What Makes Us Human?
Why it’ s not language or opposable thumbs or tool-making that sets us apart from all other life on Earth
We humans love to imagine ourselves somehow “above” other forms of life on Earth. Whether it’s our ceaseless creation of mythological fairytales about how we were supposedly created by imaginary invisible magical pixies or whether we look at more recent attempts to draw pseudo-scientific distinctions between our species and other species, we see everywhere the same desperate need to believe we’re somehow more than other creatures, somehow better. For a great many people in the West, evolution simply replaced the Great Chain of Being beloved of earlier generations, making humans supposedly the “end-point” of evolution.
In reality, evolution is not teleological and we are in no way the end-point of anything. But there is an enormously significant difference between us and all other forms of animal life on this planet. We are, in one way only, astonishingly unique.
Ethnologist and biologists have demonstrated clearly that it’s not our opposable thumbs that make any sort of difference. Many creatures have opposable thumbs. It’s not the fact we can make and use tools; many creatures including some cephalopods, most corvids, and a great many chimps, also use and or make tools for use. It’s…
