• Question: What makes us humans

    Asked by ella and roisin to Áine, Ciarán, Eoin, Lydia, Victoria on 12 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Lydia Bach

      Lydia Bach answered on 12 Nov 2014:

      Hey Ella and Roisin,

      that’s a very difficult question to think about.
      For a long time we thought we have characteristics that no animals have, like using tools, being aware that we exist and language. But scientists like Jane Goodall have shown that for example chimps use tools as well, dolphins can recognise themselves in the mirror and other animals can communicate in their own complex language. – So we had to change the way we define what makes us human and how we are different from other animals.

      From a genetic point of view we have a genome that distinguishes us from all other species of animals, even though we have 96% of our code in common with our close cousins the chimps.
      In terms of behaviour as far as we know only humans ask questions and try to find answers. As far as we know not other animal asks for example: what makes us chimps?

    • Photo: Ciarán O'Brien

      Ciarán O'Brien answered on 13 Nov 2014:

      There are kinda two answers to this.

      First, Our DNA marks us out as a separate species. All living things seem to have come from a common ancestor billions of years ago, mut as the earth cooled down and the atmosphere changed and life moved about, it adapted to its environment and became more complicated, and that’s how species formed. Nobody’s sure what changes in the environment caused humans to split from the ancestor species we shared with apes, but it probably had a lot to do with having a varied diet which allowed for our brains to develop in odd ways that don’t happen in other species.

      The second answer is culture/society. Humans can think about things, and then think about how they’re thinking about things using a kind of intelligence other species don’t seem to have. We’ve used this to build up so much information that we wrote it down or made TV shows or made a play about it, and in that way we’re still being taught by people who died hundreds of years ago, and that’s something that doesn’t happen in other species either. The huge store of information and entertainment and ideas has almost taken on a life of its own, and it tells humans how to be humans, rather than feral wild things hunting for food and fighting for territory.

      I heard a scientist called Jack Cohen call this “Extelligence”, as a sort of partner to intelligence. It’s part of why people in different parts of the world speak with different accents, or different languages altogether; the society people grow up in evolves faster than the people themselves, so they grow up saying words differently or having different outlooks and the like.

      (Read a series of books called The Science of Discworld if you ever get the chance, it’s a very amusing story about a bunch of wizards living in a magical universe that accidentally created our more scientific universe, and it has a lot of interesting things to say about humans and why we do what we do.)

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