What makes us different from all the other animals?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

NOTHING. NOTHING MAKES US DIFFERENT.

At least, not in the way  the question is most often posed. In many psychology books, operating on a philosophy that is straight outta 1896, you will see again and again statements like "This makes humans unique among the animals of the world". This statement is almost always unequivocally false.

There is no one thing, no great difference, that makes humans different from other animals. Nothing that is biologically derived, anyway; you could argue that no other animal wears pants, and you would probably be correct, but given Nature's history of proving us wrong, eventually we'd probably discover some small Amazonian beetle that weaves pants for its young out of caterpillar silk. Other animals have culture, other animals have language, other animals use tools, other animals have enormous frontal lobes. There is simply no one thing that is so special about humans that we can hold it up like a trophy, some sort of divine symbol that we stand apart from all the other species. In all ways, our differences are emergent and in measures of degree, using different versions of the same structures present in other animals in ways that make us unique-- just like all the other animals.

I would like to see the "What makes humans unique and different from all other animals?" question put to bed forever. It is an irrelevant question, it asks nothing useful and there is no useful or enlightening answer. Seeking one fundamental difference, something which we share with no other creature, is a philosophical and scientific dead-end; and at this point, philosophy has nowhere to go if it fails to embrace science. "What makes us different from all the other animals?" is a question as deep and as elucidating as "What makes a horse different from a badger?"

If we can't be satisfied with that, we probably aren't ready to move forward in asking the more significant question, not of what sets us apart, but of how we fit in.

[Cainad (dec.)]

I was hoping that would be the answer you'd have

I mean, I guess some philosophy major might try to sell something like "religion" but I'm pretty sure animals also believe things that they have no concrete evidence for, they're just less complicated things.

[P3nT4gR4m]

What makes us different from all the other animals is the fact that we ask shit like "What makes us different from all the other animals?"

Can't help thinking we're ahead of the game in that respect.

Giraffes still have the longest necks, tho. Maybe long term that'll turn out to be the more important thing.

[rong]

Separation of church and state?

[Meunster]

I'm going to go with the "humans wear pants" Like you said. That's a good one.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I was hoping that would be the answer you'd have

I mean, I guess some philosophy major might try to sell something like "religion" but I'm pretty sure animals also believe things that they have no concrete evidence for, they're just less complicated things.

Right, and they actually may not be less complicated things, as we still know very little about the cognition of, for example, dolphins, except that their brains are enormous and have relatively much greater cortical area than ours do.

[Doktor Howl]

What makes me different from animals is that I can fuck up in ways that would doom any other species to extinction.

[The Wizard Joseph]

What makes me different from animals is that I can fuck up in ways that would WILL doom any MANY other species to extinction.

Not an FTFY, just expressing a perspective jolt I had when I read that.


I think that this is the big difference. Most species are only inimical to a small and very specific set of other species, and rarely an existential threat to those species. Even the most vicious microbes are generally only a threat to a closed set of certain types of creatures. Humans can kill pretty much anything on earth, and our abilities of reason and to directly manipulate the environment have reached a point where we could kill practically everything.

I know that this isn't a true difference biologically, but if there's anything beyond biology to our being it's terrifically deadly and able to leverage our biology and mental capacity to change things no other species can, whether or not we should.

[MMIX]

Humans can kill pretty much anything on earth, and our abilities of reason and to directly manipulate the environment have reached a point where we could kill practically everything.

  and sometimes we even do it on purpose 

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I was kind of, albeit apparently futilely, hoping that people here would get the point and not run off with "things that make humans super special".

Cainad got it, at least. Cainad, let's you and me go start our own species.






Oh, shit. I'm sterile. Never mind. We're all going to die.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Ook ook, motherfuckers. Ook fucking ook.

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

I don't need to fit into no ecosystem.

I DO WHAT I WANT.

[axod]

Genetically, the prize for greatest variance goes to the octopus, I think.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

Genetically, the prize for greatest variance goes to the octopus, I think.

Which species of octopus and why?

[axod]

Genetically, the prize for greatest variance goes to the octopus, I think.

Which species of octopus and why?

I think it was the whole genus, extending maybe even to the family, and it was because of their DNA, maybe all the different proteins they can encode being greater by something like an order of magnitude w.r.t. all other "terrestrial" families; with the implication of their being practically alien.