How did we end up being intelligent?

This question should be: how did a single celled creature evolve into a complicated intelligent creature like us?

Religion explains it like this: After God created the Sun, the Moon and the Earth and separated land from water by means of the firmament, He populated Earth with plants and animals. And then, He created Adam by breathing life into dirt, after which He created Eve by taking a rib from Adam. If we look at this carefully, we see several important concepts. First, we have the idea of a firmament. This was the ancient idea of how the sky worked. Water, which falls down from the sky in the form of rain, comes from the firmament that holds back the water.

The next important idea is that plants came before animals and that man was at the end of the creation story. Also, we see the idea that God has the breath of life and can form life by breathing into dirt. The last point is that woman came from man because man complained that he didn't have anyone to talk to. Boy, that was a mistake, because the woman sure made up for his being alone and in silence. That's a joke. I think that the rib was used to create a woman to show that a woman is a person like a man and that they are linked forever in a partnership of propagating the newly created world.
Remember that man was given the order to multiply, take care of creation and use it wisely. That certainly got screwed up, and it's the main reason that Adam and Eve got kicked out of paradise. The bad part is that it meant that we have to suffer for their stupid sin of wanting to be like God.

The Book of Genesis is an allegory, which is a story that reveals a truth. No one was there when creation took place, so the writers of the Bible created a story to reveal the concept that God is responsible for all of creation. The Bible was not meant to be a physics or biology textbook. It reveals a truth by means of a story, and it's the very important truth that God created everything.

Science's explanation for how we became intelligent is complicated and incomplete. The reason for this is that most of it happened in the distant past, in geological history millions of years ago. Time, erosion, and change have erased much of the evidence for the evolution that has occurred. But, one thing is for sure. Where we are had a lot to do with why we're here.

Our perfect planet is in a perfect orbit around a perfect star in a perfect location in a perfect galaxy. That's the simple answer. The complicated answer goes like this: Our planet is just the right size, not too large and not too small. If it were smaller, the iron core in the center would have stopped spinning, which would have lost our magnetosphere resulting in our atmosphere being ablated by the solar wind. If our planet were larger, we would have had trouble moving around on it, unless we were on Krypton and were like the precursors to Superman.
Our planet also has a moon that stabilizes our planet's spin. This is important because without the moon, our axis would wobble too much, causing the climates in most locations to change radically. This would have prevented survival for early humans.
Our planet orbits our star, the Sun, at a perfect distance. This prevents us from becoming like Venus, which is way too hot and Mars, which is way too cold. Like Goldilocks, we are just right.

Our star is just right because it's a G-class yellow dwarf star. The class has to do with its emission spectra, but what it means is that our star stays on the main sequence where it fuses hydrogen into helium for a very long time, ten to twelve billion years. That means that it stays at roughly the same luminosity for a long time, which allows evolution to take place over several billion years. Planets around larger stars like large O-class that don't stay on the main sequence long enough are not that fortunate. K-class red dwarf stars can harbor planets with life and they stay on the main sequence even longer than G-class stars, but they must orbit closer because K-class stars are not as bright and this means that the planet runs the risk of being tidal locked where one side always faces the star. We are lucky to have a star like our sun. Or you could say that we were meant to have all of these benefits.

Our star is also not part of a binary system. Many stars are, and a binary system where two stars orbit one another makes it more difficult for planets around them to have stable orbits. This is important because most star systems contain gas giants, and in our case Jupiter, our big gas giant, orbits at just the right location to help prevent large asteroids from hitting us. There have been large asteroid collisions in the geological past, the last being 65 million years ago, but they are rare and that helps evolution.

Our solar system is in the perfect location in our galaxy, the Milky Way. We are not in a major arm of the galaxy where supernovae and other cosmic events take place more frequently. This also favors evolution. We are also far enough away from the center of our galaxy where there is lots of intense radiation from the supermassive black hole at the center and the presence of large stars that like to go supernova, causing gamma ray bursts.

Our planet has oxygen in its atmosphere and lots of surface water in the form of oceans. Both of these things are necessary for evolution to create intelligent life. Without oxygen, metabolism would be excruciatingly slow. The introduction of oxygen by cyanobacteria billions of years ago made it possible for the rapid evolution of multicellular animals that resemble fish and amphibians, the precursors for life on land.

The other important characteristic of our planet is that it has landmasses. This development was necessary for intelligent life to evolve on the surface. Fish, whales and dolphins don't have hands, which are needed to make tools and consequently to develop a brain that is able to create technology.

It is possible that whales and dolphins are intelligent, but we have been unable to make contact with them. They are essentially alien life forms as far as we are concerned. Speaking of this, my next essay will explore how we evolved to what we are today.

Thanks for reading.