How is it we have evolved so much quicker than other creatures on earth? surely it wasn'r just a fluke?was it?

Question

the human species is only around one million years old, and yet we have elvolved to such a high extent, we can build, use electricity, ect. why is it that others creatures, such as dinosaurs, who have lived so much longer than we on this planet, never really evolved intelligence wise?

Answer 1

I think it was probably our ability for communication and the development of language. Once we could share ideas and knowledge more efficiently and detailed, we really began to take off in advancement.

Answer 2

Yeah I agree with JoelKatz. Just because humans are more intelligent doesn't mean we are more evolved. I could throw you and a parrot out of a plane and see which one of you is more 'evolved'. My money would be on the parrot!

Its also likely that out of the many thousands of species alive that some are going to be smarter than others and that there will be a smartest!

Just happened to be us (for several reasons) and if you think its a pretty big coincidence then I'll throw you an anology.

When you were created with a sperm and an egg then only 1 sperm went into the egg, out of the millions that tried only one succeeded. If any other sperm fertilised the egg then you wouldn't be here and somebody else would have been born. The fact is (for several reasons) that it happened to be yours and it just happened that you were born. No matter how unlikely the chance that your 1 sperm went it, it did. You might think thats amazing but the chances of 1 sperm out of millions doing so isn't so amazing. Theres a good chance 1 will.

The chances that humans would evolve to be the smartest species was probably unlikey but the chances that 1 species would eventually evolve to be intelligent isn't so unlikely. Its a good strategy for survival! It just happened to be us!

Hope this has made sense!

P.S. Also its not like humans have only been around for 1 million years and we have done all our evolving in that time. It's not like a million years ago we were bacteria. We have been steadily evolving for many millions of years to humans as we know today and as for the dino's! Some of our ancestors (not really humans though) were around at the same time as the dino's!

Answer 3

oh boy *opens religious can of worms*

Natural selection. Humans were obviously a lot smaller and had fewer natural defenses against large sharp toothed predators. So we had to create weapons, tools and whatnot to survive.

Answer 4

Your question has the underlying assumption that intelligence is somehow a better survival strategy than others. It makes no difference to evolution *how* creatures survive as long as they do.

Every living thing on this planet right now has evolved for just as long as every other living thing and is, in a very real sense, just as highly evolved. We don't have the sense of smell that dogs do, and squirrels can keep track of hidden nuts better than the average human.

We don't really have a good understanding of the circumstances required for intelligence to evolve. There are competing theories, and with only one living planet to look at, it's hard to be sure.

I'll basically sketch out the two most extreme viewpoints. The truth is probably in the middle.

One extreme view is that under almost any circumstances where life can evolve, intelligence will be a good survival strategy. It just requires a lot of complexity, and so it took a long time for Earth to "stumble on it". But this theory holds that under almost any circumstances, if you let evolution go on long enough, some species will tend towards greater and greater intelligence and so long as it isn't wiped out by a catastrophe, it will out-compete all the "dumber" species.

The opposite extreme is that only under very specific conditions can intelligence evolve and is intelligence beneficial. In many cases, dumber strategies work much better. For example, cockroaches have a better chance of surviving a massive meteor strike than humans do. This theory argues that intelligence only evolved on Earth because of a massive string of unlikely coincidences that made more and more complicated life forms possible, and human-style intelligence may be unique in the universe.

For example, it's possible that intelligent life cannot evolve without vision. A world sensed by smell doesn't have objects with defined boundaries that pop out at you. It may be impossible to evolve conceptual intelligence without easily-sensed, well-bounded objects to attach labels to.

So the short answer to your question is, maybe it was a fluke, maybe it just took awhile. But we didn't evolve any quicker, just in a different direction.

Answer 5

We didnt evolve. If we did evolve we would see species evolving today..

Answer 6

well i think it is because of the way the brain evolved, and not how much the brain evolved.