It seems hard to find a definite answer, but it seems that the last common ancestor of humans and dolphins was a small mammal existing during the reign of the dinosaurs.
And they are certainly far from our line. Enter the smart and cute icon on many student posters: the dolphin.ĭolphins are certainly intelligent. To get independent intelligence, we need to go far from our line. So they don't provide any extra information about the ease or difficulty of evolving intelligence. Intelligent species tend to have intelligent relatives. Chimpanzees, Bonobos and Gorillas and such are all "on our line": they are close to common ancestors of ours, which we would expect to be intelligent because we are intelligent. The key test is not whether intelligence can arise separately, but whether it can arise independently. Instead, one could point at the great apes, note their high intelligence, see that intelligence arises separately, and hence that it can't be too hard to evolve. Any being that asked that question would have to be intelligent, so this can't tell us anything about its difficulty (a similar mistake would be to ask "is most of the universe hospitable to life?", and then looking around and noting that everything seems pretty hospitable at first glance.). except that only an intelligent species would be able to ask that question, so we run straight into the problem of anthropics. Is intelligence hard to evolve? Well, we're intelligent, so it must be easy.
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