Originally Posted by
Method Man
1. Why is the humans race so far superior compared to any other mammals on the planet. We are a lot smarter than say a lion or something hence why we rule the world. You think the drop off in mental capability from say a human to a animal would not be so large. Wouldn't surprise me if there was this ******ed like species that were almost as smart as humans had a big war or something way back when and its a cover up.
I really shouldn't even dignify the sorts of threads that are best left as blog entries, and I won't bother with the especially frivolous stuff, but to this one point:
Human beings aren't "objectively" superior to other forms of life. The superiority claimed by humans is subjective and narcissistic. If we applied a different metric to evaluating species, humanity would fall short. We are not the strongest, nor are we the fastest. We don't possess the largest brains. We don't live the longest. Our bodies are relatively fragile and, as has been so often observed, we may very well be outlived by cockroaches. We are, certainly and by far, not - at this point in time - positioning ourselves as an especially viable species, for no other species on Earth has come so perilously close to annihilating the number of species we've claimed, much less the number of species we stand to claim if human societies continue along their current trajectory.
For all our vaunted technological achievement, what has it brought us? What need does a dolphin have for a Wii? Consider human stress, human labor, and compare it to the life of a dolphin. Many humans dream of flying like an eagle, swimming like a shark, running like a horse or gazelle through an open plain - free.
If you're asking why, say, creatures remarkably similar to humans, like chimpanzees, with whom we share 99% of our genetic code, don't ride around in SUVs, the answer isn't so simple as opposable digits.
Again, chimpanzees and gorillas possess opposable thumbs, and chimpanzees do indeed use tools. This, however, isn't the reason that chimpanzees cannot create flint hand-axes. It's actually their wrists that differ from ours, which inhibits their ability to throw with a wrist snap the way our progenitors likely did to flake stone. We're bipeds, so we don't need to place the weight and stress on our wrists the way many apes do. We have a greater range of motion, though at the cost of stability.
In terms of language, Sue Savage Rumbaugh has pioneered in demonstrating the linguistic capability of chimpanzees - particularly bonobos (Kanzi, most famously.) While many apes verbalize, and even do so meaningfully, the complexity of these vocalizations is inhibited in that they are incapable of producing consonant sounds, stop consonants in particular, which is how we're able to package our verbal language. While, in defiance of long-held assumptions, chimpanzees have proven their ability to both teach and think symbolically, the knowledge they're able to pass on is limited due largely to these constraints.
Imagine if, culturally, human beings were forced to essentially "start from scratch" with each new generation. How far removed would our lifestyle be from those of so-called "higher primates?"
Apart from accumulated knowledge, humans are hardly "advanced" as life forms and the extent to which we are "advanced" is entirely subjective and relative. It's narcissistic, to be frank, and stems more or less from a "might is right" mentality. That said, if you put a human and a lion in a small room together, naked and with no resources, which one will seem like the fitter and more dominant species? That people, collectively, can exercise dominance over lions, collectively, through the application of technology means we're "more advanced" only by dint of either force, in which case humans could easily prove inferior to mere bacteria, should humanity ever find itself overtaken by a disease it fails to counteract in time, or by entirely subjective criteria like "cultural works," and, redundantly, whatever knowledge and technology we've managed to amass is hardly an objective measure of "superiority," as most human beings seem quite miserable and desperate - not that we'd find examples of such here.
Pretty much sums it up.
We are only "superior" in our narrow environment. Whales are mammals -- but are we really superior to them surviving in the ocean? I think not.
