The Australian Jewel Beetle nearly went extinct because of a beer bottle.
You see, the female of this species is large, brown, and bevelled. It shares this characteristic in common with the beer bottles often thrown on the side of the road here in Australia. And not only does a beer bottle share these characteristics with these beetles, it's bigger than them. And the male jewel beetle? It likes its ladies big.
Australia had to change its beer bottles, because the males refused to mate with the females. They preferred to hump empty beer bottles on the side of the road. It couldn't tell the difference between a beetle and a bottle. It was just using a statistical trick. "Anything brown, large, and bevelled is a female beetle". That had been true in the ancestral environment, so evolution just used the pattern. And this cognitive shortcut lead to beetles trying to have sex with bottles.
I don't think we understand shit all that much more than the beetles. I think we're just mimicking intelligence too. And one day we'll all die because of our own equivalent of the beer bottles.