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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

> evidence reveals that all such traits, be it burial, toolmaking, artistry, abstract thinking etc, is something we share with other species to varying degrees

If actual achievements speak louder than words, then "varying degrees" is a huge gap between human and other species. Yes, we know that numerous animals exhibit intelligence and emotions, but that does not change the fact that humans are very different when it comes to the understanding of time and everything that goes with it. Also, there is no other animal out there who domesticated fire or developed some kind of societal system to expands its own resources beyond what's available in the wild.

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> there is no other animal out there who […] developed some kind of societal system to expands its own resources beyond what's available in the wild.

The trouble with this sort of quasi-dualistic general statement in my experience is it doesn’t hold up well to scrutiny by domain experts. Another way of looking at this is that humans have shaped their “wild” environment to their advantage which is something many animals do. The trouble is in defining wild here - your point rests heavily on a definition along the lines of “shaped entirely by non-human forces” which is a circular argument. For example (and I’m no expert) but think of dam making by beavers and whether the resulting pools which expand their habitat and food are “wild”?

I’d agree with you that there is a qualitative difference between say industrial society and the rest of the animal world, but it’s not easy to nail down that difference in a way which doesn’t wind up excluding much of human history.

That's just a general problem of defining intelligence. Humans are able to excel in many different areas. Bringing domain experts here is like looking at an elephant through a magnifying glass (yep, it's just a skin patch, nothing unique here).

You still do not adress the domestication of fire. This leads to cooking, pottery, metal work and technology at large. Other animals never ever reached that step.

I was going to say that.

We can see the Great Wall of China from space.

And we can also see beaver dams from space.

(Note the Great Wall was built for a mundane reason - the Han people couldn't defeat the Mongols on horseback, but they could keep building walls until the horses could no longer enter. Byzantium/Constantinople also adopted that strategy, which worked for over 1,000 years until the Ottomans built the world's largest cannon and blasted holes in it.)

Nit: you cannot see the Great Wall from space unaided: https://www.nasa.gov/vision/space/workinginspace/great_wall....

That said, no beaver has seen either from space.

We can see water coloration from algae in space.

If you weren't impressed when you read the above sentence, imagine how algae feel when they read your sentence about the Great Wall of China.

You can see everything from space nowadays. How is that a helpful argument for anything ?

The argument can be applied to all species - it is engrained in the ongoing diversification process of life itself: all species by definition have traits that set them apart from others, more or less radically. It is mostly a matter of what perspective you want to apply: are the differences the most important, or the similarities.

But the main point I was trying to make was really this: > To the extent we have any unique such traits currently that radically sets us apart from other species then it has been a long and gradual process over eons

I.e. there is no need to find a specific point where all that makes us human came into place. It all happened gradually, albeit with some leaps and bounds for different traits, at different times for different things, and we carry the legacy of all those millions of years with us, not just the last 200 KY. And we share substantial amounts of traits with other species.

On some level hasn't time and language demonstrated on how different we are from animals. Those traits that you find similar in animals, eg. the elephants returning to the site of the dead, basic tool making, etc, never evolve past those developments. Why ?

The assumption might be that it takes time to develop, but those species never move beyond simplistic uses of language and tools despite their ancient ancestry.

Whatever your thoughts are on the evolution and biology of life, something is happening in the prefrontal cortex of humans that is fundamentally different.

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