Quote Originally Posted by mr. s View Post
I said there are too many, not that I can't think of one. I chose a very simple one, space exploration.
By doing this, though, you ignored my basic statement--there is nothing that humans do that is different in quality, rather than quantity, from what other animals can do. Space exploration is just tool use. Other animals make and use tools, so it doesn't qualify as being something different in QUALITY from what other species do.

I'm challenging you to come up with some basic, fundamental trait that humans possess that no other animal does. Some way in which we are truly UNIQUE. Something that really does set us completely apart.

Of course we are smarter than all other known species at present. We're smarter, cheetahs are faster, and elephants are bigger. That isn't a valid point as to why we are 'special' or 'different'.

People have been trying to set humans apart from other animals for thousands of years, and every thing they have come up with to date has eventually been disproven. From tool use to self-awareness, language to creativity...it's all been knocked down by one species or another. I've seen so many statements over the years. "Humans are the only species that make war". No, chimps do that too, and in a surprisingly organized and sophisticated fashion.
"Humans are the only species that kills for fun!"
Dolphins do that. Elephants were doing that in Africa just recently.
"Humans are the only species that has art!"
Elephants draw in the dirt with sticks for amusement--in the wild, not just in captivity.
"Humans are the only species that reveres their dead!"
Elephants again--the behavior of elephants toward the bones of the fallen is remarkable.
"Humans are the only species with spirituality!"
This one is touchy, but Orcas have displayed a behavior that is extremely hard to interpret as anything else.
The seal-hunting Orca pod in one part of the world enjoys an annual feast when the seals breed, and pups are learning to swim. They eat many seal pups, they play with the corpses, toss them around for hunting practice, and generally have a great time. Which is all very ordinary seeming.
But at the end of the day, they take the last seal pup caught, and they toss it around just as before...but more gently. They make a great show and celebration of it, splashing around, and parading with it.
Then one of the orcas carries the pup right up to the shore...and lets it go.

Hey, maybe it isn't what it looks like. But we know their brains are huge, we know they're intelligent, creative, and self-aware. We know that the potential isn't out of the question. Until we learn to speak 'orca', we can't really ask them. (Since they literally see sounds, their communication has been a hard code for us to crack--can you imagine a language comprised partly of sonar pictures? Now imagine the pictures in 'shorthand'. They wouldn't always have to be 'shortened' the same way, either. The upper and lower ranges of their sounds are far beyond ours, so we can only 'hear' them with a computer. This may seem a bit fanciful, but it is a possibility that has yet to be explored--their sound processing centers in their brains are enormous, much larger than ours, and they have proven capable of understanding sentence ordering (ie, 'jump over the hoop, then touch the ball with your tail) for novel requests).