The Warring States of NPF - What seperates humans from animals?

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- - What seperates humans from animals? (http://www.nuklearforums.com/showthread.php?t=25033)

A lot of animals eat their species' young because doing so lessens the overall population but ensures their own children's survival. Get rid of the neighbour's kids and your own will be more likely to pass their genes on. It's not a conscious decision, but instinctual. I've seen my pet fish do it tons of times, despite being the only brood in the tank. That, if anything, is a hallmark of it being an instinct-driven nature rather than a logical decision. Their young-killing cannot and should not be compared to our murdering, because the source of the motive is entirely different.

I would agree that communication is extremely advanced in humans, but it's not what separates us. The advancement is due mostly to our ability for abstract thinking. Funny thing is that children have a hard time with abstract reasoning until about grade one or two. That's why we all used counters in math at some point. We, just like animals, needed a concrete representation of the idea, otherwise we couldn't grasp it.

Want to see some fancy animal communication? Bees do little dances to tell others where honey is. Most animals use pheromones instead of gestures and sound, because their sense of smell is so much better. Koko the gorilla was the first one taught sign language.

The creepy one is crows. They seem to be strangely intelligent for a non-primate species.

Several studies were done on them, involving a food source left out and several scientists watching from a small hut. The birds wouldn't go for the food until all the scientists had left. I think there were seven of them? Anyway, the guys did a long combination of two going, one returning, the other coming back... all sorts of combinations to deek out the crows and make it look like there were more people than actually present.

The crows were smart enough not to go for the food until all had left. They could effing count.

Another study had the crows given wires. Their task was to retrieve food from the bottom of a narrow bucket. The results were kind of surprising.

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Originally Posted by Khael!

Crow stuff~

Wow, that's pretty interesting in itself. I think it's rather a nice example of degrees of intelligence. You know, so and so animal has no ability to act other than instinct, humans are self aware, crows lie somewhere on the line inbetween with many other animals. Just a nice example of intelligence being an analogue curve rather than a digitial leap from smart or not.

"Analog curve". YES.

I never was very good at being succinct, that's exactly what I was trying to say.

Especially considering dolphins. I mean, they're capable of empathy, helping other struggling animals breathe by pushing them to the surface. Tests with mirrors have shown them to be self-aware too. (They used the mirrors to inspect paint marks on their body, rather than mistake it for another dolphin.)

Another difference between humans and other animals is our hands. Not that they're opposable, but rather how we use them. Almost all animals use their hands as a method of transportation. The apes with more hand-like appendages still use theirs mainly for climbing, else for bringing food to the mouth.

But humans... we use ours for just about everything but transportation. Our arms are too out of proportion to use for running (like gorillas). Climbing is still possible, but we rarely do it out of necessity anymore. They've become tools entirely for manipulation and social expression.

The honey bee waggle dance can be interpreted as about as robotic as the description of intraspecies young-slaying. Of course, a bee's sense of direction is pretty incredible for an insect. Consider the size of its brain; it simply doesn't have much room for processing centers. Still, the dance is very cool!

As for a lack of pseudo-human primates roaming the Earth, well I haven't studied the unwritten human history going that far back, but given how warlike we are, I imagine there's such a distinctive gap because, well, we long ago genocided any close competitors. Now, having no competitors, we genocide ourselves and random species that get in our way. Go team!

The Wizard who did it- I apologize for taking forever to reply, but I've only just finally gotten a few free minutes to sit down and think through a reply.

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Originally Posted by The Wizard Who Did It

I did a quick search and found a reference to other animals burying their dead, or at least throwing leaves over them. However, that isn't the main issue to be pressed.

I did a little checking myself and found a couple references also. The distinction is that throwing leaves over a corpse isn't going to prevent decomposition, embalming does.

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Saying that we have a fear of death is making an assumption of all humans throughout time.

I quote Dr. Irvin D. Yalom, from his book Existential Psychotherapy.

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"Life and death are interdependent; they exist simultaneously, not consecutively; death whirs continuously beneath the membrane of life and exerts a vast influence upon experience and conduct. Death is a primordial source of anxiety and, as such, is the primary fount of psychopathology."

and

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"Although the physicality of death destroys man, the idea of death saves him."

and

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"It is important to keep in mind that death anxiety, though it is ubiquitous and has pervasive ramifications, exists at the deepest levels of being, is heavily repressed, and is rarely experienced in its full sense."

The purpose of these quotes is to show that death anxiety is a well established concept.

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For a second example closer to the issue, let's talk about a domestic dog. When a robber comes into a house, a dog may bite the robber. Why does the guard dog bite the robber? Because the dog believes that that is the right thing to do. He believes the robber may bring harm to his house. He believes his master is worthy of his protection. For all he knows, his master may have rightfully deserved being robbed, but the dog acts on blind faith.

I'd call this example anthropomorphizing. Here's how I would interpret this situation. The dog attacks the robber because the robber violates the dog's territory without the sanction of the alpha member of his pack (the master). It's a simple case of a dog protecting a pack member.

I'm sure you've heard stories from people about how their cat often brings dead animals to the person. This is because the cat sees that the person is not hunting for themselves and thus need food brought to them.

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On a similar note, what about an animal in a trap? When a human comes along to free the animal, the animal lashes out at the human. The animal believes that the human is trying to do him harm, and acting on it.

Violence is a reaction to pain, belief has nothing to do with it. This is called respondent aggression. You can read a little bit about one experiment with rats Here.

I think that I've found a more concrete example of belief existing only in human beings and not in animals and I'm somewhat surprised that I didn't think of it before. It's known as the placebo effect. The primary application is used in pharmaceutical trials in what's called a double blind study. Several groups of patients take a pill that is supposed to treat a condition, only some of the groups receive an inert placebo instead of the actual medicine. Some people on the placebo show improvement similar, and occasionally greater, than the actual medicine. The key here is belief. The placebo affect has to my knowledge never been shown in animals outside of instances of severe observer bias.

My take on it is that humans have "sentience" whereas animals operate solely on instinct. Some higher intelligent animals may sort of approach something that SEEMS LIKE sentience, but they still lack the idea of "I" and the forming of right/wrong ideas, or should I say the ability to even rationalize about right/wrong.

Lions in a pride work together due to an instinctual wish to protect 1. mates and 2. relatives/young. THAT is why they attack outsiders, not because they actively reason about it. A pride is usually formed of one (and possibly two or more males, but there is an alpha male), a bevy of lionesses for mating, and the young. If a male other than the pack leaders defeats the lead male, he will uniformly kill the young because they do not share his genes, but he will not kill the lionesses because he wishes to breed. Nowhere in any of this is a reasoning about what is right or wrong (since most humans would probably consider killing the young wrong)--it's entirely based around advancing his gene pool and being the leader of the pride. It's instinctual. So I disagree with The Wizard... on this being any sort of rationalizing behavior, or, if it is, the rationalizing behavior doesn't extend to any sort of cause-and-effect or higher-level thinking and is entirely attuned to a self-centered advancement.

In a way it's better just to say this is instinctual than to say that lions (and other animals) lack empathy, I think, because they lack a LOT of what we would call reasoning.

What separates us from animals? Simple: pants.

Seriously though, I believe what separates us from animals is the simple fact that we believe we ARE separate from animals. A lot of you mentioned our belief in good and evil. Good and evil are purely relative, however. Do you think the Nazis thought it was evil to murder 11 million people? Or if Charles Manson thought it was evil to kill all those people? No, of course they didn't, because they thought they were completely JUSTIFIED.

(a serious post from ME? :shock:!)

Does that mean nudists are animals?

I kid. Somehow your joke about human decency made a surprisingly valid point. We are the only species that covers ourselves because we don't want our privates seen. How come other animals that are self-aware don't give a damn about this?

I'd say that the urge to cover our "naughty bits" comes from the sense that "sex is a sin, cover ye shame!" imbued by religion (mainly the Jesus-based ones), but it's not like everyone was naked before Christianity came along. Aside from that, I'd have to say that during evolution, in a sense we traded warm hair for the intelligence to take other animal's warm hair and make it into clothes.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Khael!

The creepy one is crows. They seem to be strangely intelligent for a non-primate species.

Several studies were done on them, involving a food source left out and several scientists watching from a small hut. The birds wouldn't go for the food until all the scientists had left. I think there were seven of them? Anyway, the guys did a long combination of two going, one returning, the other coming back... all sorts of combinations to deek out the crows and make it look like there were more people than actually present.

The crows were smart enough not to go for the food until all had left. They could effing count.

Another study had the crows given wires. Their task was to retrieve food from the bottom of a narrow bucket. The results were kind of surprising.

You said it on crows. The ravens at my university have learnt to use rocks to open harder nuts, I even saw one balance a harder nut in a wedge in a tree and chisel it open using a sharp rock, a bit later most of them seem to have learnt the trick, so they can use tools and teach other ravens what they know. And the ones at my high school could operate zippers to find food in your bag. I've also heard the ones in Queensland have begun to figure out how to eat Cane Toads while avoiding the poison sacs.

The reason for this is pretty simple, they fill the same niche we do, highly intelligent generalists with the ability to live almost anywhere.