Here’s the thing.
When we look at our very close evolutionary relatives, we don’t see the same social behaviors. Humans, chimps, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans and the various species of gibbons all have very different social systems and interact with each other very differently.
Humans and wolves have more similar social structures than humans do with gibbons, or wolves with foxes. That’s why humans and dogs get along so well. But it’s not because we inherited our shared social systems from a common ancestor 100 million years ago. It’s because we both independently evolved those systems very recently, within the last 10 million years. Otherwise, foxes would have the same social system as wolves.
It’s a simple fact that some animals are solitary, and some are social, even between very closely related species.
Of course all mammals have some social behaviors, mothers usually don’t attack their babies, littermates usually don’t attack each other, mating pairs usually don’t attack each other. And so the elaborate social behaviors of various mammal species grow out of that foundation. Or they don’t, and the species is solitary. Or the species has complex facultative social behaviors whereby they are sometimes solitary and sometimes social.
And this is obviously how closely related species can be either social or solitary, and evolve different systems quickly, by elaborating or suppressing the common mammalian social heritage.
But just because humans and wolves have similar social systems doesn’t mean wolves are just people with four legs and fur. They’re not, any more than humans are just naked wolves that walk on two legs. There are two traps here, one is not recognizing the commonality between humans and other organisms, and the other is not recognizing the differences between them.
Both are wrong. Every species is different, and every individual of that species is (sometimes very slightly) different. It’s mostly wrong to imagine that most animals act consciously. It can be very easy to show the limitations of some animals behavior systems by introducing a stimulus that produces the wrong behavior.
Stick a chicken’s head under its wing and the chicken goes to sleep. Put a popsicle stick with a red dot into a gull’s nest, and the chicks peck at it even though the stick looks nothing like their parent’s beak. Put a picture of a naked woman in front of a human male and he might get sexually aroused, even though there is no actual naked woman.
The thing is, most animals don’t have the brain structures that enable conscious thought that humans do. But what that shows is not that animals are automatons, but rather than conscious thought plays a much smaller part in human behavior than we humans think it does. A human and a dog can react pretty much the same way to the same stimuli, but the dog just does it and doesn’t think about it. The human might think about it, but they just do it anyway. The thinking is secondary to the action in many cases. How many people do you know who are trying to lose weight? It’s a very simple equation, to lose weight you just have to eat less. So why can’t they lose weight? Their conscious mind just has to direct the body, and it will happen.
Except that’s not what happens. You find yourself eating that carton of ice cream at 1 AM even though your conscious brain doesn’t want to.
Another example is the ability of people to accomplish tasks without really thinking about them. The classic example is driving home from work and you kind of zone out and find yourself at home without really remembering driving home. Your conscious mind takes a back seat and your non-conscious behavior takes over. And this is what a dog’s life is like all the time. The dog reacts in complex and usually appropriate ways to its environment, in the same way a human does, it just doesn’t think about what it’s done.
Obviously thinking about things lets humans have some incredibly elaborate behaviors that dogs or chimps simply can’t do. You can’t teach a chimp to write Powershell batch files. On the other hand, it’s pretty hard to teach most humans.
The point is, human consciousness is an extra layer on top of the more ancestral mammalian brain. Other mammals have similar sorts of brain structures, but in most it’s really small, in some species it’s pretty elaborate, but in humans it’s crazily elaborate. Our consciousness isn’t something unique to humans, but our crazily elaborated consciousness is. Just like a giraffe’s neck is derived from an ancestral condition of having a normal neck like an okapi, but the giraffe’s neck is crazily elaborated compared to other mammals. On the one hand, it’s just a neck like all other mammals have. On the other hand, it’s way different because it’s much much larger than similar animal necks.