Firstly, most humans who ever lived didn't do those things. Are they not exceptional? Are they lesser in some form? Did human exceptionalism only start when we invented computers or science? I assure you, many prior civilisations saw humans above animals (source: The Bible), yet hadn't done the things on your list.
Secondly, you listed outcomes. These are value judgements. As the article points out, humans did those things but we can't do basic things like smell water from miles away or see internal organs by just clicking. Animals don't value LLMs or mathematics, in fact many humans don't!
The challenges to human exceptionalism aren't based on outcomes (because that's subjective) but tries look at what makes humans unique in a way that can't be replicated in any form. This has to be more than "we're better at X" or "we can combine X and Y to achieve Z" because, unless trait X or Y only exist in humans, then another species could conceivably replicate it given enough time for evolution.
So problem solving wouldn't make us exceptional because we see it in other species. Language might but we do see rudimentary communication in other animals like corvids and cephalopods so perhaps humans just hyper-specialised in that. Hell, scientists have observed orca pods being unable to communicate across regions, hinting that there is a form of language.
Just being better at these traits doesn't suffice because there are plenty of things other animals are better than humans at. We don't consider that exceptional in the same way.
I addressed this in my earlier point: that's measuring an outcome. By this logic, humans before 1700AD were not exceptional. Humans who weren't involved in this are lesser.
We could also point out the fact that no other animals write books (or even come close), and that arguably takes us back to about 3000BC. That doesn't mean that humans before then weren't exceptional, only that it's enough (sufficient) to point out this feature as one example in which humans are exceptional. We haven't really changed biologically since then - these are cultural developments - but there are features of humans that allow these cultural features to manifest and to build upon previous ones.
Of course as we go back in time towards our last common ancestor with chimps and bonobos there are fewer features of human behaviour that make us exceptional, pretty much by definition. The interesting questions are what those features were and when they emerged that allow the later and obviously exceptional developments to occur.
As an aside, I'm not sure what you mean by measuring an outcome - to me, outcomes are all that we measure. Roughly, outcomes=observations. So I think you're using the word "outcome" in a different way
As opposed to a trait. Let's take writing: most humans for most of human history simply couldn't read or write. At some point, we educated humans to be able to read and write.
Now, you're correct in that we've not taught animals to read or write at the level of a human but that's also a question: is there a fundamental trait that humans have that allow for this? Do we have a part of our brain that no other animal has, or could have, that means we can become literate and no other animal ever could?
Or, is this a hyper-specialisation of other traits that are shared but we have more of it? Is it a result of traits like pattern recognition, socialisation, communication and fine motor skills that combined and specialised to turn into reading and writing? Literacy then becomes an outcome of combining those traits in a certain way. We know that other animals have these traits, just not in the same way.
The reason I say this makes it not sufficient is because it reduces "exceptional" to just mean "things humans can do," without trying to look deeper than the surface level things we see. Dolphins being able to see your organs by clicking is pretty fucking exceptional. But because humans can't do it, it's not "exceptional."
When we ask "what makes us exceptional," we're asking "what makes us different from animals?" The fact that our combined traits allowed for different outcomes doesn't make us fundamentally different any more than a frog is different to a cat.
> Do we have a part of our brain that no other animal has, or could have, that means we can become literate and no other animal ever could?
I think clearly yes, depending on what you mean by "could have". I wouldn't rule out the possibility that somehow over evolutionary time some other animals might be able to reproduce human behaviours of reading and writing. But I'm not talking about that: I'm talking about what other animals can do now, and it seems none of them can write or read like a human.
Now, let's say there are chimpanzees that we can teach to respond appropriately to things like "Spot has a ball. Spot has a big red ball. What colour is Spot's ball> Blue or Red?" Maybe they can do that. But what about doing the exercises in, say, Loring Tu's Introduction to Manifolds? They're just not doing that. They don't come close. You might say most humans aren't doing that either, which is true, but if you train a human their whole life in an appropriate way then I think most of them can do at least some of those exercises, while no chimp or bonobo has been shown to have this facility. This is just one almost silly example, but I think you can see what I'm getting at.
> Dolphins being able to see your organs by clicking is pretty fucking exceptional. But because humans can't do it, it's not "exceptional."
If this is unique to dolphins, I would say it's definitely exceptional. Even if it's not unique to dolphins, but only a small subset of animals can do it, it's still exceptional to that small subset of animals. There's no reason why "exceptional" should pertain only to one species: different species are exceptional in different ways, and we're asking in this thread about whether and how humans are exceptional. Horseshoe crabs are also exceptional in that they've been physiologically constant for 200 million years or whatever it is. The fact that some species are exceptional in their own ways doesn't mean that humans aren't exceptional in their own ways.
> The fact that our combined traits allowed for different outcomes doesn't make us fundamentally different any more than a frog is different to a cat.
I think I can see what you're getting at: every animal is arguably exceptional in its own way, and picking out the ways in which humans are exceptional as being more significant than others is stacking the deck in favour of finding humans to be uniquely (or exceptionally) exceptional in an anthropocentric way.
It's definitely right to be aware of, and cautious of, anthropocentrism. But this is what I'm trying to get at: the mere fact that something is unique to humans doesn't make it significant or valuable - e.g. being a featherless and relatively hairless biped doesn't seem significant to me. But the fact that we're able to communicate in the way we're doing now, and the fact that we're even capable of sustaining this complex technological society is to me just a clear way in which humans are exceptional. We can look into why that is, and that to me is a very interesting question, and we might find that many of the traits that make this possible are shared in some ways with other animals, but there's just obviously the fact that no other animals come close to being able to replicate it.
Having said that, I do have the feeling that the ways in which humans are exceptional are themselves exceptional: we can consider dolphin sonar or echolocation in bats, or cultural practices like chimpanzees learing from each other how to crack nuts with stones, still it's a long way from creating a sophisticated technological civilization.
This is 100% my point. When people talk about "human exceptionalism," they're referring to this type of "exceptional."
> we might find that many of the traits that make this possible are shared in some ways with other animals, but there's just obviously the fact that no other animals come close to being able to replicate it.
This is true, however I posit this makes us no more exceptional than other animals. Evolution pushed our ancestors down a certain track and this was the result but that also means there's no reason another species can't emerge to do the same thing.
The reason I think this is important is because "human exceptionalism" carries a baggage of divine right (the Bible called it dominion over beasts) that leads us down the wrong path with respect to our understanding of the world and how we treat it. When we engage with other animals on their own terms, we learn so much more about them than if we simply look down on them.
That is on you, that doesn't mean humans aren't exceptional. The fact that we are even discussing our role in nature and how we shouldn't abuse it makes us that exceptional.
If humans weren't that exceptional we would just go and destroy nature everywhere it benefits us with no thoughts about the future or how this could ever hurt us, just like animals does when they have the power to.
Rather I'd call your stance "divine obligations", which is also a stance that humans are exceptional. You don't hold that for any other species than humans.
Let’s start here: humans are literally in the process of doing this via carbon emissions. There seems no way of stopping it as we’re all slaves to economic incentives. If you take a step away from the details of how we do this, you’ll see plenty of animals destroy their local ecology through things like over grazing, and need predators to bring them back under control. Again, the details and scale are different but the base behavioural trait is there: optimising local maxima and causing long term damage.
So no, humans don’t follow a divine obligation: we actually do the same thing every animal does and tries to maximise our short term goals to the detriment of everything else. We’re not exceptional in this regard.
Yeah, ok. I think it should be clear by now that people use the word "exceptional" in different ways, and it's not really clear just from the use of the word which of these ways it is.
For me, "exceptional" just means "different", but you seem to be suggesting that people use it in the sense of "better", or something like that. Maybe that's true in some cases, but I would also say that humans are exceptionally destructive, and even in some ways exceptionally evil, in the sense that some people seem to take pleasure in causing harm, which is a feature that isn't shared with many other animals - or at least it's difficult to make the case that this is shared with many other animals. So "exceptional" doesn't mean "better" to me.
Let's try to be objective about things: dolphins are exceptional in their sonar abilities, curiosity, complexity of social organisation for a marine animal, range of sonic vibrations they emit, and so on. We can similarly evaluate the complexity of human behaviours according to objective criteria: our range of vocalizations is objectively more complex than any other species (we could get into the details of this if you like: I think the informational entropy of average human behavioural outputs can easily be shown to be higher than the highest way you have of evaluating non-human vacalisations or behavioural outputs), the comeplxity of human tool use can also be objectively quantified: New Caledonian crows, dolphins, or chimpanzees have technological assemblages which consists of maximally two or three moving parts (let me know if you know of exceptions), while human ones often consist of thousands. We're really comparing one large rock, a nut, and a hammer rock, against a nuclear reactor. It just should be abundantly clear that there's an exception here.
About your ethical point that "exceptionalism" translates into "divine right", I draw the opposite conclusion. Human exceptionalism doesn't mean that we can just do whatever we want, it means that with our increased abilities and awareness comes increased responsibility: we can become aware of the harms we cause to other life and other humans exactly because we're more capable and more preceptive
I’ve already explained why this is the only real definition you can take: because otherwise “exceptionalism” doesn’t create a new meaning, it’s just a synonym for “different,” which means “human exceptionalism” would mean literally nothing.
I know I’m banging on about this definition but I think it’s a really important thing to keep in mind.
To be clear, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to point out humans are better at doing things than animals. That’s an objective fact at this point in time. My point is that this doesn’t make us “different” to other animals any more than any animal is different to another animal! This piece of human exceptionalism is what I object to.
If you want a simpler way of putting it, we can take Douglas Adams’s quote:
Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.
> To be clear, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to point out humans are better at doing things than animals. That’s an objective fact at this point in time. My point is that this doesn’t make us “different” to other animals any more than any animal is different to another animal! This piece of human exceptionalism is what I object to.
Many animals play around all day like Dolphins do, but Humans is the only animal that acts anywhere close to the way Humans do, learning to build new things over generations and doing things like going to space. No animal species has managed to go to space, that makes humanity more exceptional than any animal species. Many animals swim around in the ocean and eat fish, but only one have made spaceships, air planes, cars, computers etc.
Another way to see it is how much would earth change if the species didn't exist. Remove humans and the face of the earth massively changes. Remove dolphins and earth would hardly change at all. Humans have exceptional impact, and thus can be said to be exceptional.
I didn’t say that and neither does Douglas Adams. I’m not even sure how you came to that conclusion. Your entire second paragraph misses my point.
> Another way to see it is how much would earth change if the species didn't exist. Remove humans and the face of the earth massively changes. Remove dolphins and earth would hardly change at all. Humans have exceptional impact, and thus can be said to be exceptional.
Remove bees and many environmentalists think we’ll see ecological collapse. I guess bees are exceptional by that definition.
Many people forget the animals feel emotions very much the same as us, that they act and feel very much like us, and what separates is our ability to work together- and specialise, our individual intelligence is not terribly far away - but we have specialised in education so we’ve optimised our minds to work in a collective society and to specialise in certain trade craft.
we think of animals as being “dumb” and we get surprised when they show signs of intelligence.
- sent from my iPhone, which I can’t build a single component of; using software I can’t write, using electricity I can’t generate, while sitting on a sofa I can’t manufacture in an apartment I can’t build.
Being highly programmable is part of our distinction. You can't build any of these things, but you can learn to build all of them.
Your possible pinnacle isn't just not chewing the couch.
We're pre-paradigmatic for qualia, we don't know what structures (brain or otherwise) give rise to it in order to guess what set of qualia can be had by any given system. Until we do, I can't even quantify my expectations on the variance from increased evolutionary distance, I don't even have a quantity to express the variance of.
This growth is clearly unsustainable, and the bubble, so to speak, will eventually pop. Other species have managed to survive for an exceptional time, e.g. the horseshoe crab, or most species of moss. There are species whose individuals might be older than human civilization, like the glass sponge. There are species that will survive in extreme conditions where humans would perish, such as tardigrades. Are we better than them?
Another point: evolution has caused living beings to reach equilibria where the whole system can thrive, where each species has a role. These systems have reached self-regulating states, where e.g. an overpopulation of predators will be cut down due to an absence of prey during the next generation.
Is human society better than that? Because humans are destroying this balance through unprecedented growth, which these systems cannot respond to. Our growth is not only unsustainable from the point of view of human survival, but unsustainable from the point of view of the earths ecological systems as a whole.
If so that is a relatively recent demonstration of exceptionalism. Given the long timeline of human existence it could even be argued that it is accidental that this proof of exceptionalism developed among the humans and not among some other species.
I actually believe in human exceptionalism, in that many of the features spread around various species are all found highly developed in the human, but really that is an argument for all species exceptionalism. There are very few species that do not some collection of interlocked traits that make them exceptional in some way, it just happens that our exceptionalism is one that allows for triumphalism at the same time.
Accepting death for me is a more mature way of understanding how life works, than trying to prolong life.
That said, I personally prefer prolonging life, but I do it only because I'm afraid.
Fear can be understood as simply wiring that influences the behavior so that an organism is less likely to die. That's how I see fear of death. But sometimes death of an individual is a better solution for the group, or even for the organism itself. The problem with humans is that we have somehow developed a view that death is the ultimately worst thing to happen, and we evade it with all our imagination, trying to find elixirs of immortality since we are aware what's going on, no matter what, not matter the cost other species pay for us.
We don't see our limits and that's our problem, because we think we're exceptional and we deserve everything because of it. And it's very, very egocentric.
We are not exceptional, in the sense that we don't automatically deserve more because we can paint pictures or compose music. We value ourselves based on things that don't even matter to other species. Instead, what we should do is to accept the responsibility that comes with the effectiveness of our brains, and figure out how it fits in the bigger picture of the ecosystem we're living in. But all we do with it is we exploit everything, making it serve us, because "we're exceptional and we deserve it".
Even in this thread it's visible, people don't even spend a minute to consider this: 'whhatt?? humans not exceptional? i don't see any animals thinking about their exceptionalism, haha!'
So I’m not sure we know exactly what it is that makes us different, but we clearly are in some way. There is no other animal that has developed anything close to the capabilities we have.
Would any other species on earth, in a billion years, ever develop the ability to travel to other celestial bodies, let alone even know what they are?
Consider, horseshoe crabs are undeniably the best at doing all things horseshoe crab. No other animal comes close to behaving like a horseshoe crab!
IMHO, the almost tautological nature of this judgement is what makes it uninteresting at best and actively harmful at worst. It's just a stone's throw away from individual, group, and racial exceptionalism.
Yes, you could say this about any animal. It does not explain why, apparently, no other animal in the entire history of the Earth has done anything comparable to what humans have done.
Horseshoe crabs are good at horseshoe crab things, but convergent evolution has in the past created similar animals that are roughly equally good at doing horseshoe crab things.
There have been and are many animals good at doing horse-ish things. Many good at wolf-ish things. Even flight has evolved independently several times among both vertebrates and invertebrates (and while we can’t fly on our own, we regularly fly faster than any flying animal). We’re petty weak among all animals and yet the heaviest things that have been moved have been moved by humans. We’re pretty slow runners and yet we hold pretty much any speed record you can think of.
Why hasn’t there been any other animals similar to humans in our abilities? Why hasn’t spaceflight evolved several times? Why hasn’t metallurgy? Particle physics? Why can’t any other animal understand the basic chemistry of the universe as we do?
Neanderthals couldn't develop any of the things you mentioned because humans stopped them. If we hadn't been here or if they had gained the upper hand during some pivotal moments then they might be wondering about their own exceptionalism today.
We don’t really k ow exactly what happened to them, likely a mix of killing them and assimilating them.
And you can even broaden the original question to include our nearest relatives and it is still equally interesting, I believe.
And while I agree that it wasn't necessarily accurate to say we killed them, a shared ancestry doesn't imply any kind of harmony. Think of the hundreds of thousands to potentially millions of rapes estimated to have been committed by the soldiers occupying Germany (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_of_...)
As far as we know species like Neanderthals were very, very similar to us so it’s worth considering them as well unless we have a reason not to,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_descent_from_Genghis_K...
Metallurgy? Spaceflight? Particle physics? Those are clearly unnaturally contrived reference classes. Why can't humans HorseshoeCrabTermA (i.e. scan the ocean floor upside down at a 30 degree for optimal benthic foraging and conspecific mingling?) Why hasn't HorseshoeCrabTermB (lunar-synchronized mass spawning timed with satellite male mating patterns)? Why can't other animals properly molt and feed with gnathobase ginding like horseshoe crabs do?
Don't get me wrong, I love chrome on cars and rockets and human intellectual curiosity. No other species has invented Python 2.7, but so what?
I mean, I’m certain we could if we wanted to. But that’s my point. Why can we create things that can do almost anything other animals can do, but other animals can’t (or don’t) do that?
To be clear, I do not mean that other animals are not exceptional in their own ways.
Why can’t any other animal synthesize isotopes and elements that do not (or very rarely) occur naturally? That’s an objective understanding of the same physical universe we all share. How come no other animal can (or does not) do that too? Sure, they don’t need to, but we don’t need to either and yet we do. Why?
Why do no other animals cook with fire? Lots of animals use gastroliths to aid digestion. Lots of animals masticate and grind their food. Surely cooking with fire would be nutritionally advantageous to other animals, so why has that ability apparently only evolved once? Many successful traits have evolved independently several times. Are humans unique with regards to the unique traits we’ve evolved and developed? It certainly seems so. There certainly seems to be something that sets us apart.
If it’s anything, I would wager it’s the transmission of knowledge across both time and space. Two people may exchange knowledge without ever meeting each other. Other animals can do that to some degree (scent marking), but the information density is severely limited compared to human abilities.
Calling something exceptional or special is generally an objective statement based on observed facts. Now whether something exceptional deserves special treatment is a value judgment.
> Consider, horseshoe crabs are undeniably the best at doing all things horseshoe crab. No other animal comes close to behaving like a horseshoe crab!
What are their exceptional traits? For example, we can say peregrine falcons or cheetahs are exceptionally fast. Or blue whales are exceptionally large. Saying horseshoe crabs are horseshoe crabs isn't saying much.
> IMHO, the almost tautological nature
You conjured up a false tautological argument.
> It's just a stone's throw away from individual, group, and racial exceptionalism.
But such exceptionalisms exist individually and group-wise/racially. We know that lebron james is exceptionally good at basketball. We know that tibetans do exceptionally well at high altitudes. Those are objective facts. Now whether they deserve special treatment is a value judgment.
A billion years is a very very long time. Humans and chimps diverged about 7-8 million years ago. Given no human competitors and a billion years there's no reason some other great apes or raccoons or something couldn't develop a space programme.
> And here’s another cool thing: a little over a billion years ago, life started experimenting with multicellularity. Imagine single cells deciding to team up and work together! A fossil discovered in Scotland, a tiny ball-shaped thing, is the oldest known example of a multicellular organism.
https://geoscience.blog/was-there-life-1-billion-years-ago/
I know OP was just kind of throwing out a big number but it's worth highlighting the orders of magnitude involved here. To put it in terms HN might grok more easily, if modern humans have existed for 300 kB we're talking about one gig.
The absence of detectable plutonium-244 (half-life of 81.3 million years) is one indication that we are ~probably the first civilization on Earth to discover nuclear fission.
https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/human-evolution/2-6-...
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cbqr9NcFDtjvM6zC4/time-bindi...
Even in pre-historic times, humans were herding prey to kill using earthworks, for example. We can also live in cold climates by wearing clothes and building houses and fires, as well as hot climates by not doing those things. We can build defenses against predators. We've been using technology to enhance our abilities since forever. That's exceptional. No ape poking a stick into a hole comes anywhere close to that.
I don't care that eagles can see better than humans. A camera can see better than an eagle and a plane can fly better than an eagle but we don't say that cameras or planes are anywhere close to being comparable to human life. Those abilities are easy ones. Hell even a rock can live longer than a sea sponge, and humans are obviously exceptional compared to rocks.
Bernard Lowe: So what's the difference between my pain and yours?
Dr. Robert Ford: Between you and me? This was the very question that consumed Arnold, filled him with guilt, eventually drove him mad. The answer always seemed obvious to me. There is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts, no inflection point at which we become fully alive. We can't define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Humans fancy that there's something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do, seldom questioning our choices, content, for the most part, to be told what to do next. No, my friend, you're not missing anything at all.
from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4458814/characters/nm0942482 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7TR50Mnwpw
But in general I think this is also reflective of a negative trend in Western culture, which is something like a collapse of the “divine potential” of man. I don’t mean it in the literal religious sense (although that’s where it came from), but in the sense that many people increasingly see themselves as just evolved apes, not as creative beings with limitless potential. There are many reasons for this cultural trend (evolution, secularism and the collapse of religion as a foundation for our idea of self), and so on.
The key, to me, is in understanding that this “evolved ape” narrative is a fundamentally a narrative. What’s needed is a new story that factors in these scientifically true facts of evolution etc. but isn’t so flat and unimaginative in placing them into an arch-narrative.
It probably needs to start with a shift from essence to process as foundational. In other words, the deflationary account of humanity sees itself as “just an evolved ape” because we categorize things as if they were unchanging, static entities. A shift to a process-oriented idea means that value can grow in complexity and develop over time, and so therefore there isn’t anything deflationary about being descended from microscopic organisms.
It reminds me of philosopher Feuerbach’s ideas on God, which are essentially that humanity has externalized its own qualities and greatness into an abstract being, and become estranged from our own potential.
We are accustomed to seeing our lives and the power of dictators and the influence of tiktok content creators etc as these enormous, reality-defining things. And then we look up at the sky — with extreme rarity thanks to light pollution — and often perceive little more than a tableau as if looking at an aesthetically pleasing poster in a waiting room.
Pale blue dot flips that on its head as it should, clarifying that everything we normally view as so important does not have to be confused with the fundamental nature of reality. If there is something wrong with our environment, the fact that it is small in a grander scheme means that we have a better chance of changing it than we might have otherwise supposed.
Tolkien offers a similar quote I'd like to offer to compare and contrast with Sagan:
``` Frodo sighed and was asleep almost before the words were spoken. Sam struggled with his own weariness, and he took Frodo’s hand; and there he sat silent till deep night fell. Then at last, to keep himself awake, he crawled from the hiding-place and looked out. The land seemed full of creaking and cracking and sly noises, but there was no sound of voice or of foot. Far above the Ephel Dúath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master’s, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo’s side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep. ```
I mean, we are. Other apes also have creative potential. I'm probably better at it than most of them are, but they're probably better than me at climbing trees.
Humans are considered “evolved apes” because of our (culturally defined) system of categorization. Humans are just as related to every other species (itself a word that implies a static entity that actually isn’t) in our ancestry. It also isn’t really accurate to claim a microorganism ancestor of humans is some kind of proto-ape, or proto-human.
The point is that process is more accurate as a label. The choice of focusing on apes is a cultural one, not something inherent to the structure of biological reality.
This is just silly. We are significantly more related to chimps than fungi. Humans are scientifically classified as apes, because we share close similarities in characteristics and very recent evolutionary history.
1. language features we have and they don't understand
2. language features we both have
3. language features they have and we don't understand
Probably in that order.
Then it's just a question of gathering a couple of different species that are seemingly intelligent. Such as: corvids, octopuses, whales, etc. And see if the species can be reasoned with. If so, then you can set up schools where you can train them on human things and vice versa. Eventually you can form interspecies groups and really test the hell out of things.
Doing it that way will really challenge human exceptionalism, as well as the exceptionalism of that particular species.
I know it sounds a bit far off, but I figured that we might be able to get there with AI. I mean, we're getting better and better at giving machines tons and tons of data, and it somehow makes some sense of it.
So far, I think it's not necessarily the human species that is exceptional. It's the revolutionary periods it went through in order to become more exceptional hunters, so we could dominate and control the world in the way we want to. Things such as: discovery of fire, agriculture (+ creating defensive settlements) and antibiotics. We couldn't kill bacteria for a long time. We still have trouble with viruses and are getting into trouble with bacteria again. Could dolphins or whales have done it too, if they were land creatures?
If it's true, then we are exceptional but how can we truly know at this point? I mean, Michael the Gorilla told us about what poachers did [1].
If it isn't true, then it shows how in the prevailing consensus we are still too arrogant. In that case, we don't understand that well what sets us apart and what doesn't.
It will probably be a nuanced discussion either way regardless of what the truth is probably due to the definition of language. But in this particular case I'd want to characterize it: some way of communicating that is about as effective as whatever it is that humans do, when they speak out loud.
Also, when you look nowadays at some of the dog/cat videos and they press those buttons, they clearly are capable of communicating something. I remember one dog inventing a word for ambulance given the words he/she knew. Ah, found it! [2]
There's clearly a lot more research to be done here. I hope AI can accelerate it. I know AI is a tricky business, but one can hope.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXKsPqQ0Ycc&ab_channel=kokof...
For example, I can issue a warning to another human by using the words "step back or there will be a problem." Assuming they also speak English, my structured sentence conveys the warning in a clear way.
My neighbor's dog can also issue a similar warning by growling as I move into it's space. It's not using any sort of structure or specific messaging, rather a universally understood sound that conveys some sort of feeling related to caution and fear.
I use the "warning" example since fear/caution are extremely powerful and seem easiest to convey across species. Again, not adept at this, so my example might be dumb. I'm super interested in understanding more about this, though.
Any suggestions of further reading?
Not a good book by any means, but there has been surprisingly little written about people who go from having no language to their first language post-puberty and are asked about their experience of living without language.
Language is extremely important to living as a human, even outside of social relations. Memories don't form well, it is really hard to keep events in order of time, it is hard to order places in space and not get lost. It's even hard to remember people.
It's an engineer take, of course, but I like understanding systems by what happens when they break.
Same, though I am not an engineer, more a denizen of the adjacent service and repair field, but I have been dabbling in development, lately. Fixing broken things because I grew up in a household that was too poor to think of anything as disposable is how I learned probably 90% of what I know, providing me with an understanding of the fragility of systems and the importance of anticipating maintenance the design process.
I see the forward was written by Oliver Sacks, whom I've read and enjoyed in the past, but from more of a pop-Psychology angle. But what you say about language being related to how we think of time and forming memories strikes me. I once heard that Indigenous Australian cultures had a different concept of time than Western culture does, passed down through the language used in their folklore. I posit that we can some evidence for proof of this happening in Western cultures currently with the way that we talk about decades.
With the advent of the year 2000, we lost the ability colloquially refer to the decade we were presently in. Prior to that, we were living in "the 90's," perhaps being born in "the 60's, 70's or 80's." Each of those decades even evokes a certain composite memory of the styles of clothing people may have worn, or the music we listened to, popular automobiles, etc. The character of the decade coalesced around the colloquial name.
2000 hit, and we didn't know how to refer to it. Some folks tried to make the "aughts" happen, which felt awkward or "the 2000's" which seemed to generalized and not specific enough to be referring to the current decade. Then 2010's, which we didn't really even bother calling "the Teens" as I recall, because by then we'd fallen out of the habit of referring to time by decade.
The result is seeing a movie from 2005 and feeling like that was so very long ago, versus when I watched Star Wars for the billionth time in 1997 and the 20 years that had passed since it's release didn't seem like much time at all; only two decades.
Anyway, getting a ramble on to show agreement, but you get the idea. I might have to look for some science fiction authors who have tried to tackle this, see what sort of thought-experiments we can do when we strip language as we know it from the development of the human mind.
But the information in that example is also relatively simple. There are other kinds of information that are much harder to convey without language, talking about future or hypothetical events or abstract concepts, etc.
There seems to be evidence that dolphins use sounds to identify each other and to coordinate tasks that involve a number if animals. I think this is much more interesting and strongly hints that something language-like is going on there.
https://www.ecowatch.com/dolphins-language-communication-evi...
When I first learned about the dolphin "names" whistle, I thought of the way dogs supposedly identify each other by scent in the way that there's subtle differences that our olfactory system is not able to pick up on, but theirs is. In both cases, it begs me to ask what that means for consciousness. If the dolphins and dogs can assign individual labels to each other and recognize those labels when used later on, does that imply they form some sort of a personal identity? I also have to wonder how language, as opposed to other forms of communication, promotes the birth of that identity, but so much of this is over my head in a way that leaves me grasping at how to, well, communicate my own questions so that I receive answers that promote better understanding of the phenomenon and its challenges.
> all language is communication, but not all communication is language
Yea, good point!
> Any suggestions of further reading?
Other than this and people now trying to study animal communication through AI (having seen a few videos on it), I don't know much more than that, haha.
All animals that we’ve studied — including great apes we’ve attempted to teach sign language — have so far failed to demonstrate the acquisition of grammar. This means the number of unique communications they can express is exactly limited to the number of utterances they know.
1. Satisfying curiosity / because it's fun
2. To build new technology
By virtue of that, my stance on whether I think we are or aren't exceptional is irrelevant.
I don't have any hope that any of this will be researched thoroughly enough in my lifetime though.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
That is false. If you gave a whale five digits and an opposable thumb and have them live on land, you'd strongly reconsider that. Even without this, it doesn't take very long when studying animals to see that they have a plethora of ideas. Orcas demonstrate strong examples of this all the time.
And how can you possibly claim that you know any animal's internal dialogue?
> If they develop, it's by accident.
Human evolution is no different.
Apes are also not whales.
> that we can recognize
And there we go. That's an us problem and not a them problem.
> but their curiosity and capacity for communication stops at immediate needs like hunger and danger.
There are several interviews with native tribes who still practice hunting and gathering and that's the exact thing they worry about. Those humans are identical to us. But by your argument, "civilized" humans are more exceptional than these groups of humans?
Humans still have these basic needs and worries and thoughts. Just because we layer meta-societal pieces on top of that doesn't make them go away.
What makes humans different is technology. That does not make us different in an inherently exceptional way.
Partly, but that's a side effect. What makes us different are the mental faculties that give rise to technology (and many other fields).
Our mental faculties are not wholly unique. Look at an orca brain vs a human brain and ask who the smooth brain is, even ignoring the size.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
- because I think the article already addresses this "other species don't have literature" argument, though it doesn't talk about literature specifically.
I’m not sure if you read the article, but if you did, what would you say is the strongest argument that should be discussed ?
The author literally argues that humans are not exceptional because some animals can do things better than us.
What's meant by "human exceptionalism" is something more like "humans' longstanding habit of regarding ourselves as the apex of a strict hierarchy of species, a worldview which has had profound consequences for ourselves and others". That is a complex thing worth exploring, and what the work in the article is about. A critique from that level would be more interesting. But to do this, one would have to take in a larger working set of information.
Comments that engage with only the title of an article or the tip of its iceberg tend to be rather boring, and also reflexive/indignant. On HN, a good comment is reflective rather than reflexive [1], and engages with specifics rather than just being a generic reaction to a generic claim (like "humans are/aren't exceptional") [2].
One way to "engage with specifics" is to dig beneath the top of the abstraction heap (i.e. the title or top-level claim) until you hit a layer of substance of the relevant work or argument. In this case that's pretty easy to do: there are two paragraphs which, in their first sentences, get more specific:
* when we assess other animals, we use human beings as the baseline
* our tests of the abilities of nonhuman animals [...] study them under highly artificial conditions
To me the noteworthy thing in this HN thread is how rapid the reflex is to wholly dismiss the article (and the research it's about) and also how shallow that reflex is—how little information is processed before doing the dismissal. Strong emotional conditioning means little information can be tolerated before a reaction needs expressing. This thread is such a clear a case of that, that it points to how deeply what is called "human exceptionalism" lives in us.
Edit: actually, I was describing what I saw in the thread last night. Having looked it over again, there are a least some more substantive subthreads. That's good, and it's also common for those to take longer to appear, as described at [1] and [3].
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
If you value animals based on human traits, humans will always be better. Because you take your own good traits which other species don't have. But that's not the point. Animals have animal traits. For example, low factor of self-extinction is something we should be learning from from animals. Acceptance of death. Limiting the use of our own resources. Taking these aspects into consideration make humans a stupid race that destroy the environment they live in.
It seems obvious to me that this is a fairly useless definition of "exceptional" that would not be accepted in any context other than an ideological one.
Yes, HN is better without shallow dismissals. Perhaps we should extend that idea to shallow articles as well.
> when we assess other animals, we use human beings as the baseline
Let's use a different baseline then, let's say the visual acuity of birds of prey or the longevity of sea tortoises. Those animals win against humans in their respective categories. Use every animal as a baseline against which to compare every other animal and add up all the "wins" across all of those, and you will find that humans win in far more categories and to a much greater degree than any other single animal. This claim is just a convoluted way of saying what I said in my last comment. The language gives it an academic veneer, but that does not make it a profound claim.
> our tests of the abilities of nonhuman animals [...] study them under highly artificial conditions
This is the actual quote with a bit more context: "We study them under highly artificial conditions, in which they are often miserable, stressed, and suffering. Try caging human beings and seeing how well they perform on cognitive tests."
Does anyone honestly believe that a stressed out human would perform worse on a cognitive test than a perfectly content chimpanzee? It's a fair point that animals are often not "in their element" when we study them, but the idea that this accounts for the vast gap in intelligence and creativity between them and humans is laughable. Is the author claiming that animals behave with a sophistication whose utility rivals the utility of human behaviors, but conveniently only when we're not watching them? I'm pretty sure there's a Far Side comic about this.
On a meta note, you talk about how a lot of commenters dismissed the article by only engaging with the title. I would suggest that you did not engage with what those commenters were actually saying--they did engage with the article, but the article had no substance. It was you who reflexively dismissed the commenters, because you're sympathetic to the article's worldview.
Many such cases: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciesism
Oh yeah? But which one of those species is writing a book challenging their own exceptionalism.
I get the noble sentiment of wanting re-contextualize things to be less human-centric. But, for better or worse, we’ve taken control of the planet. It is our responsibility to take care of it. And if we do manage to, we’ll do so because the alternative is human suffering or extinction.
Dance, Monkey, Dance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLNA7MRdjlw
The monkeys feel alone, all 6 billion of them...
The monkeys shave the hair off of their bodies in blatant denial of their true monkey nature...
The monkeys don't want to be monkeys, they want to be something else, but they're not...
Ernest Cline at his peak...
And in fact this sort of achievement will be critically necessary for the survival of any species. Earth has had numerous mass extinction events, and we're well overdue for another one. And on a long enough time frame, even the Sun itself will eventually engulf the Earth. The only way to 'win' this game is technology and expansion outward into the cosmos.
And it may well be that that elephant beaten into a parlor trick of painting from the article (seriously, don't look up how elephants are 'trained'), is brought along so that its species may too eventually continue to persist into the future, thanks to humanity.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-cats-conqu...
Or we're just the cells of cultures, or religions, or corporations, or governments, or the ecosystem consisting of all biological life, or the universe.
Or each of us is the more-structurally-defined society or construction of a group of cells, or DNA, or molecules.
The point is that we typically think of humans as "conscious" and "alive", but consciousness isn't physical; whether a human is conscious or a "ghost in the shell" makes no difference to the universe. In theory, a cell or ecosystem could also be "conscious", "sensing" and "thinking", since it also makes no difference. Furthermore, although its sensations and thoughts would be much different than any human's, they aren't completely unimaginable.
For example, an ecosystem reacts to changes, experiments, and adapts via evolution (and cells react to things and display some level of sentience). Thus, evolution can be considered a form of thinking: like how we form and execute ideas to survive and prosper, an ecosystem forms and creates species to increase the coverage of life over the planet.
One thing humans seem to be uniquely good at is picking goalposts that separate us from other species.
I would say very complex tools are one way to differentiate ourselves
The point is that no other animals can be stewards, historians, or guardians of this planet. If there is a mass extinction event, no other animal would be capable of escaping it consciously, except by random chance.
Humans are better off understanding everything else they inhabit this planet with, it’s better for them and the incidence of life and intelligence, which shouldn’t be taken for granted, IMO.
Firstly, your argument about "consciously" leaving the planet versus bacteria doing so by "random chance" presents a false dichotomy. Evolution, the very process that led to human consciousness, is built on random mutations and environmental pressures. Bacteria's ability to survive in extreme environments, including the vacuum of space, is a testament to their evolutionary success. Studies have shown that bacteria can survive for years in space, suggesting that the "panspermia" hypothesis—life spreading between planets—is plausible. In a very real sense, their evolutionary trajectory has prepared them for interstellar travel in a way ours has not. While we develop technology to escape Earth, they have evolved the biological means. At this moment, their "random" adaptations have made them more successful at leaving Earth's biosphere than our conscious efforts.
Secondly, the idea of humans as "stewards, historians, or guardians of this planet" is a noble thought, but it starkly contrasts with our actual impact. To an outside observer, humanity would not appear as a guardian but as a significant threat to the planet's ecosystems. We are currently causing environmental degradation on a massive scale, including mass extinctions, deforestation, and climate change, which threatens not only other species but our own civilization. Attributing a unique "thoughtfulness towards other animals" to humans is an anthropocentric view that ignores the fact that we are the primary drivers of the current biodiversity crisis. The very existence of a mass extinction event, driven by a single species, is unprecedented in Earth's history.
To suggest that humans are the planet's only hope for survival is to ignore the fact that we are currently its greatest adversary. It is a form of exceptionalism that prevents us from seeing our place within the ecosystem, not above it.
Intelligent life is exceptional by itself, but human life doubly so because we have the cognitive ability to do a lot more than the majority of our intelligent counterparts in the animal kingdom, which is feed-fight-fuck. This isn’t a pejorative phrase, but a concept in biology.
Bacteria can indeed survive in extreme conditions, but what’s the point? It can never understand anything about the universe or nature of reality as it lacks the cognitive tools required to do so. Why is knowing anything about the universe important? Animal curiosity has been a major driver of many evolutionary processes, including cultural evolution.
To your last point. Every era seems like the end of the world to the people living in that time, but I think that’s just a trick of the mind played on us due to our mortality. Regardless, I didn’t make up these ideas on my own—better people than me have said them in much better ways. Hope is an important psychological trick for troubled times because otherwise there’s only defeat or death. Honestly, things are not that hopeless, there’s almost always a course correction any time things get too extreme, and that’s fine.
You dismiss other intelligent life as being stuck in a "feed-fight-fuck" cycle, a concept from biology. Yet, anyone who has spent time observing animals, even chickens, sees intricate social structures, communication, and what appears to be a rich perceptual world that is simply alien to us . To claim their existence has less "point" because they don't develop cosmology is a failure of our limited world view, not a failure of theirs. It defines intelligence only as that which mirrors our own specific cognitive strengths. This is the same intellectual blind spot we see today, as we struggle to define what truly separates human thought from the emergent abilities of LLMs.
Regarding the "course correction," I agree the planet will be fine. Mass extinctions are a form of course correction. The crucial detail is that the dominant species causing the imbalance rarely survives that correction. Our hope shouldn't blind us to the fact that we are not separate from the system we are destabilizing. Perhaps the ultimate test of our unique intelligence is not our ability to look outward and understand the cosmos, but our ability to look inward, recognize our limitations, and understand our place within the only biosphere we have ever known.
Similarly, the American philosophy of “manifest destiny” (ugly as it is), also carries that same scent of exceptionalism. And so does the “divine right of Kings” from our history. Modern prosperity gospel exploits those same flaws in our cognitive make-up.
In contemporary times we see these philosophies as egocentric and perhaps outdated. But just like children pass through very egocentric stages (well some never grow past that), so too does collective human consciousness evolve past exceptionalism and towards maturity and humility.
I'm confused by this one, because I am missing original thought. It sounds more like a collection of response patterns related to how various targets are supposed to be assessed in value.
I feel like the comment is meant to propose that exceptionalism is like a collective phase, by pointing out a bunch of places where exceptionalism has appeared historically.
To describe humans as exceptionalist, you must claim "animals are people too", but you didn't say that part. Or perhaps "rocks are people too", that would also work, but we don't tend to anthropomorphise rocks because they don't have faces. Or maybe "LLMs are people too". Whatever the claim is, it's an extraordinary claim, and yet you've chosen to present it in the form of a patronising telling off as if it was a foregone conclusion.
We cannot be sure pigs feel anything or have qualia, but from comparison to humans, and let's say, human babies, they at least exhibit the exteriorities of e.g. feeling pain, fear. So, I would assign a non-negligible probability that they do, in fact, have qualia and can feel pain.
Scale that up to a billion farmed pigs, the expected suffering inflicted is huge. Now yes, 'Pascal's wager' and so on, but for rocks, the argument does not work as well.
If you claim for example that rocks suffer when you walk on them, I can claim an equally substantiatex claim that rocks feel sublime extasy as you walk on them. As it stands, we don't have much reason to believe one more than the other, and they cancel out.
All that to say that you don't need to be certain that 'pigs are people too' for its consequences to be seriously considered. And each argument for why you consider pigs to not be people, ask yourself whether it is equally applicable to human babies.
As witnessed by worldwide developments over the last 15 years.
Or all of human history if I’m taking a broader scope.
I suppose this is the real answer to why we won't need UBI. The oligarchs will just wait in their bunkers while the world's population is eradicated by death bots.
That seems the more likely outcome to me than a post-scarcity utopia.
I know people point out that Malthusian predictions have always failed so far - but the reason we got to >7G humans is that an enormous amount of science and engineering went into making things better, a large part of which was spearheaded by the US because world peace and prosperity was in the interests of millionaires and billionaires. Now they've decided this isn't in their interest anymore, so I worry that the trend in scientific progress that got us here will be more like the tide - we're now flapping our fins on the beach and the water is receding.
This is why many assumptions about the future are simply incorrect. For instance people think humanity will become more secular because it has through most of our lifetimes so surely that trend must continue on into the future? But secularity is inversely correlated with fertility. So all that we're going to see happen is secular folks disproportionately remove themselves from the gene pool while religious folks take an ever larger share - now think about what the children of this new gene pool will, on average, be like.
It's also why the concept of us reaching a 'max population' is rather silly. We will reach a point where the population begins to decline due to certain groups removing themselves from the gene pool, but as the other groups continue to reproduce and produce children who, in turn, reproduce, that population will stabilize and then eventually go up, up, and away again. In other words it's just a local max.
And has been for the many generations over which humanity has gotten more secular.
> So all that we're going to see happen is secular folks disproportionately remove themselves from the gene pool while religious folks take an ever larger share - now think about what the children of this new gene pool will, on average, be like.
But for generations that hasn’t been what has happened, despite the correlation between religiosity and fertility not being a novel thing that developed this century? Why could that be? Because religion isn't a genetic trait. Fertility of populations and popularity of ideas and practices have some interaction, sure, but not in the simplistic “spread of a genetic lineage determines spread of culture and ideology” way you are trying to push here.
The second thing is that you're likely dramatically overestimating the secular population. Gallup has been polling people on religion since 1948. Here [1] are those data. As recently as 2004, the percent of people with no religion was in the single digits, so the overall relevance was low. And the inverse correlation between secularity and fertility is also quite new driven by a rather large number of new factors - antagonistic attitude towards gender roles, the embrace of non-marital sex largely enabled by the introduction of the birth control pill in 1960, and so on. So in general, we're entering into relatively uncharted waters, but it's not hard to see what lies ahead as consequences of fertility decisions lag behind those decisions themselves by ~60 years.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2016/10/26/links-betwee...
(That's if we accept that it makes people disinclined to spawn offspring, and that this was always the case and never changes.)
This is one (of many) reason why having children is so rewarding. The idea of 'transferring ones consciousness' into something is nonsense - at best you die and then have a chatbot that does a questionable imitation of you. But with children you directly transfer many of your genetic and physical/mental characteristics, and you can then instill your environmental characteristics into them. It's about as close as you can realistically get to 'transferring your consciousness.'
Interestingly this, like many things, also only becomes even more true as we age. Depending on your age, you might find yourself having more similarities with your own parents than you might care to acknowledge, depending on your relationship with them.
If you then isolate that sample to situations where both parents were Protestant and also talked about religion a alot, 89% of their children ended up as Protestant! For a religion like Islam that integrates even more significantly into one's life (and correlates very positively with good fertility rates), these figures are going to be even higher and getting within statistical noise of 100%.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2016/10/26/links-betwee...
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"Based on survey data collected in 117 countries and territories from 2008 to 2024, we estimate that about 1% of people who are raised Muslim leave the faith. This loss is offset by a comparable influx of people joining Islam."
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Wiki has a nice table on Islam in particular here. [2] They broke 10% of the world population sometime around 1820. They broke 20% 170 years later, around 1990. And they're expected to to break 30% about 60 years after that, by 2050. We're trending towards a majority Muslim world, simply because of fertility, all the while people not having children somehow think people in the future will somehow share their values.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/10/islam-was...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_population_growth#Histo...
Yes, we all know that global population growth is mainly happening in Africa and other poor countries.
You also cite global retention rates for islam. Those retention rates are memetic and highly dependent on the same set of poorer, non-western countries so you are comparing applyes to oranges. If you look at western countries, the retention rate is pretty similar.
You keep stretching statistics to reinforce your world view without trying to actually understand the statistics, which is why I assume you keep repeating garbage like "Any group that maintains a positive fertility rate will multiply indefinitely."
The same follows in places like the US, even just amongst Christians. [2] See the first figure (about 2/5ths of the way down the study) for an extremely informative graph. Intended and actual fertility rates for those who consider religion important remains healthy - at around 2.5 children. For those who it is not important or have no religion, it's around 1.5 children.
It's easy to just handwave the fertility rate of developed economies while failing to consider the issue that fertility isn't just a random distribution within these countries. It's extremely biased, and religiosity is one of the most predictive factors.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/11/29/europes-grow...
Which seems highly likely. Fertility rates change far faster than they influence population demographics.
> It's extremely biased, and religiosity is one of the most predictive factors.
If you ignore income, education, economic opportunity and how many generations ago the family immigrated and all the other important factors.
You keep trying to paint a simplistic picture of a complex dynamic.
If you would like to continue this discussion then (1) acknowledge the falsehoods you make instead of just endlessly shifting the goal posts and (2) in order to prevent an endless series of #1, cite things instead of continuing to just 'invent' false facts. And I mean actual data, not some Ted Talk, Reddit, pop media, or wherever you're getting much of the nonsense you're saying like calling Islamic fertility rates 'memetic' or now deciding to claim that fertility rates change faster than they effect populations which is going absurdly far off the deep end.
So if you have some meaningful citations for these things, great. Perhaps I can see what you missed - maybe you yourself might even see that. Or maybe indeed I'm the one missing something. But otherwise, I can only assume that you're just randomly stating, as fact, whatever you happen to want to be true.
And bear in mind that fertility is an exponential system, in both increases and decreases. So groups that are removing themselves from the gene pool will do so with a rapidity that is quite counter-intuitive. Like a fertility rate of 1 doesn't sound that insane (it obviously translates to literally every single woman having one child on average), yet it results in a generational decline of 50%, with a generation tending to be around our window of fertility - about 20 years.
So imagine two groups start at 16 people and one group maintains a fertility rate of 1, and the other group maintains a fertility rate of 3. After just 5 generations, about a century, the low fertility group will have 1 person, and the higher fertility group will have 81. You went from equal size to an 8100% difference, after a single century! And that's with fertility levels that are entirely realistic and not just comparing extremes like Nigeria or South Korea.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/04/06/why-musli...
A 84% reproductive cultural "replacement rate" means that in order to maintain the population protestants need to have an average of 2.38 (2/0.84) kids to have the same number of protestants in the next generation.
The real number is actually much higher than that because what you really need is to measure how many children of two protestants also marry a protestant. This percentage is lower than (pew estimates this as 75%) so now you need to have have an average of 3.17 (2/(.83*.75) kids just to maintain the protestant population.
These are, of course, woefully inaccurate numbers and exclude all kinds of factors. The reason I present them isn't to try to estimate what the numbers are but to make it clear that "Any group that maintains a positive fertility rate will multiply indefinitely" is not simply not anywhere near true. You just can't accurately estimate the growth rate of a cultural identity by looking at the birth rate.
> For a religion like Islam that integrates even more significantly into one's life (and correlates very positively with good fertility rates), these figures are going to be even higher and getting within statistical noise of 100%.
That's not what the science says. The rates of transmission are only slightly higher and definitely don't approach 100%.
These transmission rates also aren't "natural laws" but contigent effects that are driven by any of a number of different cultural, religious, economic and legal factors.
Even if a minority cultural identity does manage to grow through reproductive practices, it can still be fragmented by schisms (especially common with religious identity) or out competed by memetically superior identities that pulls converters from a wide range of cultural identities.
Your view is here is incredibly simplistic and ignores all kinds of basic evidence from throughout history.
Anyhow, that link gets into the exact rate of transfer for Islam, the consequent growth over time, and so on. I think you'll be surprised!
And that's been a major player, especially in the West, for the past ~70 years where you have politicians wearing religion on the coat of their sleeve, and then going and killing hundreds of thousands of people over what is overtly about oil, economics, and geopolitics - lofty moralistic rhetoric notwithstanding. Then you have things like the pedophilia scandals high within the Catholic hierarchy, made even worse by coverups.
This is probably why religions like fundamental Islam, Haredi Judaism, and so on are even more heritable. Those who follow such religions tend to very much live their proclaimed values. For instance I really don't agree with people like Khabib Nurmagomedov on many of his values, yet he lives those values, even when they hurt him in the short-run, and I find it very inspirational. I can only imagine how young (or older for that matter) Muslims see him. Integrity in life is just so important.
It's like a parent trying to teach their child about healthy eating while they down cokes, chips, and sweets every day. That kid is going to be much more likely to, himself, end up downing cokes, chips, and sweets than he is to eat healthy. And for his own kids, he may not even bother with the pretext of healthy eating.
I was agreeing with you, if not prescriptively, at least descriptively.
This gets back to the original discussion we were having about hypocrisy. Far lesser ails led to the Protestant reformation. In this case, alongside the dysfunction in the College of Cardinals, there will be no reformation but simply a decline.
The Church responding with 'you can no longer get married and shall have no heirs' was a very serious FAFO moment. Just think about how huge a deal that is, if you can even imagine it! The Church used to make much more effort to abide their values, very much in the way that e.g. Islam does today. The centralized nature of the Catholic Church means this (the pedo stuff) could easily be rectified by a single person, the Pope, but their failure to do so is also what I was alluding to with the dysfunction in the College of Cardinals (which is whom elects the Pope).
I think they got caught with their pants down due to progress in communications. there was a time they could suppress information and get away with it. they didn't realise soon enough that the world had changed. in fact secularism helped give a refuge to the victims - if the highest law of the land was the church, then the old ways would have worked just fine.
In any case I suppose now we're looping back around to the original point that we started bickering on. I think the problem is that society has become broadly more amoral, including religious leaders. If one cannot lead by example, then one cannot lead. I think this is the exact same reason that government systems are also failing. It'll be interesting to see where and what this culminates in, as I expect it will happen without our lifetimes.
As for the Church, it was (and remains) never too late to pull a Hollywood. Hollywood had been making not entirely subtle jokes about Ratner, Weinstein, and all of these other guys for decades. Everybody in Hollywood knew they were sex abusers, but it's only when it became clear that they were beyond the point of no return that Hollywood was like 'oh my gosh, that's just so unacceptable, I can't believe you'd do that, away with thee.' But of course doing that would be inconvenient, so again - it'd never happen, certainly not with the current leadership nor cardinals that elected them.
The sad thing is that culture will probably have less concern over individual rights and freedoms, and much more likely to be collectivist and religious.
Not sure I like where this is headed, honestly, but I hope I'm not around to see the fall of liberal democracy.
You make the same mistake as GP in confusing memetics with genetics. Cultures survive by ideas and behaviors spreading, not by genes. People can spread ideas without having children, and people can have lots of children and have their ideas die out.
Or just say "some people are still nasty and self-centered, although others have at least have decency to care for others after their own needs are satisfied".
"a person is smart... people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."
- Tommy Lee Jones as "K" in MIB
In any case, by "biology" you're referring to the biosphere? If so, the (potential) risk is that "biology work[ing] itself out" may involve working humans out of the picture as well.
In addition, there's the question of whether the variability in human DNA affects the originally described "nasty self-centered" behavior; if it doesn't, no amount of "natural" variability will achieve the described desired outcome.
We are like vibe code to him. I think it's quite narcissist to think that there's an omnipotent being who cares about us, and values us as the next best thing since himself, worth of saving after death. Which is a ridiculous, but nevertheless quite a natural delusion for humans, because we are human.
I'm just saying that religions would be more realistic if God had some other purpose and humans are a side effect of that, or maybe just a hobby. The anthropocentric perspective is a dead giveaway that God is a human hallucination.
When you live in a country where routinely public servants steal over 50% of public money like Russia or Ukraine, Cuba, Venezuela, with oligarchs raking billions(from your money), it is not unethical to protect your money and not let them steal your work.
I had family members that protected their money from Argentinian Government years ago. Everybody did that there. They lost part of their savings(20% or so) but had they not made illegal things like not reporting their savings to the Government, the Government would have taken more than 99% of their savings by inflation.
In some places in the world, like South Africa, the Government is the one with criminal behaviour. Imagine you wanted to protect your money from Hitler after Austrian (illegal)occupation. They occupy your land by force, they kill rebels and change the law in order to confiscate asserts from nationalists or jews and use the money to invade new territories and propaganda. Not following the law is the ethical thing there.
So you are saying that from a human perspective, humans are pretty special. Not hard to believe.
The original article is of course by a primatologist, but in the "AI" context it is useful as agitprop.
It's not that simple due to power imbalances with automation and the eternal pursuit of better living standards, but that's kind of the goal. The world chooching away by itself like a Factorio map and people purely consuming.
For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time.
But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons.
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the GalaxyPeople can say random strangers are no better than animals no big deal, but random strangers have been getting little respect and the bad end of the deal for quite a while. It's different when it's someone you actually care about.
Or as someone summed up recent American exceptionalism - Americans will come to your country, blow it up and mangle it to an incredible degree, then make 10+ blockbuster movies about how it made their soldiers sad.
I’d like to add of course - while overlaying the scenes in your country with a sepia tone.
The psychological aspects of being cognitively surpassed by silicon on many dimensions are already happening.
Demis Hassabis said there's a paucity of philosophers who are helping us understand this moment. I think he's absolutely right. Hopefully, we can come out with a more human-centric viewpoint soon.
This “One of US” reference was quite strong in the iRobot movie :)