![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
To ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
shockwave77598:
I would say sentience and communication evolved together. The "lower animals" communicate quite nicely without being sentient. In fact it has been proven that cats have to be taught how, and what, to hunt by their mothers. This requires communication between the teacher (mother) and student (cub/kitten) to be in place. That is a reason that you cannot let loose the great cats from the zoos, to the wild, and expect them to survive. They simply do not know how, or what, to hunt. Some may learn to hunt accidentally, but a great many of them will starve to death, or have to be killed after they start preying on humans, a fairly easy target.
There are also many human societies that have no written language, like the Navajo, that survive(d) quite nicely. So communication cannot be the only advantage that sentience gives to us evolutionary speaking. There has to be something else.
Tomooncat:
I am not denying that there is a "moral compass" that steers us towards in doing right, but if that were the only case I would expect to see more cases of the compass pointing the "wrong way".
That may be an evolutionary advantage though. If we limit our hostile actions towards one another there are more of us to keep the species going.
shockwave77598:I would say sentience and communication evolved together. The "lower animals" communicate quite nicely without being sentient. In fact it has been proven that cats have to be taught how, and what, to hunt by their mothers. This requires communication between the teacher (mother) and student (cub/kitten) to be in place. That is a reason that you cannot let loose the great cats from the zoos, to the wild, and expect them to survive. They simply do not know how, or what, to hunt. Some may learn to hunt accidentally, but a great many of them will starve to death, or have to be killed after they start preying on humans, a fairly easy target.
There are also many human societies that have no written language, like the Navajo, that survive(d) quite nicely. So communication cannot be the only advantage that sentience gives to us evolutionary speaking. There has to be something else.
To
mooncat:I am not denying that there is a "moral compass" that steers us towards in doing right, but if that were the only case I would expect to see more cases of the compass pointing the "wrong way".
That may be an evolutionary advantage though. If we limit our hostile actions towards one another there are more of us to keep the species going.
