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.
All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man.
~ Jiddu Krishnamurti
From Nourishing Traditions Book for Baby and Child Care: