Quote:
Originally Posted by Fuzz
Greater intelligence and the ability to manipulate our environment in far more extensive ways than other animals. We aren't mentally much different than animals, it is merely the scale of our intelligence. There are countless behavioral studies that show animals exhibiting the same characteristics we do. I'm not sure what the need is to struggle with what separates us. Think of it like a continuum, with us on one end, and paramecium and Westboro Baptists on the other. You can try to find logical breaks between species, but that is just more human constructs.
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Even the intelligence question for me can get muddied. Every species has natural tendencies, that we don't have, built into their physiology. Birds fly south, to some predetermined destination, every year, along the same path without even really being "taught" it. My dog can differentiate between cars that are minutes from my house purely by, what must be, differences in sound, and recognize them as cars that he knows (IE he will begin getting excited that my brother is coming home probably 5-10 minutes before he walks in the door). Is that intelligence any more or less what we have? Sure we can build civilizations, but so can ants (and much more efficiently).
Is that intelligence that much different than our own? Is it the very fact that we can KNOW things and choose to reject them a sign of intelligence? And through that rejection we adapt our environment vs adapting ourselves? (IE, it's pretty easy to see that people exist in places which they should not. Animals tend to leave their habitats when that happens, but we seem to stay and try to adapt our surroundings to suit us.