics from ours their behavior wouldn't look anything like ours either.

Except dolphins, of course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...