Are Humans Animals?

"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?"