Well, I deliberately said "might". I certainly wouldn't claim anything certain for the future. I was really pointing out that a constant increase in intelligence is by no means inevitable for any species. In fact intelligence can easily go into reverse, if an increase doesn't bestow any benefit on the individuals chance of reproduction.MiM wrote: The first part "The thing with evolving greater intelligence is that there has to be a survival benefit for every tiny incremental increase, otherwise it won't happen.
Evolution has no way of working towards future benefits that might happen, once you get to a certain standard." Is standard textbook stuff, and mostly ok (although there are things like genetic drift, and pure chance playing in too).
But it's your conclusions I think resemble creationist shit. Many species have evolved some sort of intelligence. How did the Buffalo learn to make a ring, if that would be unlikely for the Water Buffalo. I see no barrier (except, perhaps the pre-existence of humans) for chimps or parrots to develop human like intelligence.
That exact process could be happening to the human species right now.
You might be right that there is no barrier to chimps and parrots evolving intelligence to match ours.
I'm sure there isn't a physical barrier. But that's kind of assuming that intelligence always increases, which is not necessarily true.
The "barrier", if there is one, would be the lack of a higher survival rate for the more intelligent.
Simple as that. It's not a physical barrier, but it would still mean that intelligence would stall.
That's happened for crocodiles, and compared to us, it happened to chimps and bonobos, who had the same ancestor as us, have had the same length of time to evolve, and yet have not evolved any noticeable increase in intelligence.
As far as Buffalo go, I don't think they consciously form a ring. they just stand side by side, and the front ends are wider than the rear. But they don't have the brains to keep that formation. Predators can usually break it up, or they just lose patience.
The problem is that a little extra intelligence would not solve that problem. So there would have to be some other benefit that came from each small increase in intelligence, to get the level up to a point where they could work that kind of thing out.
It's just a fundamental principle. For something to evolve, it has to have a route all the way. Dawkins explains it well, with a mountain with various peaks. If you go up the wrong peak, you can never get to the top of the mountain, without going backwards, downhill.
Maybe Parrots and Chimpanzees are stuck at the top of a lower intelligence peak, or they may be on the lower slopes of the highest. It's impossible to tell.