Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Time to revive the campaign to rename the species Homo ignis. Rationale:

1. The ability to start and control fire is a defining feature of the species, without which spread to polar and high-elevation climates would have been impossible. Fire was a fundamental defense against predators, allowed humans to eat foods previously unpalatable, and as a result it's impossible to imagine any group of humans living and surviving without fire.

2. Language is not a unique feature of the human species, relatively complex verbal communication has been found in whales and parrots at least. Other intelligence-based activity (tool use) are also found in crows, chimpanzees, etc. This undermines the rationale for 'sapiens' as intelligence is not unique to humans.

3. The steady destruction of the biosphere's oxygen-generating capability along with injection of vast amounts of carbon and nitrogen and pollutants into the air and water doesn't really seem that wise. Homo ignis would at least acknowledge the potentially self-destructive nature of human behavior.

I mean, "tool use" in other species pretty much tops out at "poking with a stick" so it's not really comparable.

Crows will bend wire into an appropriate hook shape in order to pull a bucket out of a tube.

When we define intelligence as having the ability to do the things that only humans do, it's no wonder that we can't see intelligence in other species.

Most animals don't have digits they can use to manipulate things with the precision we do. That doesn't mean they aren't intelligent.

There are dogs that have learned to ride public bus and metro systems. They know how to act to be accepted in these scenarios when other animals would not be. They have a sense of where they will be going and what the purpose of the vehicle is. They can use their noses to detect things that we cannot even with our fancy tools, and we even rely on them for their noses when our human tech fails.

If intelligence is the domain of humanity then I'm not so interested in intelligence. I'm interested in whatever it is that allows sentient beings to understand, operate within, and adapt to their environments.

We vastly overestimate the intelligence of us and underestimate the intelligence of any other living creature.

Or rather, humanity acts as a highly intelligent collective but individual humans are only moderately intelligent in comparison.

As a thought experiment: put an average urban person on an uninhabited island. No tech. The person would have absolutely no idea how to recreate any of our technology. Nor would they know how to hunt, do agriculture, do mining, do anything.

We have no idea how anything works and outsourced even basic survival skills. The magic of humanity is that actually smart people are able to store and communicate knowledge to build ever more advanced tech, which through sophisticated supply chains and management systems is widely distributed to all other people whom don't require to know how anything works.

Spiders make hunting nets, shelters and flying devices by squeezing their butts.

Try that on for "tool use", human.

And humans do that and much more by squeezing opposable thumbs together ...

I'd like to see you, or any randomly selected human, try to create a flying device by squeezing any parts of your anatomy together, like all spiders of certain species can do.

Spiders are masters of tool construction and use, masters of manipulating their environment, and the only reason we don't recognise this more widely is because they don't do it in the exact same way that we do. i.e. they have the ability to produce materials to build tools with in their own body; which is, arguably, at least as good an idea as the idea of modifying materials obtained from the environment, as we do.

I think, therefore I am a Homo Sapiens.

Ignis sounds like a schoolyard taunt. Ignorant + Dingus

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