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Asked by Kate and Peckasso :) to Chris, Josh, Rebecca, Rob, Susan on 22 Jun 2015.
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Rebecca Dewey answered on 22 Jun 2015:
Our brains can do more different things than the brains of other animals because we have adapted to live in a different environment than the one that other animals live in. Human intelligence is our ability to use logic and abstract thought (i.e. solving a problem in our heads). We have the ability to understand. We are aware of our own existence. We communicate with other people and with animals of other species. We can copy a skill from someone else and learn to do it ourselves. We can associate events with emotions. We have a memory and lots of different ways of remembering things. We can plan ahead, and we can make things that are new that we’ve never seen before. A lot of different animals (especially other primates, apes) can do a lot of these things, but not all of them.
We don’t know exactly why humans were the species to become so much more intelligent, but it may be due to the fact that we developed ways to communicate efficiently between people, and that we learned to make and use tools. We also developed empathy, the ability to understand what another person is experiencing, and this put us ahead of other species.
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Susan Cartwright answered on 22 Jun 2015:
Parts of our brains are more capable than animals’ because sometime a few million years ago, we embarked on a way of life that encouraged that development. It looks as though tool use, social behaviour and intelligence all reinforced one another to create a strong selective pressure for greater intelligence, more effective social behaviour (eventually leading to language, which was a game changer: now you can teach your children by *telling* them instead of *showing* them, develop your hunting plan in advance, etc.) and better manual dexterity for tool use. Walking bipedally instead of on all fours looks as though it might have preceded this feedback loop (the earliest hominids are bipedal, but not obviously brainier than chimps), but was probably necessary for it to get started (having your hands free obviously increases the opportunities for tool use).
Intelligence is not *obviously* the right way to go: termites are doing just fine, thank you, and don’t need large brains to do it. Our brains are very expensive in terms of energy usage: about 20% of your total energy budget goes into powering the brain. We are *now* clearly the most successful large animal that has ever lived, but for a long time we were just hanging in there: we have a rather low level of genetic diversity compared to most species, which suggests that we went through a population bottleneck at some point in the fairly recent past. It has been suggested that the population of what would become modern humans might have dropped as low as a few thousand – firmly in the “endangered species” category. So it may be that developing intelligence as a means of survival is a high risk strategy!
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