Are we animals, or something else?

kirkules :"Recent discoveries in anthropology may show that we are not great apes at all as has been to most logical assumption in the past."


Rue: FWIW - humans are great apes. We share blood types, major histocompatibility sites, and humans share roughly 98% genes with chimpanzees. Humans have one pair of chromosomes fewer than chimpanzees and gorillas. However, human gene # 2 can be shown to be a fusion of two chimpanzee genes - from banding pattern, size, genetic content and the presence of a vestigial extra centromere in the human gene.


from various texts not available on-line -
however, you can check these fact by doing a quick google search



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Sig: Yeah, that's the one. I actually read it in Discover. Thanks for the cite though. I know I get lazy about that... ^_^'

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Anyway, to go on to some speculation about this: it's been proposed that the different number of genes is what put humans into genetic isolation from chimpanzees and gorillas. And that makes me wonder about Neanderthals and humans.

Consider that horses have 64 genes and donkeys have 62, when they mate they produce infertile offspring. If Neanderthal had a different number of genes from humans, it might mean that any pairing would have resulted infertile offspring.

Also, I came across an interesting fact in Wikibooks - different kinds of Equus (horse genus) have widely differing numbers of genes.

Przewalski's horse 66


Horse 64


Donkey 62


Asiatic wild ass 56


Transcaspain wild ass 54

Tibetan wild ass 52


Grevy's zebra 46


Grant's zebra 44


Hartmann's mountain zebra 32


or less than half the genes of Przewalski's horse.

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Ouchie. Well, good luck to you and your poor husband. Hernias? Torn tendons? Eek!

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How much “mentality” do you think it takes to know how to measure complex water currents?

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Animals being able to judge water currents and stuff is cool, but so is a computer being able to fly a fighter aircraft better than a human - it's not evidence of 'soul', or even intelligence strictly speaking. So let's not muddle concepts... if we're talking about souls I think we have to limit ourselves to talking about the mental processes of thoughts and emotions. And in this respect humans are the most complex, and advanced.

Animals (typically predators) are very cool because they have a kind of 'purity of spirit'. Anyone who has seen a cat strut around on its own turf might know what I'm talking about - they are pure instinct, and know exactly what they are about. But to my mind this purity of soul comes from their minds not being clouded by rational thought. My cats kill and torture for fun without a second thought, and the female cat will go on heat and despicably pester and annoy the two (neutered) male cats, but then when she comes off she'll go straight back to strutting around like she owns the place - like nothing has happened. Her mind is free from any kind of 'why am I acting this way' questions, she does whatever her instinct dictates at any particular time - hence purity, and in essence, lack of complexity.

This shows pretty well what I mean by the 'purity of spirit' of a predator: http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/ted-hughes/hawk-roosting/

On Neanderthals, good point about the shells Byte. I think the general concensus is that Neanderthal culture and symbolism was much more basic than ours though, from Wiki:

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Due to the paucity of symbolism that Neanderthal artifacts show, Neanderthal language probably did not deal much with a verbal future tense, again restricting Neanderthal exploitation of resources. Cro-Magnon people had a much better standard of living than the hardscrabble existence available to Neanderthals. With better language skills and bigger social groups, a better psychological repertoire, and better planning, Cro-Magnon people, living alongside the Neanderthals on the same land, outclassed them in terms of life span, population, available spare time (as shown by Cro-Magnon art), physical health and lower rate of injury, infant mortality, comfort, quality of life, and food procurement.

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Heads should roll

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I have to disagree that the 'soul' depends on mentation, that only people have it, or that it even exists. In the first case then those people without mentation - and any severely brain-damaged person fits that description - can be said to have lost their 'soul'. And we have no idea what kind of mentation animals have, though we do know some species have a concept of self. Further, we have no way to judge certain kinds of intelligence - the octopus contains a vast amount of non-cerebral nervous system. For all we know, they are body-wide thinking machines. One thing we do know, is that despite their extremely short life-spans (long life-span has been posited as necessary for intelligence) they are immensely curious, inventive and clever.

Linking 'soul' to mentation falls short in too many instances.

And then of course, how do you prove that it even exists.

However, for legal purposes, loss of brain activity in someone who once had it has been taken to mean they are no longer 'alive' in a meaningful sense.

BTW I have had my cat look me straight in the eye - something not instinctual to cats - and try to talk to me with plaintive, soft, highly modulated meows.

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Originally posted by Niki2:


Getting old sux...seems like we go along for decades just fine, then everything starts falling apart at once!

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Gotta cruse 'till the tires fall off!

I am a mass of pain. Back, knees, left wrist, neck... the list goes on. But having a lot of this pain since my 20's makes me think, it's not how it hurts, it's how you do whatever the Hell you want to because it's gonna hurt anyway.


The laughing Chrisisall

"I only do it to to remind you that I'm right and that deep down, you know I'm right, you want me to be right, you need me to be right." - The Imperial Hero Strikes Back, 2010

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I think Rue has answered the question for me, and far better than I ever could have.

Yup, Chris, that's what I've learned too. Sweeping and mopping hurt the damned torn-ligament wrist (it will never be right); hiking hurts either the back (DDD and herniated disc) or--until today (yayy!!)--the tendon (walked the dogs for an hour this morning, been bicycling 'cuz of tendon, first time walking in a couple of weeks--35 minutes in, bit of pain then it went away, 10 minutes later, same, but it don't hurt now and that's a VICTORY!); riding my motorcycle, bicycle, or myriad other things, hurts the damned wrist AND the other wrist (which has a gangleon cyst and carpal tunnel); cooking hurts my back. But I do 'em anyway; some 'cuz I have to, some 'cuz I refuse to give into it. Coupla aleve and my recliner, and I'm fine a few hours later--or the next day. Screw it!


"I'm just right. Kinda like the sun rising in the east and the world being round...its not a need its just the way it is." The Delusional "Hero", 3/1/10

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