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Originally Posted by baggygreen
Are we not much less alike than we were to neanderthals?
We use neanderthal today as a derogatory term, indicating someone who is not a human. Primates, regardless of their spots on the evolutionary tree, are still not people. Most animals are capable of independent thought, and in any domesticated animal we can see different character traits, if we look for long enough. Independent thought does not make a creature a person. Nor does having a 98% genetic similarity.
That 2% difference is what makes us people. it is the 2% which sets us above the other animals on the planet. It is that 2% which gives us thousands of languages, philosophy, (for better or worse) religion, manufactured goods, the pyramids, agriculture, yada yada.
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All the many things we use to destroy ourselves, you mean?
I wouldn't be so proud on genes being like they are. For evolution, we are no successful design, we are just a test run of a draft design that apparently has led into a dead end. the most successful design of life on this planet you find in the realms of one-cellular life forms. we will never overcome it, but it can easily overcome us.
So don't be so easy about declaring mankind to be set above all other life on earth. I personally find the lifeform of sharks for example far more impressive - their design is so perfect that they haven't chnaged since millions of years. Or isopods (woodlouses? -> Asseln). One of the most succesful designs of evolution on planet earth. Bacterias live practically everywhere on this planet, in the coldest and in the hottest places, in boiling liquids and at pressures that would turn every sub into a frisbee and every human body into white-bled mince. they - notz us - are the true rulers of this planet.
Homo Sapiens still needs to prove his design advantage, and so far it seems that the individual tool-related intelliegnce we are so proud of is not an advantage but an obstacle for our survival as an evolutionary design.
Such things and their assessments need to be approached from a less antropocentric perspective. and human philosophy and woprks of arts - in the end are not interresting for evolution or nature, but only for the human mind itself that hs created them. Already for the dog living with the owner of that mind in the same household, it all means nothing. and for the germs on planet Mars (
) it means nothing as well.
Fact is that we cannot recognize an intelligence that is too different from our own, and that can - but must not - include descriuptions of "below us", or "above us".