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NancyLebovitz comments on Open Thread June 2010, Part 2 - Less Wrong
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Inspired by Chapter 24 of Methods of Rationality, but not a spoiler: If the evolution of human intelligence was driven by competition between humans, why aren't there a lot of intelligent species?
Five-second guess: Human-level Machiavellian intelligence needs language facilities to co-evolve with, grunts and body language doesn't allow nearly as convoluted schemes. Evolving some precursor form of human-style language is the improbable part that other species haven't managed to pull off.
Somewhat accepted partial answer is that huge brains are ridiculously expensive - you need a lot of high energy density food (= fire), a lot of DHA (= fish) etc. Chimp diet simply couldn't support brains like ours (and aquatic ape etc.), nor could they spend as much time as us engaging in politics as they were too busy just getting food.
Perhaps chimp brains are as big as they could possibly be given their dietary constraints.
That's conceivable, and might also explain why wolves, crows, elephants, and other highly social animals aren't as smart as people.
Also, I think the original bit in Methods of Rationality overestimates how easy it is for new ideas to spread. As came up recently here, even if tacit knowledge can be explained, it usually isn't.
This means that if you figure out a better way to chip flint, you might not be able to explain it in words, and even if you can, you might chose to keep it as a family or tribal secret. Inventions could give their inventors an advantage for quite a long time.