Comment by nkrisc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nkrisc | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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