I'm not sure I entirely understand your point, though. It's very clear that becoming intelligent was something that we developed as an evolutionary strategy because there was a niche that could be filled.
strategy (according to Merriam-Webster): a careful plan or method : a clever stratagem b : the art of devising or employing plans or stratagems toward a goal
a careful plan.........sounds like intelligent design.
Actually, evolutionary strategies are just shorthand for a collection of traits that species use to survive. The term derives from game theory (quite an important topic in evolutionary biology) where a strategy is a series of choices. The choices don't have to be made consciously or even with purpose, but arise naturally from selective pressure into different niches.
how is a longer gestation time a sacrifice? according to natural selection any mutation that survives must provide an advantage of some sort.
Ah, here's your misconception. This isn't true, not every mutation has to be beneficial to be retained by a population. It just has to not kill you or, more specifically, not impair your chances of reproduction.
Long gestation times are required for the development of intelligence because children in the womb require more time to develop a larger brain. The shorter the gestation time, the less time for the foetus to develop.
we don't have special dietary requirements, people get by eating all kinds of diets, actually we can eat almost any food source we don't need a mixture of all of them. i mean think of eskimos, there food source has to be mostly meat because plants have a hard time growing in in ice. however there are also lots of vegetarians around the world. i mean sure humans need certain nutrients to be strong but animals need the same thing (certain nutrients-not the same nutrients necessarily) only difference is that animals are "programmed" (through instinct) to eat foods that provide them, humans can over rule there instinct.
Developing large brains requires certain proteins and other nutrients in larger quantities than you would otherwise find in a regular mammalian diet. One of our quite handy traits is that we are omnivores, but unfortunately this doesn't mean we can become vegans without any consequences (a vegan diet without the necessary proteins can actually kill you - this is why vegans take supplements).
a teaching period is not necessary to intelligence or we would never know anything, because who taught the first man? nono intelligence is about being able to figure things out yourself.
It is absolutely necessary. Other animals teach their children all sorts of things. Baby predators learn how to hunt effectively from their parents, other types of animals (primarily intelligent ones like primates and dolphins) learn how to socialise. No-one needs to have "taught the first man" because 1) there was no first man, and 2) intelligence isn't a binary switch - the hypothetical "first man" could quite easily have learnt from his slightly less intelligent parents. This is the chicken and the egg argument taken to extreme - there was no first chicken to lay the first egg; there were animals which were like chickens which laid eggs, and at some point in the evolutionary continuum we decide to define one of these creatures as a chicken.
but even with all of this the premise or your argument is bad. sacrifice is something that is done. its almost like the animals were saying. "hey i wanna be intelligent" and then others said "no that wouldn't be fair" so the first ones said "well fine but what if we did all of this stuff to ourselves so that its more of a burden?''
i hope that thought sounded ridiculous because it should. it is positively the most ridiculous theory i could possibly come up with.
It's absolutely ridiculous, yes. That is because it is what is called a straw-man argument. That is not what I am arguing, because you seem to fundamentally misunderstand the meanings of some quite common words in context. The "sacrifice" made in our development does not have to have been conscious - the sacrifices were evolutionary adaptions that allowed for increased intelligence but unfortunately impaired other traits (hence the word sacrifice).
If there were multiple sapient species, they would have to have developed fairly concurrently, due to the very little time it has taken for humans to flourish. And, of course, multiple sapient or near-sapient species would naturally compete - see the theorised competition between the contemporaneous Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens as an example.
that is my point exactly, im saying that we have all of these different intelligent people running around. so why did humans win? physically they are weaker then there predecessors, but mentally they are exactly the same. so who has the advantage?
They aren't mentally the same, necessarily. It's commonly thought that
Homo neanderthalensis was less intelligent than
Homo sapiens. There are alternate theories as well; competition between species isn't the only mechanism for extinction - it could have been pure luck that made our particular branch win out. Weather change is commonly cited, since
H. neanderthalensis was better adapted for colder weather.
And this isn't taking into account that they are not competing against their predecessors except in the strict inter-population competition sense. The fossil record clearly shows improvements in cranial capacity, indicating that we were probably more intelligent than our predecessors.
on top of that you don't see a great amount of diversity in humans, there is some in the different people from different continents but there isn't the wide diversity you see in most animals. take the cat for instance, there is the raw power of the lion, the speed and grace of a cheetah, and then there are house cats. all of which presumable evolved from the same species. so why aren't humans like that? why, in fact, did humans seem to evolve almost exactly the same around the world?
Humans didn't evolve "the same" around the world. We are descended from a common ancestral population that spread from Africa. Furthermore, humans have not actually been around all that long. Evolution takes time to produce speciation and population divergence, and the human population has not had the time to see speciation or even significant morphological differences (aside from variations on skin colour, facial features, average height and weight and so on between populations). The house cat and the lion are descended from a common ancestor some 25 million years ago. Humans originated, according to the evidence, about 200,000 years ago. That's two orders of magnitude in difference.
This is the concept of irreducible complexity (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreducible_complexity), which is largely rejected by the scientific community.
that is an assertion that needs proving. why do scientists reject it?
Because no evidence of it has actually been found. Everything claimed to be irreducibly complex has been found not to be (see also: the debate around the eye). It's quite simple - irreducible complexity is an argument from ignorance and therefore is not only a logical fallacy but is in fact one with no supporting evidence.
