common question posed and confronted by scholars, thinkers, writers, anthropologists, scientists, even theologians; alternatively "What makes humans unique?"
I wonder if a book or resource exists that surveys a wide swath of the answers to this seminal question. No doubt it does and I will soon find it.
Notably, some recent and ancient thinkers answer this question in the opposite: are humans unique? why do we imagine ourselves as separate?
For one, Carl Safina studies how animals think and feel in Beyond Words and how they form culture and teach each other lessons in Becoming Wild.
Is it true that ‣? Or is it more that ‣?
An evolutionary anthropologist and a specialist in primate studies, [Christopher Boehm] argues that while humans do have an instinctual tendency to engage in dominant-submissive behaviour, no doubt inherited from our simian ancestors, what makes societies distinctively human is our ability to make the conscious decision not to act that way.
From ‣ :
I THOUGHT BACK to the corn and tomatoes summoning wasps. They were in essence enlisting collaborators. Or, seen in a slightly different way, they were using the wasps as tools. The line between collaboration and coercion is sometimes blurry. The wasps certainly benefited from the relationship too. But either way, it was the plant that proposed the arrangement in the first place. From the plant’s perspective, it had found the right tool for the job. I thought about how an ability to use tools is a classic test of animal intelligence. I’d seen videos of crows opening boxes of food with sticks and sea otters using rocks as anvils to crack open mollusks. Was this so different? I kept reading; it turned out it’s a story repeated over and over in the plant world.
All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man.