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➪ If animals had evolved at the same rate of humans (in terms of intelligence), what do you think would be the dominant species on earth today ?
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Answers
The thing is: Evolution has no goals, no fixed paths. You can say that all animals evolved at “the same rate” as humans: “minute by minute, hour by hour, century by century”.
Also, the idea of humans being “the dominant species” is just anthropocentric chauvinism.
As phrased your question doesn’t make sense.
Now, your question could be rephrased as If natural selection would have pressured other animal to develop an enlarged brain with an intellectual power similar to human’s what would this animal be?
Well, the obvious answer is that this already happened and the name of that animal was Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. You can add other members of the Homo genus to the list.
But probably you are asking about non Homo animals.
Again, the most obvious answer are in our extremely close cousins Pan troglodytes and Pan paniscus or chimpanzees and bonobos respectively. They have more or less the same body plan and the same brain configuration as humans so if they had needed it for their survival they probably would have evolved a brain capable of culture, civilization, technology, abstract thought and science like humans. Or perhaps not, because a key feature of modern humans is the ability of complex oral languages and that came from an accident (our tracheas descended, allowing us to have a wide range of sounds andthe ability to choke with food).
But, again, you might be asking about non-ape animals. I’ll skip the other primates, then, for this reason.
Well, there are several “usual suspects” for the role of potential hyper-intelligent animal. Dolphins, elephants, crows, parrots, octopuses, maybe dogs, cats, horses, racoons and many others that I don’t remember now. Even some dinosaurs like Troodon are candidates for this position.
The thing is that none of these animals developed the particular form of intelligence of humans, maybe because there wasn’t any evolutive pressure on them to push them into an equivalent path to ours. Or maybe because even with an evolutive pressure that could lead to that path the random nature of evolution made them take other paths to “solve” the same “problem”.
An equivalent example taken from Jared Diamond’s “The third chimpanzee”: Woodpecking. This, the ability of make holes on trunks by percussion in order to access to the worms inside the tree, is exclusive of one lineage of birds, the woodpeckers. No other bird and no other animal developed woodpecking, even when they feed on worms from trees and even when their physiology would have allowed to evolve woodpecking (in the case of birds: stronger neck muscles and a stronger beak). It doesn’t matter how efficient evolutive adaptation is woodpecking it happened only once (although there are several species of woodpeckers they are all related).
Same thing can happen with human-like intelligence. Even if it is a very efficient adaptation and even if there are many animals with physiologies that would allow that adaptation it may never happen again.
But let’s assume it happens again. There is this thing: we are what we are not only because we have a big brain. We also have a very special hand and a very special vocal system. And a very special diet that might have been the starting point of all the process that went from Australopitecines to us.
Our bodies are as responsible for our civilizations and our technologies as our brains are.
Imagine that for some undisclosed reason elephants evolve to an hyper-intelligent species. Let’s call them Gurfans since we shouldn’t call them elephants more than we shouldn’t be called australopitecines. Anyway, gurfans would share a lot of characteristics with modern elephants and they would be quadrupeds with a prehensile trunk. They wouldn’t be humanoid, they wouldn’t walk upright and they wouldn’t have hands because that would mean a lot of drastic changes from the original body plan of an elephant and something like that would never happen.
So, as with humans, gurfan “civilization” would be dependant not only on their brain power but also on their bodies. Gurfans have one “arm/hand” (the trunk) and four legs. This means that their civilization was developed by one-armed four legged probably massive individuals and not (as in our case) by two-armed two legged medium sized individuals.
This alone would yield as a result something that would be hard to distinguish as “civilization” if we think in human terms. If we put the other variables, like diet or the communication apparatus, we move into more weird territories. Perhaps a different body shape yields something that is, from our human perspective, undistinguishable from the wild “less evolved” elephant.
And the same applies with all the other non-simian candidates. The lack of hands (and in the case of dolphins the lack of dry materials) would yield “civilizations” so drastically different of what we call civilization that we wouldn’t be able to identify them.