Six Un-Differences Between Humans and Animals
February 16, 2010 
Recently I visited the website of the Templeton Foundation, an institution that (fortunately!) devotes time, space, and money to exploring connections, conflicts, and resolutions between science and spirituality. When I visited, the question/discussion at hand was whether evolution can explain human nature.
For me, here’s a sub-question: Is there a difference between animal natures and human nature?
Some years back, biologists emphasized tool use by humans as the really important difference between Homo sapiens and other animal species. But this “difference” became problematic:
Observers witnessed chimpanzees in the wild dipping twigs into tiny holes in termite nests, withdrawing the termite-covered twigs and sticking them in their mouths to lap off a mouthful of termites—repeating the procedure over and over, just like a human eating a meal from a plate.
Oh…all right…but chimps don’t manufacture tools as humans do.
Well, actually, stripping leaves and side branches from twigs for termite-dipping isn’t that far from chipping flakes from stones to produce knives.
But humans truly alter natural materials….
Alas, there are crows that will use their beaks to bend a wire handle on a bird-sized bucket to produce a device with which they dip up seeds from a container of water.
OK, but humans design tools to solve problems.
Well, what of rooks that obtain water, or food floating in water, from a lab cylinder only half full of water by dropping in stones to raise the water level so that their beaks can reach the water or the floating food?
You can see this tool-use difference really doesn’t stand up.
Another major biological difference between ourselves and our animal cousins is language. Yet a number of experiments on chimpanzees and other primates, not to mention Alex, Irene Pepperberg’s experimental talking parrot, demonstrate the apparent abilities of these animals to use abstract symbols and even actual words and phrases, to communicate real ideas.
These are not the only arguments that demolish supposedly clear differences between us and our animal relatives. Experiments show capuchin monkeys have a sense of fairness. They willingly perform tasks for a cucumber slice or grape reward. But if one monkey gets a cucumber slice and sees another monkey receive a grape for the same task, the cucumber-receiving monkey soon refuses to perform the task. and behave enviously or resentfully when they are treated unfairly. Animal rights organizations, animal rescue organizations, and the Environmental Protection Agency have also done their part to blur or erase the differences between humans and other animals.
So, rightly or wrongly, over the past several decades, lots of humans have come to see animals as much less different from us and much more like us.
Human and animal nature: an interesting topic, don’t you agree? What do you think?
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