Are the most "advanced and intelligent creatures" those that are making new or modified environment for themselves to live in?
Or those, like wolves, which can gain more information that is useful to their existence / survival via their senses? Humans are very visually dominated creatures with almost useless sense of smell compared to wolves and many other animals. Now days, many humans spend many hours each day looking at their iPod / cell phone etc. Some so detatched from their immediate environment that they walk into swimming pools or step in front of buses, have car accidents while using their electronics, etc. No wolf is dumb enough to do that. They are very aware of their environment - can even start to follow a rabbit that hopped past where they are an hour earlier. No human can do that.
I love animals as much as you do (if you don't, then as much as most animal loving people), but intelligence doesn't mean we're better, what I mean is animals are completely oblivious of what's happening outside their immediate environments, we know what the moon looks like, we know what kind of atmosphere it has, when other animals don't even think about stuff like that, that is intelligence to me. I'm not saying animals don't do the best with what they have at their disposal, they are smart too.
Yes, we are destructive, we kill a lot, yet there are some human beings, that care for animals out of genuine concern, you never forget those even if they are a minority, if there was an meteor hitting a certain part of earth, killing everything, there'd be at least a few humans who'd relocate animals because they care , or at least give a thought. That's what being human is all about.
but evolution is about losing things and gaining things. The path human beings took meant they lost their sense of smell (I'm no expert on evolution, so I don't know if our sense of smell was better at some point during our evolution), they lost their claws, in favor of hands with dexterity to build tools, meaning they no longer needed claws, and claws don't help in tool building, and we have replaced it with weapons. So, human beings don't need to have heightened sense of smell because wolves do. You see, we have built tools that detect traces of poisionous gases, and we have binoculars to overcome our limited field of vision.
I'm not saying we're awesome, I'm just stating we're at least a different.
when you look at the kardashev scale, there are three types, we're not even type 1 yet, I know the scale has to do with technology, but can there be technology without intelligence? and the moment any animal takes an evolutionary route to become smarter, it seems to lose it's apparent 'savageness', loses what it has and instead develops new, efficient stuff using things we find in our environment. we use nuclear energy, that's just leaps and bounds ahead of what wolves are capable of.