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I think our difficulty comes from the fact that we are unable to admit how exceptional we are. There is a fad at the moment, and it's been ongoing for a century

I think our difficulty comes from the fact that we are unable to admit how exceptional we are. There is a fad at the moment, and it's been ongoing for a century or more, to assign a degree of banality to the biological classification of the human race. The obvious problem we all have with this is that we are the ones doing the assigning. I'm reading articles like this on a machine designed and built by humans with, if nothing else, the ability to process mathematical equations at a speed far beyond any normal human ability. We do things that are so obviously exceptional and unique that to classify us alongside chimpanzees due to DNA similarities strikes us all as absurd (because it is). When the article points out that you wouldn't assign a separate genus to an animal just because it uses tools, they're missing the fact that the difference between a bird using a stick to fetch a seed and one that doesn't is absurdly simplistic relative to LANDING ON THE F--KING MOON. At some point, perhaps something that doesn't factor in for other animals should be factored in for us due to the extreme amounts of difference between my DVR recorder and the special rock a chimp uses break open a nut. To me, this comes across as biological tunnel vision. Since the differences between other animals fall into simpler categories like appearance and genetics, biologists don't want to introduce something like "behavior" into the mix for fear of it complicating the process. The problem is that in the case of homo sapiens, behavior is an unbelievably big deal.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Interestingly, neither you nor I can likely design a DVR or go to the moon. The difference between us and other apes is, we can cooperate by the thousands/millions to get something done. Maybe that's the critical difference.
- camelNotation 11y ago
  Agreed, that was the essence of what I was trying to say.
  - ethbro 11y ago
    If you one starts to look at the things we do as a classification, then it gets very messy very fast. I work on magic boxes all day and construct intangible realities that spit out numbers. Am I still the same group as a member of a tribe untouched by modern civilization in the depths of the Amazon? What about the same group as Kelly Johnson? Tim Berners-Lee? Vint Cerf? Jack Kilby or Robert Noyce? GalileoPascalNewtonFranklinEulerFourierMaxwellCurie? MandelaDeKlerkMLKGandi? It seems pretty presumptuous to say "we (as a pan-global diaspora) have achieved great things, therefore we are all special."
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      The assertion is, that we as a race are special, right? Not 'all'
      - ethbro 11y ago
        If not all then how can we as a race be special? I'd say that if we lump going to the moon onto our collective accolades, so do we lump the Holocaust and various other genocides. My personal opinion, but it seems like there's a desire to overstate our differences with "other animals." Which generally seems like a prelude to exterminating them without feeling bad about it / trashing the environment / generally believing in our manifest destiny and right to same as humans. But that's my personal opinion.
        camelNotation 11y ago
        I think you're reading more into my assertion than what was there. Don't assume that superiority gives us the right to abuse (I would argue quite the opposite) and don't assume that regarding ourselves as equal to other forms of life will somehow lead to virtuous behavior (I would argue the opposite here as well). However, those are debates of their own.
kolbe 11y ago
I think a good reply to that would be how much of the extreme human accomplishment can we call genetic? Could Neanderthals or primitive species in our lineage have accomplished this level of ingenuity given certain circumstances? Are our accomplishments really because of the currents state of our DNA, or because of a strange set of circumstances that allowed us to use our physical makeup to build cars rather than hunt tigers? If so, which other species were likely capable of this, but never had the means to build on it the way our culture has? Then, on the flip side, it's not even clear that many cultures we think of as members of humanity today would have landed on the (f--king) moon. I can see how it's not so obvious who, past and present, should even be considered members of this exceptional intelligence club.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

Interestingly, neither you nor I can likely design a DVR or go to the moon. The difference between us and other apes is, we can cooperate by the thousands/millions to get something done. Maybe that's the critical difference.

camelNotation 11y ago
Agreed, that was the essence of what I was trying to say.
- ethbro 11y ago
  If you one starts to look at the things we do as a classification, then it gets very messy very fast. I work on magic boxes all day and construct intangible realities that spit out numbers. Am I still the same group as a member of a tribe untouched by modern civilization in the depths of the Amazon? What about the same group as Kelly Johnson? Tim Berners-Lee? Vint Cerf? Jack Kilby or Robert Noyce? GalileoPascalNewtonFranklinEulerFourierMaxwellCurie? MandelaDeKlerkMLKGandi? It seems pretty presumptuous to say "we (as a pan-global diaspora) have achieved great things, therefore we are all special."
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    The assertion is, that we as a race are special, right? Not 'all'
    - ethbro 11y ago
      If not all then how can we as a race be special? I'd say that if we lump going to the moon onto our collective accolades, so do we lump the Holocaust and various other genocides. My personal opinion, but it seems like there's a desire to overstate our differences with "other animals." Which generally seems like a prelude to exterminating them without feeling bad about it / trashing the environment / generally believing in our manifest destiny and right to same as humans. But that's my personal opinion.
      - camelNotation 11y ago
        I think you're reading more into my assertion than what was there. Don't assume that superiority gives us the right to abuse (I would argue quite the opposite) and don't assume that regarding ourselves as equal to other forms of life will somehow lead to virtuous behavior (I would argue the opposite here as well). However, those are debates of their own.

kolbe 11y ago

I think a good reply to that would be how much of the extreme human accomplishment can we call genetic? Could Neanderthals or primitive species in our lineage have accomplished this level of ingenuity given certain circumstances? Are our accomplishments really because of the currents state of our DNA, or because of a strange set of circumstances that allowed us to use our physical makeup to build cars rather than hunt tigers? If so, which other species were likely capable of this, but never had the means to build on it the way our culture has? Then, on the flip side, it's not even clear that many cultures we think of as members of humanity today would have landed on the (f--king) moon. I can see how it's not so obvious who, past and present, should even be considered members of this exceptional intelligence club.