It may be a difference in quantity rather than a categorical difference. If humans are 10x better at X than animals, it doesn't mean that X is unique to humans. But the things that humans can achieve by using X will obviously very different from what animals can achieve.
We have orcas teaching their families hunting tricks and bears spreading knowledge about how to open bear-resistant food containers. Maybe we’re only like 1.5X as smart as a bear, but the day-to-day maintenance requires 1X bear intelligence, so they don’t have left over brain-cycles to dream up kick off the feedback loop.
Or maybe there are animals out there that are just as smart, but their environment was not conducive to storing knowledge long term.
Considering that humans have evolved from animals, if there was a qualitative difference, how and why do you think something like this would have happened?
Like, from one mother to the child, a switch was flipped?
I think that we haven’t even really defined what qualtitative means.
Bog-standard evolution is perfectly capable of large qualitative differences. Animals couldn't fly until they did. Land animals didn't exist until they did. Multi-cellular beings weren't until they were. We can empirically see this, so your question should be flipped to "how can we explain such developments within evolution?" (We can, but that's a different discussion).
I guess where you stand in this debate depends on how you define “qualitative”.
One could argue that being able to fly or not is a matter of quantity, not quality. But unless you’re being deeply philosophical I admit this is a silly argument to make.
