Is it just one or two things that make us different from animals? If so what attributes are those? Are we really different from what we call animals? Aren't we animals ourselves?
Homo sapiens is a species of the hominoid ("great apes") subfamily, which means we are apes, which means we are primates, which means we are mammals, which means we are vertebrates, which means we are animals.
But there is indeed just one attribute that makes us qualitatively different from all other animals: our uniquely massive forebrain. Most animals live by the programming built into their brains (if they even have one) by their DNA: instincts and problem-solving skills of varying degrees of sophistication. All vertebrates, but especially the endotherms (warm-blooded air breathers, the birds and mammals) have a forebrain that sits on top of their instinct-driven hindbrain and gives them some ability to make conscious choices and develop individual attitudes that can modify instinctive behavior.
But only
Homo sapiens has such a huge and well-developed forebrain that we can overwhelm our hindbrain with conscious thoughts and override our instincts with reasoned and learned behavior.
To be fair, the other primates and the cetaceans may be close to this level of evolution. But our brains are qualitatively larger than theirs. Consider that humans are born at an amazingly weak and helpless level of growth and our heads continue to grow massively after birth; this is because a properly-sized head could not fit through the birth canal. Newborn giraffes can run and newborn dolphins can swim; newborn humans can't grab, crawl or focus their eyes. As it is, the human pelvis is uniquely wide in order to accommodate birthing our babies' huge heads; many of our muscles have been extensively rerouted and strengthened to allow us to walk bipedally with our legs so offset from our bodies. The result is our gluteus maximus, which I suppose is one other thing you could say distinguishes us from the other mammals.
Anyway, our ability to transcend our nature by consciously choosing to overrule our instincts is what allowed us to invent tools, agriculture, cities, industry and electronics. Civilization was made possible by our forebrains and the ability to create it is our most incredible difference from the other animals.
Extinction is and has been a part of life on this planet since the very beginning.
Yes, but either you're arguing disingenuously or you honestly don't keep up with these things. The rate of extinction of species has been much greater since the dawn of civilization, and has accelerated even more since the industrial revolution and the explosion of the human population. New species used to evolve and more-or-less keep up with the loss of old ones. That is no longer true. We've lost something like fifty species of frog just in the last few decades.
Until we become much more adept at genetic engineering, biodiversity will remain crucial to the health of the biosphere and our survival. This is a purely selfish, homocentric point of view that does not require any emotional thrill over the drawings of the last auk or the photos of the dwindling population of Irawaddy dolphins.
There have been times in the past when humans thought that diversity was unnecessary. During the Iron Age, the human population grew so abundantly that many people ate a diet that was overly rich in grains to compensate for the scarcity of meat. As a result of nutritional deficiencies that we were only able to identify and correct
in the twentieth century, average life expectancy fell from the 50s at the end of the Stone Age to the 20s in the Roman Empire.
Too bad there isn't some efficient method of population control.
I don't know how "efficient" it is, but there is one that works very well: prosperity. In all countries where the standard of living has risen to what we consider First World levels, the birth rate has fallen near or below replacement level. (The USA and Europe are propping up our social security schemes via immigration; the xenophobic Japanese are just watching their population grey.) In the rest of the world, as per-capita GDP rises, family size decreases, from twelve children to eight, from eight to six, from six to five, etc. People with more wealth:
- Don't need as many children to support them in their old age;
- Are able to pursue other interests than home and family;
- Are better educated, more literate, more wired, and more in touch with the rest of us, so they can see how our lifestyle works for us.
We all know that some people just shouldn't be reproducing anyway.
As a Moderator sworn to uphold the scientific method in this academy, I hereby invoke the Rule of Laplace and require you to support that extraordinary statement with some extraordinary evidence. Bear in mind that you must do so without violating any of the forum rules.
All I am saying is that Animals was a word created by humans meant to separate us from them.
Not true.
Animalis is a Latin word meaning "animated," which distinguishes animals from plants. Ultimately it comes from
anima, "breath." Animals are living things that breathe, which includes us. Obviously the Romans didn't know that plants also respire, but all animals take in oxygen and emit carbon dioxide, which is exactly the opposite of plants, so the distinction expressed by the Romans' word still holds even if it isn't exactly the way they perceived it.
OBVIOUSLY physically speaking we are animals, even animals know that!
Indeed. Any carnivore will happily eat human flesh.
But come on, don't disallow me to use the word animal to describe something living that's not human.
This is a place of science and that is a very unscientific and misleading use of an important word. So I, too, will discourage you. "The other animals," "the non-human animals," "the rest of the animals," there are lots of ways to say it. Sure, they require more words, but that is the price of precision. Duh.
