The well-known anthropologist, popularizer of science, scientific editor of the portal Antropogenesis.ru, candidate of biological sciences, associate professor of the anthropology department of the biological faculty of Moscow State University. Lomonosov Stanislav Drobyshevsky.
- It is enough to look at the chicken - and everything becomes obvious. There are kangaroos, jerboas, extinct dinosaurs, kangaroo rats and many other animals that cannot be called intelligent in any way, because bipedality has nothing to do with intelligence. Another thing is that bipedality makes it possible to free the forelimbs. This is not necessary for the development of intelligence, but it can stimulate its formation. We have touch and other senses that are transmitted to the brain, thereby developing it. In addition, and this is very important, you can make tools with free limbs.
Here the question is pertinent: is mind possible without labor activity? The fact is that we know rationality only in one version - ours. And what kinds of it may still exist, we simply do not know. So far, rationality has appeared only among those who used the tools of labor. Moreover, the more this someone uses labor activity, the wiser he is. If an elephant has a trunk with which it can do something, it is natural to expect that it is smarter than, for example, a rhinoceros, which does not have such an organ. The same is true for our closest relatives - chimpanzees, who can also do something with their hands, but antelopes, for example, cannot. Although the sizes of these pairs of animals are more or less comparable, their intelligence levels are different.
Stanislav Drobyshevsky
Dolphins can do things with their mouths, just like New Caledonian crows with their beaks. But with the help of your mouth you cannot make many tools of labor, so their rationality reaches a dead end and does not develop further. For the emergence of reason, there must be some prerequisites, many circumstances must coincide: a certain diet, the environment, a combination of predators and competitors, communication with representatives of their own species, etc. And bipedality is just another of such conditions that frees the front limbs for labor activities. And by itself, the number of legs here, by the way, is not important.
If the mind arose on the basis of, for example, insects, which have six limbs, they could be completely four-legged, and make tools with their front paws. The same would be the case if, for example, vertebrates came out on land, being not four-legged, but six-legged.
In addition, there is a difference in what kind of bipedality we are talking about, because the bipedality of a person and the bipedality of a bird are not at all the same thing. In all bipeds, except for us, the spine is actually horizontal (only the neck can be vertical, but the back still remains horizontal). Look at a chicken or at the same dinosaurs (in their modern reconstruction) - they have no upright posture. The concept of bipedalism and upright walking are not at all synonymous. Indeed, in order to drag the same tools from place to place, it would be good to be vertical, not inclined, otherwise it will simply be overweight and the animal will fall forward.
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If we talk about another important factor - diet, then theoretically the mind can develop on any diet. But this is theoretical. In practice, we see that it developed with us and developed at the moment when we became truly omnivorous. While the australopithecines ate mostly only plant foods, there could be no question of any kind of reason. Omnivorousness is important because it is stressful. After all, if a creature is omnivorous, today it eats fruit, tomorrow - insects, the day after tomorrow - antelope. And he should include different programs of behavior for different occasions. If an animal feeds on one thing, it has a single program, usually congenital (to work universally). Take, for example, an anteater, which only knows how to destroy termite mounds and get ants, or a colobus, which feeds exclusively on leaves,and he doesn't need anything else in his life, or a lion that catches an antelope, and apart from hunting such animals, he is not interested in any other skills. In this case, there is no stimulus for the development of the brain - everything is already defined and programmed. And an omnivorous creature needs to constantly invent something in order to get different types of food.
This became especially relevant when our ancestors became omnivores in the savannah, because, on the one hand, there is a lot of food, and on the other, it is distributed over a vast territory. We must constantly go to different places, getting one thing or another. The need to do this was one of the main impulses for the emergence of intelligence.
Tyrannosaurus
Sociability, that is, sociality, is also an important factor. The more socially an animal is, the more brains it has and the more complex its behavior, because communication involves many non-standard situations, and therefore, a reason to develop intelligence.
Reasonableness is generally associated with atypical situations. There are many definitions of this term, but here's what I like the most: rationality is the ability to react in a non-standard way to non-standard stimuli, that is, every time to give a new type of reaction, assimilate a huge amount of very different information and find connections between seemingly unrelated things. Even when it comes to a standard situation, the mind sometimes gives a non-standard answer to it. In the case of rationality, there are no innate programs of behavior, on the contrary, all programs are acquired, and besides, they are reprogrammed during life.
Stanislav Drobyshevsky