As someone who has done significantly more research into animal physiology, evolution, and ecology, what have you find to be very correlated or acting as a prerequisite for higher cognition in animals. I have read of having a real brain instead of just ganglia being important, as well as a general brain-to-body size ratio correlating well (though it seems like encephalization quotient is better as a measurement). The fact that octopi are so darn weirdly smart, as well as being an entire Order (not just a Genus of even Family like I assumed before looking into it) makes me wonder about what makes their evolutionary history so distinct or gave sufficient prerequisite for their high intellect.
Obviously as someone who doesnāt actually have a degree in any of the fields I research and instead just have biology autism, I canāt say my answer would be 100% accurate, but Iāll try my best and if anyone wants to add to this theyāre welcome to.
Higher intelligence is such a loaded and complex question that we just donāt have a definitive answer for yet, because thereās so much we donāt understand about intelligence itself! And itās likely that higher intelligence itself doesnāt have a singular cause. Thereās many different kinds of intelligence and traditionally ādumbā animals can be more intelligent than us in certain areas! But if I had to list things that could allow for sapience to evolveā¦
Endothermy or at least regional endothermy. In order for a brain to be very active and sapient it needs to have high cellular activity in its neurons, which a cold blooded creature usually has a hard time with (there are exceptions like octopus and tegu).
It needs to be a large somewhat long lived social animal that learns behaviors and can reproduce multiple times in its life, meaning that it can accumulate knowledge and has a method of transferring this to its young or young of the same species.
Obvious one but tool use (duh). A sapient species needs to recognize that it can use things separate from its being as extensions of itself to get what it wants. We can probably throw in the mirror test too.
Pattern recognition. ABSOLUTELY PATTERN RECOGNITION. A sapient creature has to be able to recognize things that are repeated and what they mean/are correlated to, and their brain needs to chemically reward them for picking up on it. Humans are the biggest example of this because recognizing patterns is so hard baked into us as a species that itās literally everywhere in our society. Hell, one of the biggest theories for why we invented music is because we like recognizing patterns.
It essentially needs to be stuck between a rock and a hard place. It has to have selective pressure to think to survive. Maybe it has to contend with drastic seasonal changes and how to survive them, or maybe it needs to out-think predators.
High energy diet. A big brain needs lots of power and proteins. So a diet of meat, fruits, nuts, roots, sugars, etc. all of these have relatively high caloric value. Cooking food as well exponentially increases the amount of nutrients you can get out of it. Amino acids are curled up into different shapes because of their electrical charges and a lot of the energy that goes into digestion is spent just unraveling amino acids so that they can be transported and used. But if amino acids are exposed to high enough temperatures then they unravel on their own, so by using this little physics hack a sapient creature can get more bang for their buck.
Those are the things that I can hazard a guess can lead to sapience when all put together.
The reason why octopus are so smart is because they fall into that ārock and a hard placeā category. Theyāre squishy, unarmored, and very tasty so they needed to outsmart their predators.
