Are Humans Animals?

The question of whether humans are animals came up in the The Historical Jesus: Did He Create the Universe? thread, but it was off-topic there, so I'm starting this new thread in case there's interest in discussing it. This is from Message 487:

If presented with the three choices above, humans are animals. No other animal has a written language. No other animal can make things...such as the wheel, electricity, and nuclear energy. Thus we differ from the other animals in some distinct and unique ways.Another difference often brought up is empathy.

When people make these comparisons they ALWAYS fail to list the tens of thousands of feature humans share with other animals. They also ALWAYS fail to note that pretty much every species has features that are unique.Humans definitely are unique and amazingly different from all other species, but thousands of other mammal species have superior senses of smell and eyesight and hearing, just to name a few features where humans are NOT SUPERIOR!There is not a single aspect of human biology that is not also mammalian biology. Humans fit perfectly into the nested hierarchy of animal life on this planet.

Every species of animal is unique in some way. Humans are pretty amazing, though. I will also openly admit my bias on this one.

I'm not that great at flying, or breathing under water. I've not tried, but I'm sure I can't reproduce by splitting myself in half or burying a bit of me in the ground. I really wish I could create electricity and shock people with a handshake. Sleeping all through winter would be nice and would save on bills. Echo location would be useful. Yeh, I can think of quite a few upgrades that would be cool.

As an olive branch to creationists, the classification of humans as animals is independent of the theory of evolution. Linnaeus classified humans as animals a century before Darwin, and Linnaeus was a creationist. In fact, Linnaeus wanted to put humans in the same genus with the rest of the apes, but didn't because of the uproar it might cause. So we were classified as animals, vertebrates, mammals, and primates well before Darwin came along.

"Intuitively obvious to even the most casual of observers", as one of my supervisors used to say. Though candle2 would say that humans are mineral, since he believes that we come from dirt.Yes, we humans are indeed animals, and chordates (possessing a spinal cord), and vertebrates (possessing a bony spine), and tetrapods (four limbs), and amniota (developing embryos surrounded by a membrane), and mammals, and primates, and haplorhines ("dry noses"), and simiiforms (monkeys), and catarrhines ("noses with down-turned nostrils", Old World monkeys), and Hominidae ("great apes"), and Homininae ("African apes"), and Hominini (sub-clade of Homininae that includes humans and chimps, but excludes gorillas), and Homo ("Man").A side note would be the observation that instead of there being completely separated and unrelated "basic kinds" to which every individual species can belong to one and only one to the exclusion of all any other "kind", we instead find that each species belongs to a multitude of "kinds" generally as described in the Linnaean classification system; eg, dogs and cats and pigs are all of different "basic created kinds", and yet they are also part of a larger more encompassing "mammal kind", and "amniote kind", and "tetrapod kind", and "vertebrate kind", and "chordate kind", etc.There's also a problem in how candle2 and other fundies/creationists abuse language. Words have more than one meaning, so they choose a meaning for a word and then seek to win an argument by using that word's meanings that do not apply. For example, if I told you to fetch me a round, what would you bring me? A circle? A loop?, A ball? A bullet? A song? A tray of drinks?candle2 is doing that here by substituting the wrong meaning of "animal", a non-biological one. His meaning is "a non-human animal". In that context, we have two basic kinds of animal: humans and non-humans. But instead of sticking to that distinction, he conflates any reference to humans being animals (which we most definitely are) with humans being made non-human. That raises another issue of their abuse of language in that we define and use words to describe what we observe and are talking about, whereas they use arbitrary word definitions for the purpose of changing reality. It's a kind of Word Magick whereby they believe they can wish something they don't like into the cornfield simply by redefining it as something else.This is the basis for one of their basic really stupid arguments: "If you teach children that they are animals, then they will act like animals." Observe how they are abusing language there as they switch between two different meanings for "animal": first "animal" in the proper biological sense, then in the "non-human animal" sense. And the sad thing is that fundie ground-pounders like candle2 don't even realize what they are doing.BTW, yes, we do act like animals. All animals do, each according to the nature of its species. Dogs act like dogs, cats like cats, wolves like wolves, deer like deer, whales like whales, etc. And humans act like humans in accordance with human nature.To quote the punchline of a minor old dirty joke from more than half a century ago: "What the 'ell did you expect? Feathers?"BTW, even though I did share this "Clint's Reptiles" video with you before (and you thanked me and you're welcome), here it is again for the benefit of the others: It does a good job of illustrating the chain of related groupings by characteristics which I refer to in my second paragraph above. It also emphasizes how each species is still a member of all its ancestral "kinds", the applicable Biological Law being: "You cannot evolve out of your clade."I liked how Clint brings up how there's no such thing as a "scurvy dog" since dogs can produce their own vitamin C whereas we cannot due to a mutation which disabled that gene. That loss of the ability to produce vitamin C goes back to haplorhines which appears to have been where the disabling mutation happened, but more interesting is how all the descendent species are also unable to produce vitamin C for the exact same reason, due to the exact same disabling mutation.Interesting. Or to quote from the punchline of a creationist video series targeting school children: "Kind of makes you think, doesn't it?"

Darwin is famous for discovering two things in biology: natural selection and common descent.In his own notebook, Darwin drew this diagram and the words "I think".That's a pretty cool moment, the moment when Darwin realized that the nested pattern in life was due to common descent. When he shared his discovery with the world it instantly clicked in the minds of other biologists. Like all great discoveries, they are obvious once discovered. From George Romanes in 1882:

quote:

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Now, since the days of Linnæus this principle has been carefully followed, and it is by its aid that the tree-like system of classification has been established. No one, even long before Darwin's days, ever dreamed of doubting that this system is in reality, what it always has been in name, a natural system. What, then, is the inference we are to draw from it? An evolutionist answers, that it is just such a system as his theory of descent would lead him to expect as a natural system. For this tree-like system is as clear an expression as anything could be of the fact that all species are bound together by the ties of genetic relationship. If all species were separately created, it is almost incredible that we should everywhere observe this progressive shading off of characters common to larger groups, into more and more specialized characters distinctive only of smaller and smaller groups. At any rate, to say the least, the law of parsimony forbids us to ascribe such effects to a supernatural cause, acting in so whimsical a manner, when the effects are precisely what we should expect to follow from the action of a highly probable natural cause.
--George Romanes, "Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution", 1882

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In my opinion, the nested hierarchy is still the number one piece of evidence for evolution. Almost all of the evidence for evolution comes back to this basic concept. This is also why I am shocked and not shocked when online creationist warriors say they have no idea what a nested hierarchy is. It's like claiming the theory of relativity is wrong and not knowing what spacetime is.

I much appreciated Admin providing an opportunity for further discussion of this matter. The replies above are an excellent mix of the learned and the eloquent.My original impulse was aimed at the idiocy of "mere animals." Dwise1 in particular did a grand job of dissecting the Orwellian doublespeak that view entails.I no longer have a dog in this fight.

I would give a definite yes to answer that question, humans are animals. And where all animals have unique traits, I do feel humanity tends to 'humanize' the traits other animals have. Everything is put in the context of how we experience things.I remember in the past getting my hands on a logbook from the famous 'Peter the Dolphin' experiments from the 1960s where they had a half submerged laboratory and a researcher named Margaret. One specific experiment really hit home for me because it showed that, while we feel humanity is unique in its intelligence, we tend to dumb down animals that in their own way, are very intelligent.The experiment started off as a simple fetch game, Margaret would throw the ball and urge Peter to go and get it and bring it back, having him drop the ball in front of her before another round of fetch.The goal was to see if a dolphin could be trained to play simple games like this but at some point, it turned into something else, the dolphin training Margaret to trust him.Because at some point, he would grab the ball but hold it right at the front of his beak and he wouldn't drop it, she had to reach over to grab it from his beak. This can be a scary thing of course, a dolphin could easily bite you and wound you.But the game would end more and more often with him offering her the ball and after she got comfortable with this, he would hold the ball further back in his beak so she had to actually reach in to grab it until one time, she reached in and he'd drop the ball but keep his beak open, showing her that he wouldn't bite, he wouldn't hurt her.And she ended up trusting him more, being more comfortable with him and seeing him less and less as "just an animal"So yeah, we are animals, and we're different, but so is every other animal and what we have and can accomplish is unique. But there's a lot of uniqueness in other animals as well that we sparsely understand.Another short example is Prairy Dogs language, where their chirps are actually descriptive words signaling not just simple concepts like danger or food, but colors, shape and size.. Specifically signaling that for instance, a person is wearing a red shirt in their own way. Fascinating stuff.

Absolutely, animals have their own intelligence and unique ways of communicating and interacting with the world around them. It's important for us to acknowledge and respect the abilities and traits of other animals, rather than simply comparing them to humans. Each species has its own way of thriving and surviving in their environment, and we can learn a lot from observing and studying them. The examples you provided are such great reminders of the complexities and intricacies of the animal kingdom. It's truly fascinating to learn about the different ways in which animals think, communicate, and form relationships. Thank you for sharing these interesting insights!

Humans anthropomorphize just about anything, be it weather or our vehicles. We all experience this from time to time. If our car breaks down we actually get mad at it, as if it has some malice towards us.Of course, this human trait is also very, very useful in the right circumstances. Our ability to empathize and interpret the actions of other humans allows our species to work together and achieve pretty spectacular things. Gua the chimp is another great example. A pair of scientist parents had the idea of raising an infant chimp alongside their infant son. At one point the chimp was not learning to talk, but their son was starting to talk. They stopped the experiment soon afterwards because their son started grunting and copying ape sounds instead of learning human language. It turns out humans are better at aping than other apes.Gua - Wikipedia(chimpanzee)