Are Animals Evolving Intellectually?

[Deleted]

Unlike human beings, animals can actually adapt to their environment.

Human addapt enviroment to their needs, thats what I call intelligence and higher being.

[Deleted]

No, we change the environment to suit us.

When was the last time you trotted around the Alaskan winter without clothes?

So what? the animals that live there have evolved for thousands of years+ to adapt. So would we if we had to.

What you're saying is completely off the point too though. If you take a tropical rainforest animal and put it in alaska, how long do you think it's gonna live? Death is the only thing it's gonna adapt to.

[Deleted]

Naturally they will evolve in some way but they still have an ability to adapt and learn on their own which is what we see. Domesticated dogs are essentially bred away from their original evolutionary path anyway.

[Deleted]

Well, there is a lot of pressure to become more intelligent with urbanization. To survive, the cats and dogs have to use their intellect to evade catchers and to steal food which often requires skills to open locks, doors etc. Pets usually don't require these skills as they're fed anyway and kept happy by their owners but they don't exactly "contribute" either as most people have them neutered.

And cats are more likely to become intelligent than dogs as most people don't care about their breed(do cats even have them?), while mutts are generally not wanted so humans try to keep dog breeds more or less pure and will breed out most of the intelligence that may randomly evolve in stray dogs.

What...? Evolution doesn't happen overnight.

[Deleted]

Humans adapt to their environment just as any other animal. A good example is our overbite. Humans didn't use to have an overbite a few hundred years ago, but with the invention of the knife and fork, we no longer had to wear down our incisors the same way, and there ya go; overbite. Should we get rid of the knife and fork, we would also get rid of our overbite.

We could of course also go back a bit, and realize that we used to hang from trees limbs, until we came down and started to roam the savanna instead. Then we had to run away and run after predators and prey, and there ya go, endurance runners. Then again, if you look at the average American these days, they rarely even have to walk, let alone run, and they've adapted to lying down on couches quite nicely.

Yes, humans do find a way to adapt their environment to suit their needs as well, but it doesn't somehow negate our equal ability to adapt to our environment. If you threw a bunch of polar bears in the middle of the hottest Africa, they'd have to do some serious adapting, which is what they're having to do already, seeing as though we've destroyed their habitat almost completely.

Adaptation and evolution are two different things. Humans can adapt to an environment just as any other animal can.

[Grimbold21]

When i saw the tittle of the thread, i was sure this was gonna be about that piece of news of a orangotan that tries to fish after seeing local fishermen doing it

[PosPosPos]

No, we change the environment to suit us.

When was the last time you trotted around the Alaskan winter without clothes?

Your harping on semantics aside, that would really be the very definition of adapting to the environment.

[Mihalik]

Because only one is actually the definition of evolutionary adaptation.

The argument can be made that Intelligence is the human evolutionary adaptation to hostile environments.

If we are cold we use other animals skins for protection/build fires, if we are trying to catch fast animals we create spears/bows etc.

[Collegeguy]

No, they aren't right now as the title of the thread.

The same climate challenges that created intelligence are long gone atm, and many animals are designed to migrate instead of actually deal with those challenges.

[plat0nic]

The argument can be made that humans are not evolving from their original so called "origin". The original homo sapiens were more hairy, stronger, most likely faster, more suited to the environment. The argument can be made that we were cross bred or received genetic manipulation somewhere along the lines from Extra Terrestrials that have caused us to evolve in a completely different direction than is natural to our environment.