Like what?
Please read the posts you respond to.
I did. I did not find any examples of things that could not develop under water.
Yes, that’s right up there with, “If we descended from monkeys, why do monkeys still exist?”
Clearly you did not.
The posts you are responding to posited that whale-like intelligence could not develop on land. The reason being that land animals’s salient problems do not include keeping track in real time of a wide variety of social, predator, and prey actors in a huge volume of space, problems of salience so alien to us that we can scarcely understand what they are.
Not at all. The most intelligent creatures in the oceans did not evolve there, but are mammals that took to an aquatic life. Fish don’t have schools.
Nyuk nyuk nyuk
Think again.
Really? Flying creatures don’t move around in 3 dimensions? Nor do creatures that live in trees? Or, for that matter, creatures that live mostly in 2-D but need to be aware of things in 3-D.
I did. The answer to the original question is ‘absolutely not’. Human intelligence could have evolved only in the way it did. That’s why intelligence in animals is rare. It doesn’t usually pay. Being faster, stronger, bigger, more prolific, etc., are the easier traits to acquire. Evolutionarily speaking, acquiring intelligence is not the easiest or best way to be a successful species.
Maybe you misunderstood. You said:
Name one thing about our intelligence that cannot exist in the sea.
Questions of animal intelligence regularly devolve into a litmus test of observer bias, personal insecurities, and sweeping statements.
I have to admit, however, that claims that humans lacked “human-level intelligence” for the vast majority of human existence are pretty novel.
That was not the question. The question was whether human-like intelligence could *evolve *in the ocean. The answer is ‘no’. I have given the reasons why. Human intelligence is basically mammalian, and specifically arboreal, then bipedal primate. Being arboreal and then bipedal allows our forelimbs to be relieved of the chore of bearing weight. It allows hands to develop. The rest follows.
Or that illiterate people today aren’t human.
This whole discussion reminds me of the short story THEY’RE MADE OUT OF MEAT.
By some of the logic in this thread, if aliens surveyed Earth a couple million years ago the answer to the question “can this planet evolve an industrial society?” would be “no.” Where are all the smart animals?
But that was your answer.
What is it about an aquatic environment that would prevent hands from evolving?
They didn’t. * No advantage.
Apparently (if I am remembering this correctly from some lectures several years ago), freshwater fish and saltwater fish remember things differently. If you introduce a food to freshwater fish, once they learn to eat it, they remember it forever. If they don’t see it for a year and then you reintroduce it, they will go straight back to eating it again. Saltwater fish don’t remember a food type for more than a few months. The theory was that the marine environment is so variable, and constantly changing, there is no point for saltwater fish to hold on to memories that might never be relevant again.
This is the kind of thing that makes me think that human-like intelligence would not evolve in the oceans. But human-level intelligence is not the same thing as human-like.
How so?
It’s almost as good as being in, say, some sort of weightless environment, where supporting weight is unnecessary. Kind of like, oh, I don’t know, floating in water all of the time.
To cut to the chase: “it never evolved” is NOT evidence of “it could never have evolved”. That’s a pathetically weak argument. Evolution is not inevitable; it does not work toward a goal.
You don’t have a college freshman’s understanding of evolution or biology.
It didn’t because there was no need for it. Evolution is not goal-directed. Our intelligence is an adaptation to our specific environment.
Evolution cannot detect that there is a “need” for something and go “Ah, ha! It’d be really useful to have a super-duper brain! Let’s build that!”
I repeat: your understanding of evolution is severely flawed, as evidenced by all of your posts in this thread.