> For a while, we thought it was language and then discovered that it wasn't.
When did this happen? I only studied linguistics at the undergrad level, but as of about 5 years ago, animal language has not made it there other than some examples of 'here are some non-human communication systems, and this is of they differ from language'.
It is not plausible to say that linguists are simply too egotistical to consider the possibility. Scientists in general love animal models. Plenty of linguists would jump at the chance to conduct experiments that are way too unethical to do with human subjects.
There is some promising research into whale songs which might turn out to be analgous. However, as far as I have been able to find, our understanding there is still largely speculative.
I think it's at the level where one has to say only humans have non-trivial fully recursive grammar -- word order has to matter. Various animals have been shown to have fairly impressive language abilities otherwise.
A long time ago one didn't have to phrase it carefully.
It's too easy to accuse every such article of arrogance - after all, something is obviously different, especially given that crows and apes didn't take over the planet long before humans existed. It's fair enough to look for it.
The impact humanity has had on the planet is undeniable. Further, we really are the apex predator globally and we have caused the extinction of numerous species. By most measures it’s absolutely true that we have taken over the planet, imho.
That's a very old hat. What has Cyanobacteria done lately, as in the last billion years? Reminiscing about the glory days? We are the future (of screwing things up).
It may be a difference in quantity rather than a categorical difference. If humans are 10x better at X than animals, it doesn't mean that X is unique to humans. But the things that humans can achieve by using X will obviously very different from what animals can achieve.
We have orcas teaching their families hunting tricks and bears spreading knowledge about how to open bear-resistant food containers. Maybe we’re only like 1.5X as smart as a bear, but the day-to-day maintenance requires 1X bear intelligence, so they don’t have left over brain-cycles to dream up kick off the feedback loop.
Or maybe there are animals out there that are just as smart, but their environment was not conducive to storing knowledge long term.
Considering that humans have evolved from animals, if there was a qualitative difference, how and why do you think something like this would have happened?
Like, from one mother to the child, a switch was flipped?
I think that we haven’t even really defined what qualtitative means.
Bog-standard evolution is perfectly capable of large qualitative differences. Animals couldn't fly until they did. Land animals didn't exist until they did. Multi-cellular beings weren't until they were. We can empirically see this, so your question should be flipped to "how can we explain such developments within evolution?" (We can, but that's a different discussion).
I guess where you stand in this debate depends on how you define “qualitative”.
One could argue that being able to fly or not is a matter of quantity, not quality. But unless you’re being deeply philosophical I admit this is a silly argument to make.
This narrative that "there is nothing uniquely human" is just a grift originating with a handful anthropologists, who tried to claw some academic fame, by challenging the consensus. It is a catchy contrarian take. But it's very obviously naive. Yes, ants can organise their community, apes can break walnuts with a stone, dolphins can communicate their foraging wisdom to offspring, prairie dogs have a rich vocabulary to communicate their experiences. However, no species demonstrates either of these skills as a boundless process. For example, no species has approached levels of abstraction such as: a derivatives financial market; a meta-idea such as "this is a conversation"; the concept of a "concept" itself; or mythology. And while certain animals might be able to demonstrate far more effective problem-solving in their special environment (such as cephalopods), the features that set humans apart are generalisable across environments and explain the evolutionary advantage.
Searching for the mental capacity is the weird thing, there’s more pointing to the idea that other species cant be compelled to care. We cant even tell if another human is capable of intelligence if they are handicapped in speech, paralyzed or locked in. Our best brain scans dont correlate with the level of consciousness and intelligence told by people that became unlocked after a brain injury. of course there are going to be limitations in animals without vocal cords and other priorities.
The inquiry into human uniqueness is probably just another case of human curiosity, enabled by our (seemingly) boundless capacity for understanding across domains, no? I agree about methodological limitations, but we do have plenty of examples where we measured features of animal cognition – it's just that we didn't find evidence that their abstractions can be boundless.
Why not balance that with all of the deficiencies of humans? There are a whole host of traits, defects, and unproductive aspects that haven't been weeded out. A small group of self starters have built the entire infrastructure for humans to excel in and only when given the structure to prioritize doing so. Most people are just a monotonous as every other species most of the time.
I find that angle very sympathetic, but it isn't clear to me at the moment if those people lack potential altogether; or, whether there are cognitive factors (e.g pertaining to education) which suppress that potential. If we could find the neurological basis for that potential, we could determine whether some people just don't engage it, or whether they lack it altogether and are therefore hopeless cattle. That basis might be the large size of the human pre-frontal cortex, which is shared by all healthy humans, so this is why I'm reluctant to dismiss the lack of potential.
> The inquiry into human uniqueness is probably just another case of human curiosity, enabled by our (seemingly) boundless capacity for understanding across domains, no?
I think it is like the Ptolemaic model of the universe. We want to be special. Same as "my home team is the best in the world."
Would you say the same about the early homo sapiens? Practically the same mental capabilities but zero accumulated knowledge baggage you have now. Even the articulated form of the "concept of a concept" you mention is a construct humans came to collectively, let alone "financial markets".
The actual mental capability gap between humans and other animals might be shorter than it appears, if you filter out the knowledge obtained over generations (i.e. not possible to obtain individually without some advanced society).
There seems to be something special in the way humans accumulate and refine knowledge over generations that seems to be unique, but this is hard to isolate and test. Maybe it is just that our quantitatively higher intelligence and social nature combines to weirdly to create a qualitative difference.
More or less modern humans existed for hundreds of thousands of years with very little change. The exponential growth of knowledge in the last several thousand years is just a blip on that timeline, and it mostly became possible due to certain breakthroughs like agriculture.
Sure, most animals have significantly less mental capacity than homo sapiens, but I'd argue that the human society is decoupled from the biological capabilities of a single individual to a large degree. It's a separate self-organizing system, and 99% of our perceived intelligence (a made up number) is purely social in nature.
The fact that individual specimens of our species are capable of reflecting, in the first place, on "what makes us what we are", is itself an example of the boundless capacity for abstraction. It is itself a meta-idea. Even earlier humans were able to talk, then pause, reflect and suddenly point out: "we are having a conversation right now". Animals (such as prairie dogs) may have linguistic constructs for various colours; but not for the the abstract idea of "colour", let alone for the abstract idea of "perception". But I agree that there is a second component to this, which is the fact that each new generation starts from the latest abstractions arrived at by the former, then carries on. So what is unique about humans is that this process appears to be boundless, both at the individual and collective level.
I think, it's a mix of the right abilities that make us unique.
Walking absurdly long distances without pause, throwing things very precisely, not killing each other when in huge groups, autonomous temperature control.
Humans use of language is way beyond any other known life form. Same for tool use. Saying they are the same as humans is like saying a tsunami and a ripple on a lake from a pebble are both waves.
For a while, we thought it was language and then discovered that it wasn't. Same for tool use.
Maybe the search for uniquely human things is the uniquely human thing?
We can get over that too if we consider that we may not be that special.