His answer is the octopus. What say you?
But they
- Have extremely short lifespan so a limited capacity to learn (1-2 years)
- Don’t raise their offspring, in fact after mating/laying eggs they naturally die, so no knowledge sharing
- Are extremely solitary and don’t have social bonds or do anything socially, so little communication/passing of knowledge
On top of that, they might not even survive the CO2 and consequent ocean acidification. If humans were to get eradicated by some super plague, then octopi might still stand a chance, but the points you mentioned are going to make that journey much harder.
I worked as an intern at a lab studying octopus vulgaris.
They are extremely sensitive to all sorts of things in the water. Keeping them well is very difficult. Although I would imagine if there are big but gradual changes in water environment, they would have a chance of adapting faster due to short life cycles and the fact that mating creates hundreds of thousands of eggs.
If we assume that they somehow survive all the way to the very moment when humans get a permanent ban to the Earth Server, then the changes should be gradual enough after that. The bad news is, humans love to play this game by recklessly exploiting every bug and glitch, so rapid changes (in evolutionary scale) are the norm.
See also: Peppered moth evolution
I’m not even convinced that intelligence is a requirement to be the dominant species. Intelligence is so expensive that nature rarely ever selects for it.
Trilobytes did pretty damn well for a hell of a lot longer than we have so far. I think we need a stronger working definition of “dominant” in order to judge any candidates.
But the reason he gives for them becoming the dominant species is their intelligence.
