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Interesting as this is, the article nurtures an old misconception (with roots both in religion and classical philosophy) that there are some traits that distinc

Interesting as this is, the article nurtures an old misconception (with roots both in religion and classical philosophy) that there are some traits that distinctly separates humans from other animals, and by extension, finding the time when humans developed that trait is when we became truly humans. In reality the evidence reveals that all such traits, be it burial, toolmaking, artistry, abstract thinking etc, is something we share with other species to varying degrees. To the extent we have any unique such traits currently that radically sets us apart from other species then it has been a long and gradual process over eons. In the case of burials, this old misconception places a ridiculously high bar on proof that other species revere their dead. Case in point being that of Homo Naledi, admittedly a Homo but not a human by a long shot that clearly practiced burials in inaccessible cave structures. [0] [0] https://humangenesis.org/2016/05/18/did-homo-naledi-bury-its-dead/ https://humangenesis.org/2016/05/18/did-homo-naledi-bury-its...

ekianjo 5y ago
> evidence reveals that all such traits, be it burial, toolmaking, artistry, abstract thinking etc, is something we share with other species to varying degrees If actual achievements speak louder than words, then "varying degrees" is a huge gap between human and other species. Yes, we know that numerous animals exhibit intelligence and emotions, but that does not change the fact that humans are very different when it comes to the understanding of time and everything that goes with it. Also, there is no other animal out there who domesticated fire or developed some kind of societal system to expands its own resources beyond what's available in the wild.
- stareatgoats 5y ago
  The argument can be applied to all species - it is engrained in the ongoing diversification process of life itself: all species by definition have traits that set them apart from others, more or less radically. It is mostly a matter of what perspective you want to apply: are the differences the most important, or the similarities. But the main point I was trying to make was really this: > To the extent we have any unique such traits currently that radically sets us apart from other species then it has been a long and gradual process over eons I.e. there is no need to find a specific point where all that makes us human came into place. It all happened gradually, albeit with some leaps and bounds for different traits, at different times for different things, and we carry the legacy of all those millions of years with us, not just the last 200 KY. And we share substantial amounts of traits with other species.
- nfg 5y ago
  > there is no other animal out there who […] developed some kind of societal system to expands its own resources beyond what's available in the wild. The trouble with this sort of quasi-dualistic general statement in my experience is it doesn’t hold up well to scrutiny by domain experts. Another way of looking at this is that humans have shaped their “wild” environment to their advantage which is something many animals do. The trouble is in defining wild here - your point rests heavily on a definition along the lines of “shaped entirely by non-human forces” which is a circular argument. For example (and I’m no expert) but think of dam making by beavers and whether the resulting pools which expand their habitat and food are “wild”? I’d agree with you that there is a qualitative difference between say industrial society and the rest of the animal world, but it’s not easy to nail down that difference in a way which doesn’t wind up excluding much of human history.
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    I was going to say that. We can see the Great Wall of China from space. And we can also see beaver dams from space. (Note the Great Wall was built for a mundane reason - the Han people couldn't defeat the Mongols on horseback, but they could keep building walls until the horses could no longer enter. Byzantium/Constantinople also adopted that strategy, which worked for over 1,000 years until the Ottomans built the world's largest cannon and blasted holes in it.)
    - azundo 5y ago
      That said, no beaver has seen either from space.
    - wombatmobile 5y ago
      We can see water coloration from algae in space. If you weren't impressed when you read the above sentence, imagine how algae feel when they read your sentence about the Great Wall of China.
      - redis_mlc 5y ago
        Both of the structures I mentioned were deliberately created by mammals. Are the algaes deliberately creating "water coloration" in a pattern?
- thrownintospace 5y ago
  On some level hasn't time and language demonstrated on how different we are from animals. Those traits that you find similar in animals, eg. the elephants returning to the site of the dead, basic tool making, etc, never evolve past those developments. Why ? The assumption might be that it takes time to develop, but those species never move beyond simplistic uses of language and tools despite their ancient ancestry. Whatever your thoughts are on the evolution and biology of life, something is happening in the prefrontal cortex of humans that is fundamentally different.
f6v 5y ago
You’re right in a sense that traits are continuous. But I think the notion of bifurcation point can be useful here. At some point there’s a dramatic change in how system behaves.
- simonh 5y ago
  That’s true and I think there were two inflection points in human evolution. One is the development of modified tools and fire. Yes I know that’s two things, but they’re both very ancient and probably were enabled by the adaptation that gave us language. It’s possible there were several adaptations there but I suspect they all came from one fundamental advance in cognition. This drove a series of major evolutionary changes that adapted us to a tool and fire using mode of living. The second I think was prefrontal synthesis, at around the time this child was buried. This enabled us to form complex linguistic concepts (take this Apple and give it to the girl on the other side of the wall) and create tools with multiple features composed together, such as needles with an eye hole. Pretty much everything else derived from these innovations, or at least the cognitive capabilities that enabled them. So yes of course we have abilities other animals don’t have, but we also have a lot in common. Showing reverence and tenderness for the dead is definitely something we share with many other mammals, but complex funerary rituals with associated burial objects are more a human thing.
  - lwhi 5y ago
    I agree. I think language was the big differentiator here. Being able to contextualise, to tell stories .. and imagine worlds before and after one's own, must have accelerated the brain's development exponentially.
  - shagie 5y ago
    > One is the development of modified tools and fire. Yes I know that’s two things, but they’re both very ancient and probably were enabled by the adaptation that gave us language. It’s possible there were several adaptations there but I suspect they all came from one fundamental advance in cognition. This drove a series of major evolutionary changes that adapted us to a tool and fire using mode of living. There was a bit going around a number of years ago (not sure where it stands in current scientific thought)... https://www.wired.com/2004/03/docs-drop-jaws-over-gene-mutation/ https://www.wired.com/2004/03/docs-drop-jaws-over-gene-mutat... The theory is that there is a mutation which caused the jaw muscle of the line of hominids that gave rise to humans. If you look at chimpanzees, gorillas, and other hominids you'll find a skull with a crest with the anchor point for the muscle that enables a very powerful jaw. However, that muscle also constricts the size of the cranium which likewise constricts the size of the brain. The theory goes that by weakening this muscle it allowed for other mutations to increases the size of the cranium and at the same time necessitated the use of fire and tools to help overcome the "we can't kill it by biting it." That mutation traces back to about 2.4 Mya. Earliest hints of control of fire was about 2.0 Mya. The Oldowan tools date to 2.6 - 1.7 Mya.
lwhi 5y ago
> Interesting as this is, the article nurtures an old misconception (with roots both in religion and classical philosophy) that there are some traits that distinctly separates humans from other animals, and by extension, finding the time when humans developed that trait is when we became truly humans. In reality the evidence reveals that all such traits, be it burial, toolmaking, artistry, abstract thinking etc, is something we share with other species to varying degrees. To the extent we have any unique such traits currently that radically sets us apart from other species then it has been a long and gradual process over eons. Both these things can be true. There are traits that distinctly separate us .. which have also developed gradually over a long period of time. I think the article is acknowledging a common behaviour between humans and a distance relative to humans; if anything it's backing up your assertion that development has occurred over a long and gradual process.
notsureaboutpg 5y ago
There is always a comment like this in one of these threads that makes me think too much education can be a bad thing. Most uneducated people in the world can tell you that there are many traits which distinguish people from animals: religion, our souls, our ability to learn about the world around us, the fact that we act on reason and not on instinct, our ability to read and write, etc. It's perhaps one of the most obvious things in the world that humans are exceptional amongst living beings on Earth. But with enough fancy words and misapplied education, you can say things like "Oh Elephants have burials too, so human beings aren't special, we're just wild purposeless animals also. Only silly religious people think humans are special"
animalshumans 5y ago
>the article nurtures an old misconception .. that there are some traits that distinctly separates humans from other animal There are a number of traits that make humans a unique animal, it's not a misconception. Humans: - Are aware of the existence of good and evil and have the capacity for moral reasoning - Have language - Are aware of the existence of the distant future, and can plan for it beyond the instinctual cycle of a single season like a hibernating squirrel - Are aware of their own mortality and vulnerability - Have art There might be more but that's a good start. We are animals, of course, nothing "separates us from the animals," in a clean way, but boy we're weird animals. > Immediately downvoted WTF HN, is this not polite, curious discourse? Why do I even try here? Never mind, I hate this website. Bye
- bolzano 5y ago
  I was going to leave a similar comment, you've done much better at expressing my own objections to the OP. I've tried to upvote you but I don't have very much karma (not sure that that matters?). Sorry to see this sort of thing happen on HN too :( It would be great if the people who are downvoting you would tackle any of your bullet points. We are certainly descended from animals, but we are also wildly unique from anything else we've ever seen in the biological world, past or present, mostly due to our cognitive capacities for art, science, morality, math, language, you name it. Our capacity for language (and its core property of digital infinity) alone, as pointed out by Chomsky, doesn't seem to have an analogue anywhere in the biological world down to perhaps the level of DNA. That's a great puzzle and mystery, we shouldn't run away from it but rather we should embrace it with humility and awe.
  - throwaway3699 5y ago
    The great trend of the day is abject materialism, a philosophy that sees humans as just clever bipeds. I'm not too keen on it. There is clearly something different about humans.
    - wombatmobile 5y ago
      > There is clearly something different about humans. That's not what this debate is really about. The proponents of "humans are different" are actually thinking "humans are superior". They can make a case for that, but only in terms that confer advantages and entitlement to humans. Take this example: > Are aware of the existence of good and evil and have the capacity for moral reasoning and apply it to an encounter in the forest between a human and a venomous snake. Imagine one kills the other without provocation. Which animal was good, and which one was evil? Let's try that exercise again three more times. I'll give you more information for each case: 1. The human was your pregnant wife. 2. The human was the mass murderer, Adolf X. 3. The snake was hungry and scared, and had a family to care for.
FridayoLeary 5y ago
writing.
- andrewflnr 5y ago
  Which as far as we can tell, only arose in the last handful of thousands of years. Not super useful for discussing what made humans unique 78k years ago, much less when our lineage diverged.
kingsuper20 5y ago
I think that's a reasonable observation. I'd add that I think that scientists in the digging-up-stuff business are far too ready to assign motive and behavior rather than simply describing the physical results. To be fair, it's part of the marketing they have to do to keep that bit of grant money flowing.
0xBABAD00C 5y ago
> there are some traits that distinctly separates humans from other animals There clearly are distinct characteristics of what it means to be human, as opposed to not just other animals, but other hominin species as well. For instance, the mutation in prefrontal cortex development that allowed us to acquire a complete recursive language (a Turing-complete communication system), along with all of its benefits for large-scale coordination and strategy. This mutation is likely 70k year old and has caused a cascade of civilizational advances, from complex culture, to myths, to arts, etc. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/166520v9.full https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/166520v9.full
logicchop 5y ago
"an old misconception (with roots both in religion and classical philosophy)" There is also a new misconception (with no real roots except egalitarianism taken too far) that everything is the same as everything else "to varying degrees." That isn't very interesting though. I live in the US. To "some varying degree" I live on the east coast; but that degree is nil because I live far west of the mississippi. Human language, use of tools, artistry etc. are so massively remote from the animal cases that it's worth labelling it a "distinction" and not a "difference."
- smhost 5y ago
  > with no real roots except egalitarianism taken too far This is a strange way of saying that it has roots in ancient philosophy. Every major ideology I can think of has forms of anti-anthropocentrism spanning from classical animal rights to silicon valley's post-humanist techno-utopian ideology.
- wombatmobile 5y ago
  > Human language, use of tools, artistry etc. are so massively remote from the animal cases What do you mean by the term "massively remote"?
  - zaat 5y ago
    I'm unaware of any other animal with writing abilities. The differences between human and animal languages are widely discussed and the accuracy of the distinctions are contested, but in general the properties of being generative and recursive are considered to be unique to human language.
    - wombatmobile 5y ago
      > in general the properties of being generative and recursive are considered to be unique to human language. For a scholar to make that claim, he or she would have to have studied the bulk of other languages. Since there are more than 70,000 species of vertebrates alone, none of whose language has been deciphered by humans, and we know that other types of animals e.g. honeybees rely on language to function, it is difficult to imagine any scholar qualified to make the claim. Moreover, 99% of humans wouldn't even understand the statement, even after you'd explained what you mean by "generative" and "recursive". So I'm not sure what your statement is, other than yet another example of a human giving himself or herself a justification for the belief that humans are superior to animals, achieved through the mental gymnastic of a truism wrapped up in an academic paper.
gcheong 5y ago
“The discovery, the researchers said, sheds light on the development of early complex social behaviors in Homo sapiens.” My takeaway is that this isn’t looking so much for the dividing line between our species and others in terms of traits but more about determining when cultural evolution began to eclipse biological as the primary force driving our species development.
MomoXenosaga 5y ago
Amusingly the hip trend in my country is putting dead people next to a tree and let nature deal with it. But the lousy coffee and cake (one slice per person!) thing will never disappear.
whatever1 5y ago
Look no further than human babies. There is no single point in their lives that you can definitely say that "hey exactly now (s)he is a complete human but 1 second ago (s)he was not". It is a continuous progression

ekianjo 5y ago

> evidence reveals that all such traits, be it burial, toolmaking, artistry, abstract thinking etc, is something we share with other species to varying degrees If actual achievements speak louder than words, then "varying degrees" is a huge gap between human and other species. Yes, we know that numerous animals exhibit intelligence and emotions, but that does not change the fact that humans are very different when it comes to the understanding of time and everything that goes with it. Also, there is no other animal out there who domesticated fire or developed some kind of societal system to expands its own resources beyond what's available in the wild.

stareatgoats 5y ago
The argument can be applied to all species - it is engrained in the ongoing diversification process of life itself: all species by definition have traits that set them apart from others, more or less radically. It is mostly a matter of what perspective you want to apply: are the differences the most important, or the similarities. But the main point I was trying to make was really this: > To the extent we have any unique such traits currently that radically sets us apart from other species then it has been a long and gradual process over eons I.e. there is no need to find a specific point where all that makes us human came into place. It all happened gradually, albeit with some leaps and bounds for different traits, at different times for different things, and we carry the legacy of all those millions of years with us, not just the last 200 KY. And we share substantial amounts of traits with other species.
nfg 5y ago
> there is no other animal out there who […] developed some kind of societal system to expands its own resources beyond what's available in the wild. The trouble with this sort of quasi-dualistic general statement in my experience is it doesn’t hold up well to scrutiny by domain experts. Another way of looking at this is that humans have shaped their “wild” environment to their advantage which is something many animals do. The trouble is in defining wild here - your point rests heavily on a definition along the lines of “shaped entirely by non-human forces” which is a circular argument. For example (and I’m no expert) but think of dam making by beavers and whether the resulting pools which expand their habitat and food are “wild”? I’d agree with you that there is a qualitative difference between say industrial society and the rest of the animal world, but it’s not easy to nail down that difference in a way which doesn’t wind up excluding much of human history.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  I was going to say that. We can see the Great Wall of China from space. And we can also see beaver dams from space. (Note the Great Wall was built for a mundane reason - the Han people couldn't defeat the Mongols on horseback, but they could keep building walls until the horses could no longer enter. Byzantium/Constantinople also adopted that strategy, which worked for over 1,000 years until the Ottomans built the world's largest cannon and blasted holes in it.)
  - azundo 5y ago
    That said, no beaver has seen either from space.
  - wombatmobile 5y ago
    We can see water coloration from algae in space. If you weren't impressed when you read the above sentence, imagine how algae feel when they read your sentence about the Great Wall of China.
    - redis_mlc 5y ago
      Both of the structures I mentioned were deliberately created by mammals. Are the algaes deliberately creating "water coloration" in a pattern?
thrownintospace 5y ago
On some level hasn't time and language demonstrated on how different we are from animals. Those traits that you find similar in animals, eg. the elephants returning to the site of the dead, basic tool making, etc, never evolve past those developments. Why ? The assumption might be that it takes time to develop, but those species never move beyond simplistic uses of language and tools despite their ancient ancestry. Whatever your thoughts are on the evolution and biology of life, something is happening in the prefrontal cortex of humans that is fundamentally different.

f6v 5y ago

You’re right in a sense that traits are continuous. But I think the notion of bifurcation point can be useful here. At some point there’s a dramatic change in how system behaves.

simonh 5y ago
That’s true and I think there were two inflection points in human evolution. One is the development of modified tools and fire. Yes I know that’s two things, but they’re both very ancient and probably were enabled by the adaptation that gave us language. It’s possible there were several adaptations there but I suspect they all came from one fundamental advance in cognition. This drove a series of major evolutionary changes that adapted us to a tool and fire using mode of living. The second I think was prefrontal synthesis, at around the time this child was buried. This enabled us to form complex linguistic concepts (take this Apple and give it to the girl on the other side of the wall) and create tools with multiple features composed together, such as needles with an eye hole. Pretty much everything else derived from these innovations, or at least the cognitive capabilities that enabled them. So yes of course we have abilities other animals don’t have, but we also have a lot in common. Showing reverence and tenderness for the dead is definitely something we share with many other mammals, but complex funerary rituals with associated burial objects are more a human thing.
- lwhi 5y ago
  I agree. I think language was the big differentiator here. Being able to contextualise, to tell stories .. and imagine worlds before and after one's own, must have accelerated the brain's development exponentially.
- shagie 5y ago
  > One is the development of modified tools and fire. Yes I know that’s two things, but they’re both very ancient and probably were enabled by the adaptation that gave us language. It’s possible there were several adaptations there but I suspect they all came from one fundamental advance in cognition. This drove a series of major evolutionary changes that adapted us to a tool and fire using mode of living. There was a bit going around a number of years ago (not sure where it stands in current scientific thought)... https://www.wired.com/2004/03/docs-drop-jaws-over-gene-mutation/ https://www.wired.com/2004/03/docs-drop-jaws-over-gene-mutat... The theory is that there is a mutation which caused the jaw muscle of the line of hominids that gave rise to humans. If you look at chimpanzees, gorillas, and other hominids you'll find a skull with a crest with the anchor point for the muscle that enables a very powerful jaw. However, that muscle also constricts the size of the cranium which likewise constricts the size of the brain. The theory goes that by weakening this muscle it allowed for other mutations to increases the size of the cranium and at the same time necessitated the use of fire and tools to help overcome the "we can't kill it by biting it." That mutation traces back to about 2.4 Mya. Earliest hints of control of fire was about 2.0 Mya. The Oldowan tools date to 2.6 - 1.7 Mya.

lwhi 5y ago

> Interesting as this is, the article nurtures an old misconception (with roots both in religion and classical philosophy) that there are some traits that distinctly separates humans from other animals, and by extension, finding the time when humans developed that trait is when we became truly humans. In reality the evidence reveals that all such traits, be it burial, toolmaking, artistry, abstract thinking etc, is something we share with other species to varying degrees. To the extent we have any unique such traits currently that radically sets us apart from other species then it has been a long and gradual process over eons. Both these things can be true. There are traits that distinctly separate us .. which have also developed gradually over a long period of time. I think the article is acknowledging a common behaviour between humans and a distance relative to humans; if anything it's backing up your assertion that development has occurred over a long and gradual process.

notsureaboutpg 5y ago

There is always a comment like this in one of these threads that makes me think too much education can be a bad thing. Most uneducated people in the world can tell you that there are many traits which distinguish people from animals: religion, our souls, our ability to learn about the world around us, the fact that we act on reason and not on instinct, our ability to read and write, etc. It's perhaps one of the most obvious things in the world that humans are exceptional amongst living beings on Earth. But with enough fancy words and misapplied education, you can say things like "Oh Elephants have burials too, so human beings aren't special, we're just wild purposeless animals also. Only silly religious people think humans are special"

animalshumans 5y ago

>the article nurtures an old misconception .. that there are some traits that distinctly separates humans from other animal There are a number of traits that make humans a unique animal, it's not a misconception. Humans: - Are aware of the existence of good and evil and have the capacity for moral reasoning - Have language - Are aware of the existence of the distant future, and can plan for it beyond the instinctual cycle of a single season like a hibernating squirrel - Are aware of their own mortality and vulnerability - Have art There might be more but that's a good start. We are animals, of course, nothing "separates us from the animals," in a clean way, but boy we're weird animals. > Immediately downvoted WTF HN, is this not polite, curious discourse? Why do I even try here? Never mind, I hate this website. Bye

bolzano 5y ago
I was going to leave a similar comment, you've done much better at expressing my own objections to the OP. I've tried to upvote you but I don't have very much karma (not sure that that matters?). Sorry to see this sort of thing happen on HN too :( It would be great if the people who are downvoting you would tackle any of your bullet points. We are certainly descended from animals, but we are also wildly unique from anything else we've ever seen in the biological world, past or present, mostly due to our cognitive capacities for art, science, morality, math, language, you name it. Our capacity for language (and its core property of digital infinity) alone, as pointed out by Chomsky, doesn't seem to have an analogue anywhere in the biological world down to perhaps the level of DNA. That's a great puzzle and mystery, we shouldn't run away from it but rather we should embrace it with humility and awe.
- throwaway3699 5y ago
  The great trend of the day is abject materialism, a philosophy that sees humans as just clever bipeds. I'm not too keen on it. There is clearly something different about humans.
  - wombatmobile 5y ago
    > There is clearly something different about humans. That's not what this debate is really about. The proponents of "humans are different" are actually thinking "humans are superior". They can make a case for that, but only in terms that confer advantages and entitlement to humans. Take this example: > Are aware of the existence of good and evil and have the capacity for moral reasoning and apply it to an encounter in the forest between a human and a venomous snake. Imagine one kills the other without provocation. Which animal was good, and which one was evil? Let's try that exercise again three more times. I'll give you more information for each case: 1. The human was your pregnant wife. 2. The human was the mass murderer, Adolf X. 3. The snake was hungry and scared, and had a family to care for.

FridayoLeary 5y ago

writing.

andrewflnr 5y ago
Which as far as we can tell, only arose in the last handful of thousands of years. Not super useful for discussing what made humans unique 78k years ago, much less when our lineage diverged.

kingsuper20 5y ago

I think that's a reasonable observation. I'd add that I think that scientists in the digging-up-stuff business are far too ready to assign motive and behavior rather than simply describing the physical results. To be fair, it's part of the marketing they have to do to keep that bit of grant money flowing.

0xBABAD00C 5y ago

> there are some traits that distinctly separates humans from other animals There clearly are distinct characteristics of what it means to be human, as opposed to not just other animals, but other hominin species as well. For instance, the mutation in prefrontal cortex development that allowed us to acquire a complete recursive language (a Turing-complete communication system), along with all of its benefits for large-scale coordination and strategy. This mutation is likely 70k year old and has caused a cascade of civilizational advances, from complex culture, to myths, to arts, etc. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/166520v9.full https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/166520v9.full

logicchop 5y ago

"an old misconception (with roots both in religion and classical philosophy)" There is also a new misconception (with no real roots except egalitarianism taken too far) that everything is the same as everything else "to varying degrees." That isn't very interesting though. I live in the US. To "some varying degree" I live on the east coast; but that degree is nil because I live far west of the mississippi. Human language, use of tools, artistry etc. are so massively remote from the animal cases that it's worth labelling it a "distinction" and not a "difference."

smhost 5y ago
> with no real roots except egalitarianism taken too far This is a strange way of saying that it has roots in ancient philosophy. Every major ideology I can think of has forms of anti-anthropocentrism spanning from classical animal rights to silicon valley's post-humanist techno-utopian ideology.
wombatmobile 5y ago
> Human language, use of tools, artistry etc. are so massively remote from the animal cases What do you mean by the term "massively remote"?
- zaat 5y ago
  I'm unaware of any other animal with writing abilities. The differences between human and animal languages are widely discussed and the accuracy of the distinctions are contested, but in general the properties of being generative and recursive are considered to be unique to human language.
  - wombatmobile 5y ago
    > in general the properties of being generative and recursive are considered to be unique to human language. For a scholar to make that claim, he or she would have to have studied the bulk of other languages. Since there are more than 70,000 species of vertebrates alone, none of whose language has been deciphered by humans, and we know that other types of animals e.g. honeybees rely on language to function, it is difficult to imagine any scholar qualified to make the claim. Moreover, 99% of humans wouldn't even understand the statement, even after you'd explained what you mean by "generative" and "recursive". So I'm not sure what your statement is, other than yet another example of a human giving himself or herself a justification for the belief that humans are superior to animals, achieved through the mental gymnastic of a truism wrapped up in an academic paper.

gcheong 5y ago

“The discovery, the researchers said, sheds light on the development of early complex social behaviors in Homo sapiens.” My takeaway is that this isn’t looking so much for the dividing line between our species and others in terms of traits but more about determining when cultural evolution began to eclipse biological as the primary force driving our species development.

MomoXenosaga 5y ago

Amusingly the hip trend in my country is putting dead people next to a tree and let nature deal with it. But the lousy coffee and cake (one slice per person!) thing will never disappear.

whatever1 5y ago

Look no further than human babies. There is no single point in their lives that you can definitely say that "hey exactly now (s)he is a complete human but 1 second ago (s)he was not". It is a continuous progression