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RobinHanson's avatar

Many birds live in jungles, and have smart brains. So clearly jungles is far from enough.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

It's difficult to imagine getting to technological civ being a really hard step. It's true that being smart isn't enough; you need a big brain + dexterity + language (which is initially dependent on a big brain but also specific genes). You need to be smart enough to solve natural puzzles and use tools, be precise enough to make tools better efficiently, and then pass on the knowledge. Then give it a few hundred thousand years and a few ups and downs in civ and you've random walked to explosive tech take off as we did.

Now, birds like corvids can understand water displacement puzzles instantly, and can use tools but will probably not easily evolve the dexterity required to optimize them, so not every path leads to all the required abilities. Dolphins have it even worse; smart and social but in a highly limited environment for tool use. It seems that the viable evolutionary path for all three factors on a planet is an arboreal lifestyle where you develop not just intelligence and sociality/language, but also the prerequisite for hyper-dextrous hands. Even then you may need to be forced to move away from the jungle to grasslands for grasping hands to evolve human level dexterity; other great apes remain stuck at a level of dexterity that is high enough to use tools but not easily optimize them.

All that said, the social part probably evolves easily, leading to complex brains, and then once you have a sufficient level, perhaps all you need is for jungles to exist for long periods and then give way to grasslands periodically due to climate change. If that's a reasonably full description of the relevant pressures, then tech can't be a very hard step from complex brains, unless for some reason jungles are the rarest thing in the universe.

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