Because that’s what intelligence is. There’s a very funny video floating around of a squirrel repeatedly trying to bury an acorn in a dog’s fur and completely failing to understand why it’s not working. Now sure, a squirrel is not the smartest animal in the world, but it does have some intelligence, and yet there it is just mindlessly reproducing a pattern in the wrong context. Maybe you’re thinking that humans aren’t like that, that we make decisions by actually thinking through our actions and their consequences instead of just repeating learned patterns. I put it to you that if that were the case, we wouldn’t still be dealing with the same problems that have been plaguing us for millennia.