An I'm suggesting that a population that dies out before accomplishing any intellectual achievements wasn't all that intelligent or make sense as a species. How

An I'm suggesting that a population that dies out before accomplishing any intellectual achievements wasn't all that intelligent or make sense as a species. How a species would appear that decides to forego its basic needs in favor of making art is beyond me. A species that spends its time making birdsongs is effectively just a dumber version of birds. > Evolution doesn't look ahead to avoid dead ends. It does though, by many metrics. Many steps of evolution are not just the outright outcomes, but traits that make it easier for competitive adaptations to develop later on. That is, natural selection works on multiple levels of derivatives of fitness scores. Humanity's intelligence is built on top of everything else, and is often overruled, by base survival instincts.