Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => Marine Science => Topic started by: myriam on 12/09/2010 13:47:49
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if we observe the behavior of some animals we can not deny the great degree of their intelligence and the most important of this matter is the capacity of animals to learn and to evolute not only in form but also in behaving,
take the example of the evolution of the hunting method of some kind dolphin and the hunting strategies of the salted waters crocodile !!!
now I wonder how is the most intelligent animal on this planet ?
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Umm... evolute is the wrong word to use in this context:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolute (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolute)
I suspect you simply meant evolve.
In any case, you have got things back-to-front and are putting the cart before the horse; intelligence is not a causal factor in evolution, it is (or disputably, may be) a consequence of it.
Evolution occurs due to random mutation, and because it's random there is no scope for intelligence to play a direct role in directing how something evolves i.e. the nature of a particular mutation.
Having said that, we could consider Inuits. Arguably, it was intelligence that induced a group of people to move to, and live in arctic conditions where, after a long enough period, their descendants could be said to have evolved to survive in those conditions. However, just moving to the arctic, on its own, wasn't enough to make the people evolve into Inuits; someone within that group must have undergone a random mutation that made them better able to survive in those conditions and which was passed down to their descendants. It could have just as easily gone wrong though, because if that particular random mutation hadn't occurred to that particular person then we wouldn't have had Inuits at all (which is not to say that a different mutation couldn't have occurred, in which case we'd still have Inuits but they'd be a different race from the ones we have now, just as we have quite a variety of different desert dwelling races)
Although by posting this in the Marine Science section you're clearly angling at the whales in your question, you shouldn't discount the apes or elephants.