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The Children of Anaxagoras: Did hands make us human?
- unit91 8y agoNo. > then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. Genesis 2:7
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- maaark 8y agoReally? Proselytizing on Hacker News of all places?
- pavel_lishin 8y agoI'd wager that statistically, it's not more or less effective than standing in the subway with a pamphlet in your hand.
- Chris_Chambers 8y agoI don’t see why we can’t all get along. The delayed choice quantum eraser experiment proves that a fully plausible history to explain current circumstances will spontaneously manifest whenever necessary to fill in the blanks. God could have easily created man in some sort of rudimentary character building tool and let the false history generation algorithm do the heavy lifting at the quantum level.
- nopassrecover 8y agoPerhaps a tangent, but the article opens with a claim that the Indonesian rock art is conclusively the oldest art of Homo sapiens, but strangely overlooks the art of Indigenous Australians which is at least as old, and perhaps a further 10,000 years older.
- pmiller2 8y agoThere’s a lot of fuzzy argumentation here. Hands undoubtedly make tool use easier, but simple tool use has been observed in corvids and dolphins, but there’s no sign of world domination by crows and aquatic mammals. Likewise, monkeys and non-human apes have hands and have been observed using tools, but they are certainly not human. Even raccoons have hands. What makes us human is the combination of intelligence and tool use.
- about_help 8y agoThe more the brain is used the better it gets. I would look at this as a co-evolutionary trait. Hands help brain, brain helps hand. Without hands it would be hard for the brain to be useful. Maybe thats why octopuses are so smart, they can manipulate their environment.