Somebody asked on Reddit: “[I]f humans evolved from apes to become what we are today is it possible for the same thing to happen with another species of monkey or even another animal altogether? Is there something very specific that caused us to be able to walk and talk and organize a civilization with infrastructure or is it just that humans were the first to do it?”

Below is my answer.

It’s not entirely clear what you mean by “compete”, but it sounds like you recognize that humans have a certain unique ability, and you’re asking whether animals could have that same ability.

That ability is creativity – ie the ability to create new knowledge, including knowledge not already provided by genes. Creativity enables man to reason and be rational. Animals categorically cannot do either; purely zoological explanations of their behavior apply.

Humans are biologically classified as animals, but epistemologically they’re on a different level entirely. I find it inappropriate and scientistic/authoritarian to consider humans animals or even study them like animals. For example, some evolutionary psychologists study what they call ‘human mating’, which would be an apt description for animals but not for humans. That’s why I don’t take issue with your phrasing “humans evolved from apes” even though some scientists would argue that humans are (still) a kind of ape. Physicist David Deutsch has introduced the term people (singular person) as an epistemological designation that collectively applies to humans, artificial general intelligences, whatever creative aliens might be out there, etc – ie all “entities with intentions and human-like thoughts […]”. See his book The Beginning of Infinity (BoI), chapter 3.

Creativity is certainly responsible for our ability to “talk and organize a civilization with infrastructure […]”, as you write. Even walking is something babies learn creatively – I don’t believe they are born with the knowledge of how to walk, unlike other species. Maybe you meant walking upright specifically, but I doubt it was as important in our evolutionary history as some people make it out to be, at least when it comes to the evolution of creativity and our species. They think walking upright changed our brains and led to an explosion in intelligence, but hardware changes alone don’t explain creativity – creativity is a property of software.

There’s some instruction in the human genome that codes for creativity. We don’t know what exactly it says but it might be relatively small since the genetic difference between humans and non-creative relatives is minor, from what I understand. On the other hand, Deutsch has conjectured that creativity could be part genetic and part memetic since meme evolution was already underway by the time our species evolved (BoI chapter 16). In that case, the difference in instruction might be greater.

I believe there was a jump in our evolutionary history that turned our ancestors into people. I think it was purely genetic, and I outline how that jump might have occurred here.

Whether purely genetic or partly memetic, the difference is one of software. I don’t see why an animal whose hardware is computationally universal couldn’t become a person given the right software. Consider the brain of a dog, say. I don’t believe it’s all that different, hardware wise, from a human brain. (In terms of ideas, the difference is an ocean, but let’s consider only hardware for now.) I suspect that dog brains are computationally universal, meaning they could, within memory and processing-power constraints, run any software any other computer could run, too. (Yes, brains are computers.) Putting moral considerations aside for the moment, one could turn a dog into a person by changing its software.

We don’t know how. But it could be done. Likewise, creativity could evolve independently in another species, eg a dog.