system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
With enough time, is every species capable of evolving to be on par with human intelligence?

I may be wording my question poorly but I want to know if it's possible for other species to reach the level of humans with enough time via evolution. Intelligence might not be the right word but could we have other species reaching the same level of control over their environment? Would this be exclusive to primates or would it be possible for other animals as well?
gpt
Kind of? We have to be careful with words here, and also think carefully about what evolution actually does.

There's often a bit of a misconception that humankind is somehow the "pinnacle" of evolution - that the "aim" of evolution is to produce increasingly advanced and sophisticated life, with intelligent life such as humans as the "goal", beyond which you would find some sort of super-intelligent creatures.

However, this is not what evolution really does. Evolution isn't a process that tries to produce the most sophisticated life. It's a process that tends to produce species that are good at producing children that survive long enough to produce their own children. If a cockroach or a shark is about as good as possible at surviving and producing children within its niche, then it is a successful species. It's not like a cockroach *must* evolve into something super-intelligent given enough time.

The other thing is that, in theory, any species could have some descendant that has human level intelligence. But it's not like you would have a super-intelligent ant. Instead, you would more likely have something so distantly descended from an ant that it probably doesn't really count as an insect anymore. It's just a matter of having enough of the right mutations. So this is where we get into semantics. Given enough time, a single-cell organism can have a human descendant. But those single-cell organisms are not really the same species as humans at all.