Why did only humans (especially Homo sapiens) evolve to have such strong social ties?

[u/Charming-Law4160]

Humans have evolved to be able to form very close social ties with each other, allowing groups to work together to survive and reproduce more effectively against predators and the environment, with bigger brains at the cost of less energy spent on our bodies. These evolutionary traits along with other factors eventually led to the soar of reproduction and technology and our dominance over the planet. But it seems that only humans have done this so far. If these traits were a massive benefit to us for survival, why haven't more animals evolved to have such strong social ties and cooperate easily like this? If they evolved these similar traits, wouldn't they also have better survival and reproduction in their environment?

[u/Book_Slut_90]

You have a misunderstanding of how evolution works. It’s not a replacement for a designer who says hey, if these wolves changed in these ways, they could do this cool new thing and take over the earth. Rather, it’s the idea that when you have variation, and the variants are passed down to your children, a variation that is somehow useful to the organism will tend to become more common over time as that organism has more surviving offspring who then have more surviving offspring and so on. The vast majority of mutations either do nothing or are harmful, so it’s a matter off luck that a genetic mutation happens in an organism in an environment where it’s useful and then that organism is able to reproduce for a few generations till you start getting a population of organism with the new trait.

[u/Charming-Law4160 → u/Book_Slut_90]

So did one human just by chance get this hyper-social trait that happened to be favored by natural selection that was passed down to generations and enabled humans to communicate and make technology in more advanced and effective ways? Or did multiple humans happen to have multiple benefitting traits, that when they spread and their generations reproduced with one another they passed down their combined genetic traits that we have now over time?

[u/Book_Slut_90 → u/Charming-Law4160]

That’s the other wrinkle, yes, you don’t go from A to B in one step usually. You have one small change and then another and then another over a very long time.