Van Inwagen’s laugh test

I believe the emphasis should be upon the notion NOT that we are so unlike apes etc but that we are in fact in many respects related to them and therefore ought not see ourselves as so distinctly different when in fact we share some evolutionary reactions. Hamlet, also not a scientist, noted that we are somewhere in-between angels and animals.

The position that only minds and elementary particles exist is pretty strange on the face of it, but it doesn’t take much explanation to make it sound more sensible. All physical objects are ultimately composed of elementary particles, so those particles can legitimately be described as the only real ‘things’. Minds are indivisible, just like elementary particles.

If that’s what you think, that minds (and he obviously would much rather say ‘souls’) are these free-floating sui generis entities, and not the product of physical effects, then it is laughable to compare apes and humans. Apes are temporary collections of elementary particles, people are _minds_. There’s no comparison.

What is this “vast, radical difference, a chasm” supposed to consist of ? Obviously nothing physical, so presumably he means either speech, culture, or something less definable such as the possession of a soul. Well, research over the last twenty years or so has proved quite conclusively that chimpanzees do have the capability for speech and symbolic thought, and also culture – learned behaviors shared by groups. That leaves the idea of the soul, perhaps. But whatever you think of that idea, it certainly isn’t scientific. The argument sounds suspiciously anthropocentric – isn’t the “vast, radical difference” just the fact that van Inwagen happens to be a human, not a chimpanzee ?

Is Van Inwagen proposing that two things can only compare to one another as “similar” or “different”? Because that would be an unusual proposal.

Small, minor, petty correction, almost completely irrelevant to the point you are making: van Inwagen believes in snails, spiders, fish, trees, etc., none of which is a human being or an elementary particle. It’s not clear to me that trees meet the unified consciousness test, but he believes in them too. He also believes in all sorts of abstract objects, which are neither conscious, nor living, nor elementary particles. The only composite material objects van Inwagen believes in are living ones.

Some other ideas which surely fail the laugh test:

– light doesn’t travel in straight lines

– there’s a special kind of metal which causes an enormous explosion when you assemble a few kg quickly enough

– invisible “radio” waves can be used to send messages thousands of miles with no wires

– you can make a machine which does more than ten million million arithmetic operations each second (that’s 10TFLOPS)

– a heavier-than-air flying machine can fly right round the world without stopping or refuelling

Which gets us to the heart of the problem – mathematics, science, and technology get you to conclusions which are true and/or useful even though they seem laughable. So a philosopher pontificating about what is and isn’t laughable has really not been paying attention.

It is indeed a funny thought that chimps and humans are very similar – when you’re a 8-year-old child.

Note, by the way, that VI uses the “laugh test” as a way of refusing to suppoft his position with arguments– “You certainly wouldn’t want to invest much time in an argument with someone who would believe it in the first place.” It would be hard to find a more contemptible move in an intellectual debate. It’s also the sort of thing that “Intelligent Design” proponents do all the time, especially Dembski, who fancies himself a wit. Birds of a feather, or something.

Any thing can be made a joke. Once it is a joke, why take the question seriously? There is a deep intellectual dishonesty at work here that denies science, and indeed any form of rationality. The simple question is whether there are revealed Truths, such as the unique status of human beings, or only truths that emerge from an examination of an objective external world.

The question isn’t if geese migrating and people hopping are both motion. The question is how can we distinguish them? What, exactly, is different between humand and chimps? Only revealed truth needs rely on partial, unrefinable definitions of the sort assumed to be laugable. A point of doctrine never leads anywere but to heretic hunts.

Gellner’s “Postmodernism, Reason and Religion” should be required reading.

That doesn’t really diminish my sense that when it comes to claims that are, on the face of it, laughable, van Inwagen may be a man throwing stones in a glasshouse.

But he doesn’t say that the claim is “on the face of it, laughable”, he says that “its consequences apart, it’s simply a very funny idea”. I think that’s a quite different thing to be saying.

I am afraid to think what would be left of Philosphy if the “laugh test” became standard practice.

Ray: the alleged difference is between collections of elementary particles
that form “a life” and those that don’t. He has a more or less usable
definition of “a life” for this purpose, whose details I forget. You
can find the laughable details in his book “Material Beings”, available
at all good joke shops.

The elemtnary particles and minds thing doesn’t seem so strange to me.

In principle, we can explain the whole material world in terms of elementary particles. References to all other material phenomena are just shorthand.

When we’ve finished this, what do we have left over? Moral concepts such as right and wrong, duty, guilt, truth and falsity. All of which refer to relations between minds.

So, particles and minds. Just your basic Kant is all.

(Whetehr this is what vI is actually arguing I have no idea, never having heard of him before this post.)

.. which is why comments like Cownie’s above are so off the point. A neurologist can tell you lots of things about Terry Schiavo, but he can never tell you if her expressed prior wishes (arguendo) outweigh her parents’ current ones.

Lemuel: No, that is not what van Inwagen is arguing; his theories concern the
question of when certain *material* things, collectively, form another *material*
thing. He says that it happens only when they take part in a particular sort of
occurrence called a “life”. This has nothing to do with the existence or otherwise
of minds, laws, prime numbers, angels, duties, computer programs, or anything else
putatively outside the range of material beings. I think van Inwagen is a realist
about several of those things, but that’s a separate matter.

I can’t recall offhand whether VI is to be included here, but for you non-philosophers out there, many of us think YOU don’t think there are composite material objects like tables, chairs, corks, and screws. I’m curious to see how this does with respect to the laugh test since it is often out of deference to your superior judgment that this sort of attitude is justified.

Since this computer, keyboard, mouse, and network
connection don’t “exist”, it doesn’t really matter
what I think because none of you can read what I
write.

I guess every discipline has its share of idiots.

They’re very good at conjuring up imaginary non-philosophers who conveniently have exactly the intuitions requed to make their arguments work, no matter how bizarre the intuitions or unlikely that anyone actually has them. This game is not new- Berkeley was a master of it.

“His claim is that people considered as material objects exist whereas tables don’t.”

Debating him in person, there would be a temptation to pick up the table and hit him over the head with it, exclaiming, “Thus, I refute you!”

Not chimps, not water, but void.

“The idea that there isn’t a vast, radical difference, a chasm, between human beings and all other terrestrial species is simply a very funny idea.”

What, if anything, is a human being?

On the other hand, a single chimp can match
the value of Van Inwagen’s navel-gazing pretty
quickly …

Matt wrote:

What? Some metaphysicians think non-philosophers don’t think that there are composite material objects? That is the craziest thing I’ve heard all day.

When I was told by a friend and soon to be practicing metaphysician that this was what he was told by another metaphysician about the non-philosophers, that was pretty much his reaction. Followed by despair. Mine too. People believe in all kinds of stuff. And things, too. Probably less than they think but probably more than others do.

You don’t think they believe in the object composed of my ear and your monitor do you?

“Maybe in order to understand mankind, we have to look at the word itself. Mankind. Basically, it’s made up of two separate words—‘mank’ and ‘ind’. What do these words mean? It’s a mystery, and that’s why so is mankind.”

– Jack Handey

Up close there is a vast difference between humans and chimps that becomes miniscule on an evolutionary scale. Gould and Berlinski are both right.

Take some 2-year-olds to the zoo and observe both them and the juvenile chimps, and you may start to be less impressed with the differences even up close.

Our elaborate culture, made possible by the freakish overdevelopment of the language areas of our brain, is responsible for what it pleases us to regard as the impassable gulf. But the raw biological differences on which that is based are actually pretty unimpressive. As expected for species which diverged so recently and which as often noted, from a non-anthropocentric viewpoint might well be classified as belonging to the same genus.

g, we were specifically discussing the claim by eudoxis that the biological differences are really greater than the DNA sequence conservation would indicate. I think that nowadays few biologists would agree with him.

For most of the existence of Homo Sapiens, we didn’t
have physics, poetry, “technology that advances substantially”, or money.
Those probably arrived in the last 10000 years. Religion may perhaps
date back further, depending on how you interpret
the evidence of Cro-Magnon burials, but probably
no more than 40000 years ?

So these are *not* “differences between humans and
great apes”, they’re differences between
modern-day humans and {earlier humans + great apes}.

I’m no anthropologist, but I’m sure there are
plenty of human societies even in the 20th C
which still lack at least physics and money, and
possibly other items on your list.

van Inwagen wants to draw a bright line between
human and non-human, but each criterion ends up
drawing the line in a different place, and none
of them quite where he wants it. I’m not
surprise he doesn’t want to argue with scientists:
he wouldn’t last 10 minutes.

53-57 appeared while I was composing 57, but just to be clear 56 is tautology: it’s a matter of defining humans to get the answer one wants. If you define humans as animals that span culture and no-culture, then you make them into animals.

Humans, by many magnitudes, are more phenotypically flexible than any animal you wish to compare. There is nothing that comes close. In this regard, humans are nothing like chimps.

Jeremy the trouble in moving too far back is that evidence is really scant. In terms of culture it’s likely that a lot of early culture was oral (stories, songs) or performance, which leaves no trace. And physically it’s possible that consequential differences in brains left only small or ambiguous traces in fossil remains. Since the complex thing that I want to call culture must have come into existence at some point, one can always make a larger and sufficiently archaic definition to get the result you want. That’s why it’s tautological.

Givn that, I make no apology about reasoning from what we see around us. We know of no human groups without languages or rituals, or whose members cannot learn new languages or other high-order skills. By contrast there have been numerous attempts to raise monkeys of various kinds as humans, and all you get is a relatively domesticated monkey. Chimpanzees may have 99% of our DNA but they do not write poems 99% as good as Wordsworth’s. You won’t even get a limerick. And presumably the philosopher who started the conversation is talking about humans as they are, not how they might have been.

To put it another way I could ask *what* archaeological result should cause me to disregard the rich evidence supplied by living organisms right now.

I’m surprised so many people are applying the laugh test to van Inwagen’s view on the non-existence of tables and chairs, and not to his idea that at death, your body is taken directly to heaven and immediately replaced by a physical duplicate, just so that there’s something available to be resurrected.

Peter Van Inwagen, “The Possibility of Resurrection,” Philosophy of Religion, ed. Louis Pojman (Wadsworth Pub. 1994), pp. 389-92.

Steve Labonne: perhaps you were discussing, specifically, “eudoxis”‘s claim that biologically the differences between humans and chimps are greater than the amount of common DNA suggests; but I wasn’t.

But the point that we didn’t have all those extraordinary cultural things until, say, 10k years ago or so, is a good one. But: human beings, at least as we are now, are *able* to have such a culture. It appears that chimpanzees are not; though of course that may simply indicate our inability to find the right way to tell. That, to my mind, is (from some perspectives) an enormous difference. And, from others, an unimportant one. Again, “is it a big difference?” is a pseudo-question, and the real more tightly specified questions are the interesting ones. They will not all have the same answer.

I have no idea when H. sapiens became able to have such a culture. Maybe some very subtle change in brain structure a few tens of thousands of years ago was responsible. Maybe it was much longer and we just took a while to take advantage of our abilities. Does it matter?

When did this discussion come to be about whether there’s a “bright line” to be drawn, separating humans from everything else (past and present)? Most likely there isn’t; that’s well nigh inevitable unless some weirdo saltationist (or, even less likely, creationist) theory turns out to be right. But it has nothing to do with whether (according to some set of criteria or other) there’s a “bright line” between humans *now* and everything else *now*.

Likewise for humans with badly defective or damaged brains: the existence of such unfortunates says nothing about whether the human species is or isn’t dramatically different from all other animal species currently found on earth.

Van Inwagen’s example of a “funny” idea not worth discussing also strikes me as absurd, and I think it shows just how narrowly he’s setting the boundaries of discussability. “The idea that Americans have a fundamental constitutional right to own automatic assault weapons” is wrong, in my view, but it’s no more ridiculous than lots of other theories people have about the constitution. Someone could argue for that claim on a number of grounds–textual, pragmatic, whatever. Again, I’m pretty sure I (and most people) would be unconvinced, but isn’t it pretty far from the kind of idea that’s so ridiculous that it can’t profitably be discussed?

Since the complex thing that I want to call culture must have come into existence at some point, one can always make a larger and sufficiently archaic definition to get the result you want.

But what this implies to my way of thinking, is that culture must have developed organically, as an evolutionary process — if there were some binary ontological division of “humans” vs. “animals” then there would have to be a clear historical divisive point, where either (if there is common descent) some individual of an animal species, had a child who was a human; or else, an animal species was “ensouled” or whatever it takes to become human. It seems to me that the very fact that no such clear division exists — that language and ritual developed over the course of tens of thousands of years — implies that humans and animals are the same essence. I regret that I am not better schooled in philosophy or biology, to be able better to communicate this reasoning, which seems pretty intuitive to me.

And just to be clear — I would certainly not deny the importance in our world, of the things which you describe as making us human. I just don’t think we’re made of a different essence as VI seems to suggest.

Ditto g’s very clear remarks. Obviously there have to have been transitional cases, however fast or slow the transition was. The point is simply that *at the moment* the gap is consequentially large. Monkeys are also distantly related to bacteria, but are now consequentially different.

*You can*, Richard, with a little training, write a passable poem, maybe even one as good as #63. You *can*, with a little training, read and perform Shakespeare and understand what people who are now dead meant when they wrote about Shakespeare, and appreciate Shakespeare’s relation to previous playwrights. You *can* appreciate that you and people like you have a history. The difference between you and Wordsworth is, I maintain, of qualitatively far less importance than the difference between you and the cleverest little monkey we can find.

I spent part of the summer in suburban New Delhi where rhesus macaques abound. No question they’re smart. Devious, sometimes vicious. I never saw this, but it’s said that they’ve learned to steal laundry from the clothesline and barter it for food.

To Jeremy: I don’t understand what you mean by “essence.” I’m not VI and am not defending his entire system. I don’t think that the entire secret of our humanness has to be buried in our DNA either.

I liked them both, text — you’re a credit to your species.

We all use the ‘laugh test’ whenever we laugh. And why do we laugh? To create a separation between ourselves and the object of our laughter. The standup comic may act foolish, we laugh, thus demonstrating to all those around us that ‘we laughers’ are apart and superior to the actor of foolishness. Laural & Hardy do pratfall, we laugh because we feel superior, knowing we would never act so foolishly. The master comedians, like George Carlin, turns the tables and exposes us to our own foolishness, and again we laugh, because the very exposure educates us, and in a flash we separate ourselves from the foolishness of others and laugh! How smart we are, not like Chevy Chase who does the same stupid thing over and over and over again, and never learns! So we laugh at the monkeys, because we are superior; we laugh at the foolish among us, for we are superior; we laugh in the face of nothingness, for I am superior! Hahahaha … God knows it’s funny!

Bartleby — chimps and bonobos also laugh, I believe — I wonder if they do it for the same reason?

More directly to Chris’ question, Gould commonly made the point that the difference between humans and our closest relatives was one of degree; that there was no particular barrier between humans and chimps. The naked quote above isn’t wrong from a scientific viewpoint, but the fact that there is such a quote to begin with, in the context or the polarized non-scientific arena, makes Van Inwagen suspect. The comments, like #64, make it clear that Van Inwagen is trying to lay claim to a metaphysical barrier between humans and other species. From a molecular biologist’s standpoint, however, the greatest difference between humans and chimps lies in that space between genotype and phenotype, especially in differential gene expression in the brain.

Backword Dave,
Specific Terms? And depending on the definition of animals, either of us could win. Since we were discussing primates in particular, definition number 2 sounds fair.

And why do you have to get all serious and bring Dawkins into this? I thought we were discussing who has a bigger dick, chimps or men?

“The idea that we’re very similar because they have tools (reeds to stick in an anthole) and we have tools (iPods, Mars rovers, etc) is really pretty silly.”

Let’s try a little change:

“The idea that Europeans and Native Americans are
very similar because they have tools (spears, bows)
and we have tools (violins, ships, firearms) is
really pretty silly”

You can get yourself in a lot of trouble making
these kind of arguments. Tools are tools,
culture is culture, I’m not any more or less
different/superior to other apes because someone
in China happened to discover gunpowder a few
generations ago. Or because apes don’t think
about theology.

#88 is just silly. We have a substantial science of culture which gives us a rich set of categories that embrace Europeans and Native Americans but not apes, not to mention historical experience. Malinche learned Spanish because she was a culturally-adept human being, as was Cortes.

I am *not* like Richard Cownie because we can both hit things with a stick. I *am* like him because we can learn the same language and have a rich conversation in it, whose results matter to us.

“I am not like Richard Cownie because we can both hit things with a stick. I am like him because we can learn the same language and have a rich conversation in it, whose results matter to us.”

This high-falutin’ stuff about language and culture
is all very well, but as a father of 3-month old
twins, I’m confronted with hard biological reality
every day (and night!): we are mammals first and
foremost. They’ll talk and walk upright someday,
but babies start out as little apes.

Bro. Richard, the difference between your 3-month old twins and ‘little apes’ is ‘potential’ — what your twins possess and what the little apes don’t. Leaving high-falutin’ stuff behind, I would say your twins have a very advanced CPU, not simply ‘hardwired’ — for the human brain isn’t hardwired, it is ‘fluid-wired’ with the potential to grow evermore complex, not only from generation to generation, but within the lifespan of each human brain. But that very advanced CPU has little potential without the software to drive it. As research on feral children have shown, the potential of the human brain is wasted, the ‘wild child’ advances very little beyond a very clever ‘little ape’ … alas, given a mother, that baby immediately begins to ‘download’ software to drive that CPU, and a father and immediate family adds more software for the tiny brain to process and adapt to, and the neighborhood provides even more variety of ‘programming’ to the CPU to work with, yet the fledgling CPUs in your twin’s skulls haven’t even begun to reach their potential. Ever more circles of community input more software into the tiny brains, software that becomes ‘fluidware’ that interacts with itself. Slowly from potential springs forth a mind, and even yet more potential is ever present and awaits that which will feed it. And what became of our dear ‘little apes’? I would say, forgive me if this offends anyone, that they have not the ‘image of God’ as we humans have. It is we humans who are created in God’s image. But feel not sad for the little apes, for they are not offended by any of this. –Bro. Bartleby

The problem that I have with the VI passage quoted in the blogpost is that it appears to reject all discussion of similarity and difference. If similiarity and difference is just a rhetorical game, then we really ought to be talking of ‘chasms’ between chimps and bonobos, and snails and slugs, and so on. If he VI believes this, fine.

The chimp/human discussion is also misleading. It is not about whether chimps and humans are similar or different in some isolated sense. These are not the only two categories of objects in the universe. Does is really make sense to say that chimps are no more similar to humans than a chair? It is when we consider other objects (even if we only consider them implicity) that we make statements of similarity and difference; it is only in this context that such a statement makes sense.

These statements are matters of human judgement, but this is no radical statement. And in our judgement, we do see, at whatever level of investigation we turn our gaze upon, greater similarity between humans and chimps than we see between chimps and other objects, even most other living objects. Statements that do nothing but mock (as opposed to simply reminding us of the essential part played by) enculturated human judgement in divining similarity and difference either need to be grounded in a rejection of ‘similarity’ and ‘difference’ or they are made in bad faith.

I don’t quite understand the fuss about VI’s comments. It all depends on the point that Gould was trying to make. If Gould wanted to establish the truth of evolutionary theory by claiming that there is a similarity between humans and apes, for example, then we might, legitimately, reply that his account of similarity relies on various claims about evolutionary theory. We might say that the argument is laughably circular. If, on the other hand, he wanted to make some kind of moral point, then there may be important dis-similarities between humans and apes, relative to our moral concerns, such that it is laughable to get an ought from these claims of similarity.

I want to stress here – I think evolution is correct and that we can get all sorts of interesting claims about morality from evolutionary theory. However, VI may be right both to say that a) it hardly seems pre-theoretically obvious that humans resemble apes (you need a lot of biology, perhaps including evolutionary biology) to get that claim, and b) that for moral purposes, the differences between humans and apes may mean more than the similarities. Of course, the argument is still flawed as, insofar as I understand the deabte, one can show human-ape similarity without relying on evolutionary theory. However, it’s not a crazy response, although, I admit that for VI to use an argument from ridicule seems, um, ill-advised, to say the least.

“Steve: #61 is inane. Are you just stirring the pot, or do you not understand the difference between molecules and DNA? Honestly? I called you on this before….”

Of course its inane. That’s the point, because it is a very similar argument to the “humans and chimps share X% of DNA, therefore there is no significant difference between them.” I could just as easily say “humans and chimps are both carbon-based. therefore there is no significant difference between them.” We are now actually arguing that “three year old humans and chimps both share the desire to defecate and lack of social skills, therefore there is no signficant difference between them” as if it is a serious argument!

I think its obvious that the whole “there is no signficant difference between humans and chimps because DNA blah blah blah” isn’t a real argument, and it isn’t presented to be taken seriously as a real argument. Rather, its essentially ‘cover;’ “all living beings are equal” is a religous statement rather than a scientific statement. Changing it to “all living beings are equal because DNA% blah blah blah” gives that religious statement the rhetorical scientific big words gloss for the speaker to pretend he’s not just expressing his faith (because we are the reality-based community, after all. Faith is for rednecks).

Steve

Steve, the ‘percentage of DNA’ argument, while not a serious argument in itself, is not the same as the ‘carbon-based’ argument you compare it to. As I said in my post above, most of the glib responses to the % of DNA argument ignore that these arguments are implicity comparing the degree of similarity between humans and chimps with the degree of similarity between humans and other other living things. Yes, humans are similar to chimps on the basis that they are both built from organic molecules. But, on that, they are no more or less similar than a human (or chimp) and a carrot. But, a human and a chimp are MORE similar on the basis of DNA sequence (and not just DNA sequence) than a human (or chimp) and a carrot.

I think you are building a straw man, pretending that people are arguing that there is no significant difference between chimps and humans. This may be the case when biologists are discussing the classification of human beings, by pointing out that the biological difference between humans and chimps is far less than that found within other categories of living things. Now, you can argue that this makes no sense, but to do so is to deny that there is any place for grouping organisms together, on the basis that statements about similarty mean nothing (which appears to be the essence of your argument).

What is actually being argued is that chimps and humans are very similar living things. This is not ‘faith’, any more than any other form of scientific knowledge at least, but a statement based on the degree of similarity between humans and chimps as compared with the degree of similarity between other living things.

“Perhaps if we spent less time congratulating ourselves on how marvelously special we are, we might stand a better chance of surviving for more than a few additional generations.”

Are you serious?
“If we don’t believe we are merely equal to chimpanzees, the human race will go extinct.”

This has become bizarro land.

“Our self-congratulatory egotism is clearly one of the most dangerously dysfunctional things about our species”

Hah, yeah, that is an educated observation. So at least 10,000 years of human advancement and of thousands of religions saying that humans were meant to rule everything (including their neighbors) and “Our self-congratulatory egotism” is going to be the end of us? And just shooting from the hip, I’d say the religions that weren’t chock full of “self-congratulatory egotism” were a hindrance to human progress more often than not.

Steve: re (100). You misunderstood. Your line of argument is inane, not just the statement you made. Andrew has described why in 102, so I won’t repeat it.

Look, while there are clear differences between, say bonobonos and ourselves, there are a huge number of interesting similarities. The point isn’t that there are no differences, it is that humans, bonobonos, and chimps are so much more alike than they are like any other living organism.

People who drag out the `people are nothing like apes’ and `what a laughable idea’ sort of arguments tend to do this with ulterior motives. They would like something to be fundamentally special about humans, usually because they would like to reject the evolutionary evidence that we share a recent common ancestor with chimpanzees. The evidence just isn’t there, though, so these people tend to build disengenous arguments much like your water one. I called you on the form of argument, I have no idea if you also share the above characteristiscs with others who have forwared this sort of straw man.

You wouldn’t understand if I did.

“You wouldn’t understand if I did.”
That or you are afraid to say that Global Warming and Ocean depletion are going to kill us all? Or is it DDT that will be the end of us? CFC’s? Benzene? GM foods? The Neptune invasion of Earth led by the galactic warlord Zoltan?

There is a Russian science joke that is applicable.

Place a cockroach on a table and hit the table. The cockroach runs off.
Remove two legs from the cockroach and hit the table. The cockroach again runs off.
Remove two more legs and hit the table. The cockroach attempts to run off.
Remove the last two legs and hit the table. The cockroach does not run off.
Therefore cockroaches hear using their legs.

DNA comparisons of species may demonstrate a common ancestor. It may simply demonstrate that DNA strands for bipedal locomotion and back hair are the same regardless of species.

Is there any controversy (among reasonably intelligent and well informed people) about any of the following points?

1. Biologically, humans and chimpanzees are very, very similar; much more similar than, say, cats and dogs.

2. Most members of the species H. sapiens are capable, with suitable education, of attaining some understanding of such things as science, commerce, religion, poetry, music, and the like. No members of any other species on the planet (including chimpanzees) show any sign of similar capability.

3. Some members (or groups of members) of the species H. sapiens are capable of such feats in these fields as have transformed the lives of millions of other members of that species; for instance, by inventing the telephone or composing Schubert’s songs or writing “Das Kapital” and the Communist Manifesto. (The consequences of such feats may be good or bad or neither.) No members of any other species on the planet (including chimpanzees) show any sign of similar capability.

From these, I conclude that (a) from some viewpoints there is very little difference between humans and some other species such as chimps, and (b) from some other viewpoints that I know of no reason to discount out of hand, there is a very big difference. The difference shows itself in “cultural” phenomena, but it isn’t only a difference *in* culture; it’s a difference in cultural *capabilities*. And this difference has consequences that are large even from an “external” viewpoint, in so far as we can attain one, on account of the way that cultural phenomena can have very widespread effects. There probably isn’t anything an individual chimpanzee, or a small group of chimpanzees, could do that would have consequences comparable with those of what Einstein, or Hitler, or the Buddha, did.

So, once again: The question “so is it a big difference or not?” is a pseudo-question with no useful answer; it depends on how you measure it. There are non-bogus versions of the question to which the answer is “no”, and non-bogus versions whose answer is “yes”. I don’t understand how any of this is at all controversial to anyone who hasn’t already made up their mind one way or another on ideological grounds.

Steve LaBonne: Molecular phylogeny as in the basis behind DNA testing for paternity. Nope never heard of it.

“DNA comparisons of species may demonstrate a common ancestor. It may simply demonstrate that DNA strands for bipedal locomotion and back hair are the same regardless of species.”

Steve isn’t explaining why you’re confused. Perhaps if you consider the methods of determination of linguistic family trees will help. Note that the function of a particular string of characters is a clue (among many) to phylogeny but is certainly not determinative by itself and, in fact, may be purely coincidental. This this is often not understood is the problem for many or most folk etymologies. There is a strong parallel here to genetic phylogeny.

Understanding that we’re neither somehow separate from the rest of the natural phenomena of the universe, nor are we the universe’s reason for existing, is not false but genuine humility, and is esential to prevent us from imagining that we will always succeed in engineering ourselves out of the consequences of our foolishness.

I believe Vonnegut wrote a novel about this (Galapagos Islands?) where he complains repeatedly about big brains being the worst, most disadvantageous characteristic of the human species.

Not chimps, not water, but void.

There is no void. There is no such object as nothing. There is only ‘being’, and all else/anything/whatever is undefineable.

I cannot compare ‘all of existence’ to anything (LOL)

#1, keith m ellis, looks like rain! :O) (I guess even talking about the weather is more usefull than comparing, well, this thread to anything relevent)

BTW saw an excellent idea recently contained in an otherwise non-memorable work of fiction — a department store whose slogan was “(Store Name) — we’re everything that is the case!”