crows and parrots dolphins elephants chimps and orangutans octopi
Just looking more into this because is this discussion is fascinating:
- Life transitioned from uni to multicellular multiple times. Animals and land plants both evolved from single celled lineages independently. Fungi like Ascomycota and Basidiomycota went multicellular independently. Even green, red and brown algae went multicellular independently.
- Ctenophores (comb jellies) might have evolved nerves independently. Some sponges and placozoans have cells that perform coordinated, nerve‐like functions. These use a different genetic and cellular toolkit that synapses and seem to be an independent evolution.
- Octopi evolved brains independently of us. Our last common ancestor just had a primitive nerve net.
So at least the path from unicellular life to monkey/octopus level intelligence doesn't seem like a fluke at all to me. It seems like even on the same planet the major transitions occur repeatedly and independently.
The jump from monkey to human happened so fast that indicates to me its not vanishingly unlikely. (Monkeys as smart as chimps are thought to have evolved 15-20M years ago). You might say octopi and birds are older and haven't evolved but they didn't have hands to take advantage of their intelligence and create a positive feedback loop.
I'm trying to imagine where evolution and super-intelligence seem irreconcilable. Maybe it's the jump from monkeys to the Homo genus, where brain size first started to run away? I think its clear how increasing brain size can confer an advantage there once the stage is properly set. Chimps already had complex social dynamics and rudimentary tool use. We even see initial phases of modestly increasing brain size with the Australopiths that preceded Homo. However our hominid lineage is the only one that did have an increasing brain size.
Is it the progression from early Homo to us? That seems like a natural and inevitable progression once the process started.