Enmos
Valued Senior Member
Conscious ?
Humans make a particular point of it as well, granting themselves superiority in the process.
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Beating the dead horse of animals vs humans
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Conscious ?
Humans make a particular point of it as well, granting themselves superiority in the process.
so then a squirrel sees itself as superior because it mainly associates with other squirrels? they do associate with other species, like birds, but nothing like they do with each other. from what i have seen it is not really a close association at all with other species.
humans are superior.
humans are superior.
i was thinking about that for some time. i think we should eliminate one species as a trial. the first one should be rats. keeping some around in a controlled environment only.
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
This blinded me to anything else you wrote.
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
wrong
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
Apes ?
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infraclass
For example: all insects belong to the Class Insecta.
Humans belong to the class Mammalia, just like any other mammal out there.
Look at the classification at the right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humans
Enmos
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Fraggle Rocker
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Hey, in my crowd I wouldn't bet on it. I've always hung around with people who love language and play games with it. The other kind don't find me to be very good company.
Are you sure? That's a rather arbitrary definition. For starters, if you're excluding insects (six-legged arthropods) I'm sure you also exclude all the other arthropods: arachnids (eight legs), myriapods (centipedes and millipedes) and crustaceans (no standard number of legs but they're the aquatic ones). And why stop there? Surely you reject the mollusks, earthworms, jellyfish... all the way down to the amoebae; all of which are, properly, animals. I suspect what you meant to say was that only vertebrates (mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and bony fish) count as "true animals." People who use that paradigm probably include the cartilaginous fish (sharks, eels, rays, etc.) because it's unlikely that those people even know enough basic biology to realize that those animals are not real fish at all, but members of a separate phylum.
Back in the 1950s you'd occasionally hear an old back-country paradigm, in which "animal" meant only mammals. I used to have a kids' picture card game called "Animal, Bird or Fish?"
Many animals have strong social instincts. Some are pack-social like most primates including humans, bonding strongly to a small circle of pack-mates, and some are herd-social, living in moderate harmony and cooperation with large number of anonymous herd-mates (or flock or whatever it's called for the particular species).
The pack-social species have many behaviors that are precursors to ours such as loyalty, self-sacrifice, rivalry, love and playfulness. The reason dogs were the first animal to domesticate themselves is that their attitudes and habits are similar enough to ours to make a compatible multi-species pack. Anyone who's lived with any species of parrot (arguably most are flock-social but their high IQ gives them many pack-social traits) knows how easily they fit into a human family while at the same time teaching us new ways of seeing the world.
That's because they don't have our massive forebrain and have not invented the technology of language, and because they don't have opposable thumbs and have not invented spatulas and frying pans. But despite those handicaps the cetaceans have invented complex communication systems that we can't even understand, and quite a few species of mammals and birds have invented primitive tools which they use to gather and prepare food more efficiently even if they can't use them for cooking.
Apes are even closer to us than we ever imagined. Both gorillas and chimpanzees have proven capable of learning American Sign Language. They develop an impressive vocabulary and use it to demonstrate abstract thinking processes. The first time Koko saw a zebra she called it a white tiger. One of them taught it to her baby.
Let's see: high school is a zoo, government free clinics are veterinary hospitals, and prison is animal control
I'm not really arguing against that. I'm just pointing out that the word "animal" has a well-defined meaning and to misuse it is to abuse it.
It's not social life that sets us apart from all the other species. Whales, wolves, hyenas, budgies and myriad other species have a rich social life. Their inability to read doesn't differentiate them from us any more than it sets the indigenous people of the Amazon apart from us. What sets us apart from them is our qualitatively superior intelligence, which permits us to override our instincts to a degree that no other animal can approach.
We have more emotions than fear in common with the other pack-social mammals. All of them feel a sense of caring for their pack-mates and also depending on them. A member of an African canine species brazenly strode into a research camp and slowly dragged out his anesthetized pack-mate who was scheduled for a blood test. The scientists were so touched that they just let it happen. He overrode his instinctive fear to manifest his instinctive caring, just as most humans do for a pack-mate in trouble.
Most non-predatory birds are comfortable around other non-predatory species. Even birds that are not particularly social easily tolerate the proximity of other birds when feeding. When the weather warms up a little more I'll see blackbirds, finches, woodpeckers and several other species using my feeder together, with cardinals and pigeons cleaning up the ground underneath.
Nonetheless they're all programmed to recognize their own species. When it's time to migrate they flock together, and of course they will only do their mating dance for a female of their own species.
do you have any examples (images) of different facial features in apes?
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
I don't even get what point you're trying to make..
Sure, different Chimpanzees have different faces :shrug:
That humans are not trained to accurately distinguish between them is an entirely different point.
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
So do they consciously categorize themselves as different from other animals ?
Because if they do that would be marvelous, it would mean that they are self-aware like us
we are not going to agree on this but i dont think there is anywhere near the variation we see in humans. not even close to it. i dont agree with the training statement either but i am aware of this response.
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
Well, there is real good evidence to support it.
I'll see if I can find it tomorrow (I'm off to bed in a minute).
But please, could you specify what point you're actually trying to make with this (in light of the OP of course) ?
John99 don't be a ding-a-ling and not understand the complexity of animal communications. Apes (humans are apes) have complex societies. Take a gander at the work on chimpanzees.
Chris is right in that the English language supports a difference between humans and other animals. For instance, people often say "She's the girl that won the prize." This is incorrect English. The proper sentence is "She's the girl who won the prize".
Chris is interesting is that he has a size cutoff for animals. I used to do the same thing when I was in second grade.
Chris is right in that the English language supports a difference between humans and other animals. For instance, people often say "She's the girl that won the prize." This is incorrect English. The proper sentence is "She's the girl who won the prize".
Chris is interesting is that he has a size cutoff for animals. I used to do the same thing when I was in second grade.
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