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June 22 - November 21, 2016
The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. —Charles Darwin (1871)
science fiction novelist Isaac Asimov reportedly once said, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny.’”
When insects evolved hearing in order to evade bat detection,
This sentense was not written right. "Evolved" seems to imply an intention and "in order to" a purpose. None of this makes any sense. It would have been better to write : 'Natural selection led to the emergence of hearing among insects, as those could evade bat detection.
we like to keep our fellow primates at arm’s length.
the assumption that animals are “dumb,” in the sense that they lack conscious minds, is only that: an assumption. It is far more logical to assume continuity in every domain, Griffin said, echoing Charles Darwin’s well-known observation that the mental difference between humans and other animals is one of degree rather than kind.
can’t help but wonder about the mismatch between conviction and expertise.
Human reflection is chronically overrated,
Capacities that were once thought to be uniquely human, or at least uniquely Hominoid (the tiny primate family of humans plus apes), often turn out to be widespread.
By making suitable tools out of raw materials, chimpanzees are exhibiting the very behavior that once defined Homo faber, man the creator. This is why the British paleontologist Louis Leakey, when he first heard about such behavior from Goodall, wrote her back, “I feel that scientists holding to this definition are faced with three choices: They must accept chimpanzees as man, they must redefine man, or they must redefine tools.”
Every cognitive capacity that we discover is going to be older and more widespread than initially thought.
power alliances (politics)
the spreading of habits (culture),
empathy and fairness (...
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no trait, not even our beloved linguistic ability, ever comes about de novo. Nothing evolves all of a sudden, without antecedents. Every new trait taps into existing structures and processes.
Like Galileo’s colleagues, who refused to peek through his telescope, humans are a strange lot.
half a century ago, DNA studies revealed that humans barely differ enough from bonobos and chimpanzees to deserve their own genus. It is only for historical reasons that taxonomists have let us keep the Homo genus all to ourselves.
subjective coloring of traits that we deem crucial.
The good thing about DNA is that it is immune to prejudice, making it a more objective measure.
Neo-Creationism
we descend from the apes in body but not in mind.
one seems to know how interconnectivity produces consciousness nor even what consciousness exactly is.
there is a vast mass of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral similarities between us and our primate kin. But there is also a tip containing a few dozen differences. The natural sciences try to come to grips with the whole iceberg, whereas the rest of academia is happy to stare at the tip.
It is out of insecurity that we love the contrast with other Hominoids,
though the iceberg’s tip has been melting for decades, attitudes barely seem to budge.
The zeal to find out what sets us apart overrides all reasonable caution.
Pygmalion, in ancient mythology, was a Cypriot sculptor who fell in love with his own statue of a woman. The story has been used as a metaphor of how teachers raise the performance of certain children by expecting the world of them.
the human ego gets in the way of dispassionate science.
Keeping humans in their preferred spot on that absurd scale of the ancient Greeks has led to an obsession with semantics, definitions, and redefinitions, and—let’s face it—the moving of goalposts.
Summarizing these ideas in his 1975 book Sociobiology, E. O. Wilson helped launch the evolutionary approach to human behavior.35
human-animal difference is one of degree, not kind.
All vertebrate brains are homologous. Although we cannot directly measure consciousness, other species show evidence of having precisely those capacities traditionally viewed as its indicators.
conformist bias.
Members of our own species are the ultimate conformists, going so far as abandoning their personal beliefs if they collide with the majority view. Our openness to suggestion goes well beyond what we found in the chimps, yet it seems related.
How little rewards matter is also evident from habits that lack benefits.
Animals strive to act like others, especially others whom they trust and feel close to. Conformist biases shape society by promoting the absorption of habits and knowledge accumulated by previous generations. This by itself is obviously advantageous—and not just in the primates—so even though conformism is not driven by immediate benefits, it likely assists survival.
Proponents of human uniqueness face the possibility that they have either grossly overestimated the complexity of what humans do or underestimated the capacities of other species.
