There’s a professor at St. Andrew’s, Kevin Lalland I think, who has done a lot of work on imitation. His theory is that that imitation is generally useful but without high enough copying fidelity culture won’t develop.

For example monkeys have been known to exhibit fashion trends (hanging a bit of grass out of their ear). But these trends fizzle out over time. Before more behaviors can be layered on top.

I think you’re right about those factors creating a good environment for this to happen and I bet they’re sufficient but not necessary. Too bad we don’t have another example :)

Chickens are bipedal. There are tree frogs with opposable thumbs. Elephants and cetaceans have strong social behavior. Other hominids have all these.

What other animals make fire? Cooked food was the game changer.

https://www.livescience.com/5946-chimps-master-step-controll...

Fire is rad but I don’t see how it explains modern civilization.

If most animals are operating on a calorie deficit and fixing this can lead to larger brains then why haven’t domesticated animals evolved towards our level of intelligence?

I don't think fire and therefore cooked food was THE change, though I think it definitely helped, but

>If most animals are operating on a calorie deficit and fixing this can lead to larger brains then why haven’t domesticated animals evolved towards our level of intelligence?

Because farm animals do not evolve, they are bred. We have directed their evolutionary paths for centuries, away from what it would do on it's own, towards creatures that produce more milk, more meat, or fattier meat.

Probably because our interference with their breeding selects for non-smart qualities.

What interference? The animal world was free to evolve for the majority of the history of the earth. Literally millions of years and nothing came of it. Until we came along.

Domestication, the process we put animals in to make them peaceful enough to provide a calorie surplus without stomping the early humans to death because they got scared by a branch

Modern civilization is multi-special.

From a calories-per-unit-of-labor standpoint, dogs and cats have now clearly eclipsed humanity, using their emotional intelligence to create a post-scarcity Marxian utopia where they can mostly do whatever they want all day while humans toil for them.

Other species have culture (behavioural traits/patterns and social organisation/cues that are communicated, not innately inherited via genes and development), and other species have tech (making intentional modifications to their environment, creating structures that better support their existence).

What seems to be rare is the ability to use culture a medium to store and transmit tech.

It's that Noah Yuval Harari book, isn't it?

What's separates humans is we can construct common fictions that we actually believe in, eg "my job is to maximize shareholder value" where both the corporation and the responsibilities towards it are made up but generally believed.

There's of course a rather large elephant in this room, too, that decides a lot of things about our lives.

Harari’s book is awesome but I think he gets stuck too far up the hierarchy.

Trying to describe culture with stories feels like trying to describe biology with proteins. It gets us most of the way there but also adds a whole ton of complexity because it misses the fundamental nature of the system.

Humans are great at general and accurate imitation. This probably seeded a runaway evolutionary process, the result of which was tools, fire, and language.

I think if any animal has a shot at sentience, it'll be dogs. We've been improving their diets and breeding for intelligence.

This is what the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn proposes. Interesting read.

the same thing probably happened early on, chemical evolution may have thrown up multiple replicators, but our ancestors had some small edge which allowed them to literally eat the competition.