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Comment by cercatrova | Hacker News Reader

I mean, we're both mammals with a somewhat recent common ancestor, I'd assume the brain doesn't change that much between such species.

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I'd only disagree with the somewhat recent common ancestor since it was on the order of 60 million years ago. Even geologically speaking, that's a bit. But it's quite clear if you observe rats, dogs, and other mammals (especially social ones), they've got some of the same wiring. I'd go so far as to say that most human laws are just codified innate primate tribe dynamics.

I even hear people say they can relate with their reptiles, but that seems harder for me to square.

I'm always particularly befuddled by the idea that animals don't have emotions. I mean, emotions are based in the deepest, oldest, most lizard-brainy parts of our minds, it's everything else that's more recent.

i'm always surprised by these "we just discovered humans and animals are the same" articles, i've never understood the difference between humans and animals, i always believed we all shared similar fundamental bits, just didn't consider the brain bit but it makes sense.

Same here, people seem to have this strange assumption that humans are somehow fundamentally different from all other organisms.

I think the opposite assumption would make more sense, that we're more alike than different

Well there is only one species that was able to put lightning into a rock, make it smart and use that instead of shouting at each other - not to mention the use of language while doing so.

Animals are treated as automatons which is IMHO very wrong. But saying that there are no fundamental differences seems wrong too.

"But saying that there are no fundamental differences seems wrong too." i don't think thats what they're saying, though i see how it could be interpreted as that. i think what they're saying is that on a basic level we (animals/mamals?) are very similar. ofc there are big differences between species but the building blocks all come from the same place.

also yes we're the only ones to do all that stuff but it doesn't deny the difference between animals, it compares the output of a species abilities (for lack of a better word), our ability just happens to be a really powerful one and one that compounds really quickly.

“Hairless apes, not wingless angels.”

- me

That's brilliant! Kudos!

We share some commonalities with animals - they can have OCD, anxiety, or PTSD for instance. Animal models makes sense for those.

But animals cannot, for example, experience schizophrenia or other psychoses. Nor can they be autistic. Directly from our capacity for improvements in intelligence and self-awareness comes psychosis. Directly from our unique social evolution comes autism. Brain differences that are wholly unique to humans are what underpin a lot of disorders.

The animal model approach has a very limited scope. Some "researchers" think animals can be autistic (under an outdated idea of what autism is from over 60 years ago). It's dangerous pseudoscientific research being used to propose dangerous quackery treatment models.

dogs were built up by humans. dogs are connected to humans on emotional level, so this is not surprising.

Eh, it's extremely unlikely that dogs have developed any totally new types of emotions during the domestication process. More like they were easy and useful to domesticate because as intelligent, mammalian, social pack predators, their ancestors were already a good fit for humans, mentally.

There are papers/studies that show that dogs have facial muscles that wolves lack that effectively give them expressive eyebrows. You could argue this is the result of human selective breeding but it does allow them to portray emotion in a way wolves can’t. Not sure how one would define “new emotion” but certainly their ability to communicate emotion to people at least has changed/increased.

Adding on to this, there’s evidence that domestication involved selecting for genetic abnormalities in dogs that are analogous to Williams Syndrome in humans, a disorder which is known to cause pro-sociability, a strong sense of empathy, and relatedly, anxiety.

I’d argue we have pretty good evidence that the emotional processing of dogs has been dramatically altered by domestication.

https://www.insidescience.org/news/rare-human-syndrome-may-e...

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