What makes us humans compared to animals?
Humans are no more than animals with large brains. Let me tell you the story from the beginning.
In the past time, there were different types of humans in a big family (genus) called homo and different species such as sapiens, habilis, and erectus. Sapiens represent modern humans. The only sapiens could survive until now. There are many theories that hypothesize the reason why sapiens lived but I will not get to them.
For an unknown reason, the genus homo had large brains that made us unique compared to other species. Maybe it was just by chance. It could be random mutations that just happened to us. But we paid the price for these big heads. The old human was actually muscular unlike know, but because these brains need a huge amount of fuel “food” that wasn’t available back in that time, our bodies paid the price through muscle atrophy. Our muscles atrophied and shrunk in size to provide a source of energy to our brains. This explains why humans don’t have huge bodies such as chimpanzees. This is called the cost of thinking. Also, this made us spend more time searching for food and, thus, we discovered fire which helped us to cook food easily and spend less time eating rather than spending half a day shewing some meat. So, we had smaller intestines and diverted more energy to our brains. Also, women paid the price of these jumbo heads as it made laboring a very painful process due to the passage of a large head from a small vaginal opening. This explains why humans had to be born with small brains to avoid the death of the mother!
All these factors contributed to our brain and to what is known as cognitive evolution!
What happened in this cognitive evolution? we acquired new abilities and each one had its consequence and they made us “HUMANS”
Ability: transmit larger quantities of information about the world
Consequence: planning and carrying out complex activities
Ability: The ability to transmit larger quantities of information about Sapiens social relationships
Consequence: Larger and more cohesive groups numbering up to 150 individuals
Ability: The ability to transmit information about things that don’t really exist such as nations, religion, human rights.
Consequence: Cooperation between large number of strangers and rapid innovation of social behavior.
Listen to this talk about Yuval Noah. He explains what I just said in further detail.
He is the writer of a book called sapiens from which I obtained all this information!
STAY CURIOUS, HOMO SAPIEN!
Actually it is not the size of the brain, but the proportion of brain mass/body mass. It is not about the amount of information, but two different capabilities that separates us drastically from animals: the first is the capability of abstract processing (animals are not able to do that); and the second is free will (examining in an abstract way whatever happened to us, we build complex models and take decisions based on that model) - again, animals do not do that, they are guided by a combination of their memories and instincts, not free will. Free will make us go even against the most basic of instincts, survival, by committing suicide (we do possess instincts as well, but they are not deciding factors).
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