Why did man not remain at a level comparable to the other primates but evolved more intelligence than what is needed to simply survive?
by 
-O-uknow
ANSWERS: 4
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good question. the way i see it is that level of "intelligence" has gotten the world in some serious situations. take green house gases for example. they didn't just pop out of nowhere. they are a result of such "intelligence". nature had no idea what was in store for it.
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Ignoring any Biblical implications. Possibily a lack of fangs, a lack of fur, a lack of a prehensile tail coupled with a larger brain just made everything fall into place. But perhaps ther was a grander design.
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'Simply surviving' isn't the goal in terms of evolutionary theory-it's all about generating the most offspring. The more progeny a species can get to survive, the more natural selection will favor that species. Evolution certainly doesn't have the foresight to know which adaptations will be trouble down the road, it can't get complacent when things are just okay, and it doesn't have some great plan for us. There just happened to be a niche that we could fill by becoming intelligent and learning how to manipulate our environment. By using our adaptation, we were able to control our environment more and more, and create more offspring that were able to do the same. We (understandably) tend to think about evolution from a very human-centric point of view, and prize our intelligence as the most valuable adaptation. A bacterium might just as well ask (if it could) why it were given the amazing capacity to reproduce every twenty minutes when most other organisms need to wait hours, days, or even (gasp!) months.
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SomeSay said it with "survival is not the goal, reproducing is". So, the smarter folk lived long enough to produce more young, who got smarter and so on. There's no logic or intelligence sitting behind evolution to say "Okay, that's enough." So smarter people just kept on coming. Other primates DID evolve 'more' intelligence - two known examples being neanderthals and homo floriensis. It turned out that OUR ancestors, homo erectus, were better at the intelligence/social development thing and muscled these other two (and maybe more) species out of the niche. We now fill it so thoroughly that no other species can even begin moving into it.
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