How is this hypothetical species going to discover any medicine if they spend all their time writing birdsongs? Any individual with a slightly lower proclivity to write birdsongs will be evicted from the gene pool with great prejudice, so there is no chance that anyone will ever be born with the desire to spend a whole hour thinking about something else. Again, if this seems unrealistic, just imagine humanity with the mean "art vs. programming" balance of desires shifted a little bit towards art. There are many people who do not care at all about doing the kinds of things that lead to solving problems, and it is easy to imagine a species that is just them.
Because at some point you run out of food, and if you write birdsong in spite of that you just die out. It may be possible but its not much an effective long term strategy. Too stupid to survive doesn't earn a lot of marks towards being an intelligent species.
Individuals with a desire to improve their survivability being evicted from the gene pool is the opposite of how natural selection works. Humans would still invent things even if painting gave everyone erotic pleasure.
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.
