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Comment by nkrisc | Hacker News Reader

They’re correct that they are many measures by which humans are not exceptional. Quite a lot, actually. But there clearly is something different about humans, something exceptional. Is it language? Is it our capacity for thought? I think what it actually is that makes us different is absolutely up for debate, and even traits we thought were exclusive to humans may not be.

So I’m not sure we know exactly what it is that makes us different, but we clearly are in some way. There is no other animal that has developed anything close to the capabilities we have.

Would any other species on earth, in a billion years, ever develop the ability to travel to other celestial bodies, let alone even know what they are?

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Calling something as exceptional or special entails a value judgement; it's not particularly surprising, IMHO, for the things humans care about to align around human traits. Heck, even the act of making judgements about human exceptionalism is an arguably human-specific trait.

Consider, horseshoe crabs are undeniably the best at doing all things horseshoe crab. No other animal comes close to behaving like a horseshoe crab!

IMHO, the almost tautological nature of this judgement is what makes it uninteresting at best and actively harmful at worst. It's just a stone's throw away from individual, group, and racial exceptionalism.

> Consider, horseshoe crabs are undeniably the best at doing all things horseshoe crab. No other animal comes close to behaving like a horseshoe crab!

Yes, you could say this about any animal. It does not explain why, apparently, no other animal in the entire history of the Earth has done anything comparable to what humans have done.

Horseshoe crabs are good at horseshoe crab things, but convergent evolution has in the past created similar animals that are roughly equally good at doing horseshoe crab things.

There have been and are many animals good at doing horse-ish things. Many good at wolf-ish things. Even flight has evolved independently several times among both vertebrates and invertebrates (and while we can’t fly on our own, we regularly fly faster than any flying animal). We’re petty weak among all animals and yet the heaviest things that have been moved have been moved by humans. We’re pretty slow runners and yet we hold pretty much any speed record you can think of.

Why hasn’t there been any other animals similar to humans in our abilities? Why hasn’t spaceflight evolved several times? Why hasn’t metallurgy? Particle physics? Why can’t any other animal understand the basic chemistry of the universe as we do?

There have been other animals with similar capacities, we just killed them all.

Neanderthals couldn't develop any of the things you mentioned because humans stopped them. If we hadn't been here or if they had gained the upper hand during some pivotal moments then they might be wondering about their own exceptionalism today.

We didn’t kill them all. Many people alive today have some small amount of Neanderthal ancestry.

We don’t really k ow exactly what happened to them, likely a mix of killing them and assimilating them.

And you can even broaden the original question to include our nearest relatives and it is still equally interesting, I believe.

Most people outside of subsaharan Africa have Neanderthal DNA

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_genetics

It's also been suggested that nearly 1 in 10 men in Asia are descended from Genghis Kahn

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_descent_from_Genghis_K...

I'm not sure that it is still interesting. If we start to broaden the goalposts every time then the question just becomes one of "earth exceptionalism," right?

And while I agree that it wasn't necessarily accurate to say we killed them, a shared ancestry doesn't imply any kind of harmony. Think of the hundreds of thousands to potentially millions of rapes estimated to have been committed by the soldiers occupying Germany (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_of_...)

I’m not suggesting broadening the goal posts beyond what I stated.

As far as we know species like Neanderthals were very, very similar to us so it’s worth considering them as well unless we have a reason not to,

While it’s a possibility, as far as I heard, we don’t know if Homo Sapiens killed them or why they went extinct.

That's pretty reductive of horseshoe crabs. Foraging bipeds have evolved many times, equally good at human things.

Metallurgy? Spaceflight? Particle physics? Those are clearly unnaturally contrived reference classes. Why can't humans HorseshoeCrabTermA (i.e. scan the ocean floor upside down at a 30 degree for optimal benthic foraging and conspecific mingling?) Why hasn't HorseshoeCrabTermB (lunar-synchronized mass spawning timed with satellite male mating patterns)? Why can't other animals properly molt and feed with gnathobase ginding like horseshoe crabs do?

Don't get me wrong, I love chrome on cars and rockets and human intellectual curiosity. No other species has invented Python 2.7, but so what?

> Why can't humans HorseshoeCrabTermA (i.e. scan the ocean floor upside down at a 30 degree for optimal benthic foraging and conspecific mingling?)

I mean, I’m certain we could if we wanted to. But that’s my point. Why can we create things that can do almost anything other animals can do, but other animals can’t (or don’t) do that?

To be clear, I do not mean that other animals are not exceptional in their own ways.

Why can’t any other animal synthesize isotopes and elements that do not (or very rarely) occur naturally? That’s an objective understanding of the same physical universe we all share. How come no other animal can (or does not) do that too? Sure, they don’t need to, but we don’t need to either and yet we do. Why?

Why do no other animals cook with fire? Lots of animals use gastroliths to aid digestion. Lots of animals masticate and grind their food. Surely cooking with fire would be nutritionally advantageous to other animals, so why has that ability apparently only evolved once? Many successful traits have evolved independently several times. Are humans unique with regards to the unique traits we’ve evolved and developed? It certainly seems so. There certainly seems to be something that sets us apart.

If it’s anything, I would wager it’s the transmission of knowledge across both time and space. Two people may exchange knowledge without ever meeting each other. Other animals can do that to some degree (scent marking), but the information density is severely limited compared to human abilities.

> Calling something as exceptional or special entails a value judgement;

Calling something exceptional or special is generally an objective statement based on observed facts. Now whether something exceptional deserves special treatment is a value judgment.

> Consider, horseshoe crabs are undeniably the best at doing all things horseshoe crab. No other animal comes close to behaving like a horseshoe crab!

What are their exceptional traits? For example, we can say peregrine falcons or cheetahs are exceptionally fast. Or blue whales are exceptionally large. Saying horseshoe crabs are horseshoe crabs isn't saying much.

> IMHO, the almost tautological nature

You conjured up a false tautological argument.

> It's just a stone's throw away from individual, group, and racial exceptionalism.

But such exceptionalisms exist individually and group-wise/racially. We know that lebron james is exceptionally good at basketball. We know that tibetans do exceptionally well at high altitudes. Those are objective facts. Now whether they deserve special treatment is a value judgment.

Anything a horseshoe crab can do, I can do better

> Would any other species on earth, in a billion years, ever develop the ability to travel to other celestial bodies, let alone even know what they are?

A billion years is a very very long time. Humans and chimps diverged about 7-8 million years ago. Given no human competitors and a billion years there's no reason some other great apes or raccoons or something couldn't develop a space programme.

Life has existed for billions of years before humans, why hasn’t it happened before us? Perhaps you’re right, and that’s equally interesting.

How do we know it hasn't? If some clever species of dinosaur ~100M years ago had a few thousand years of rapid progress like we've had -- before blowing themselves up... would we even be able to tell?

We'd have been able to see, for example, ice cores showing chemical changes in the atmosphere from industrialization. You can't carry out the same kind of massive activity that humans did without leaving some evidence. Even the Black Death was observable in ice cores on account of fewer humans burning wood.

Humanity has left many traces. An interesting example is a vast amount of chicken bones buried underground.

None of which are even close to even 100,000 years old, let alone a million or 100 million.

We have stone tools from a few million years ago. Modern things are much larger and numerous so would be much easier to find and last longer.

https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/human-evolution/2-6-...

We don’t know it hasn’t, but we have no evidence it has.

This is actually a somewhat active area of research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis

The absence of detectable plutonium-244 (half-life of 81.3 million years) is one indication that we are ~probably the first civilization on Earth to discover nuclear fission.

One billion years ago there were no animals or plants and only barely multicellular organisms:

> And here’s another cool thing: a little over a billion years ago, life started experimenting with multicellularity. Imagine single cells deciding to team up and work together! A fossil discovered in Scotland, a tiny ball-shaped thing, is the oldest known example of a multicellular organism.

https://geoscience.blog/was-there-life-1-billion-years-ago/

I know OP was just kind of throwing out a big number but it's worth highlighting the orders of magnitude involved here. To put it in terms HN might grok more easily, if modern humans have existed for 300 kB we're talking about one gig.

It's funny looking at the theropod (e.g. T. Rex) family tree compared to ours. Bipedal animals whose forelimbs shrink and jaws grow. No way they're making tools.

Korzybski claimed that the most significant difference was the human ability of time-binding.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cbqr9NcFDtjvM6zC4/time-bindi...

Jacob Bronowski expressed this with a more fundamental hypothesis. Humans have "a sense of the future" whereas other animals have very limited foresight.

Don’t octopi take a coconut shell with them to cross a patch of sandy sea floor with no place to hide? Pretty advanced sense of future.

Even those other measures at which other animals excel are largely done better by humans once you include the use of technology.

Murder. We're the best at murder.

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