So are human beings animals or what?

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Manfred Belheim

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From a secular/atheist/"rational" point of view the answer is obviously "yes". For centuries most people would have had a more religious/spiritual view that humans and animals are discrete and separate categories of "thing", where humans are above animals in some way, possess souls etc etc.

Most people seem a lot happier with the idea that we're just animals like all the other animals these days, at least superficially. But often this seems to break down if we're forced to think about what this might actually mean in too much depth.

I'm thinking specifically of studies that show (or purport to show) inherent, innate differences between races, or between genders, in things like intelligence or behaviours. I don't want to talk about any particular studies in general because I'm not really talking about the veracity of any individual claims, more the reaction they usually garner. It seems no-one ever has any problem if, for example, someone claims to have evidence that grey squirrels are more intelligent than red squirrels, or that Bengal tigers are more aggressive than Siberian tigers, or that female marmosets tend to avoid risks and have smaller territories than male marmosets. Or even that different breeds of dog, which are all exactly the same species, exhibit wildly different temperaments, behaviours and perhaps even intelligence.

To me it would seem the natural assumption, given that we see these sorts of differences in practically every other animal species you'd care to mention, that we are very likely to possess such differences ourselves. Or at the very least it's not an unreasonable idea to concieve of. Yet whenever such subjects are raised they're often met with outright hostility, incredibly emotional responses, and more often than not the word "Nazi". So why are people so unable to approach such ideas as rationally as they would when discussing any other animal species?

Again, I'm not addressing any specific studies here, and if any individual study is found to be based on faulty or poor data, or flawed reasoning, then obviously it should be dismissed. But even in such cases, the logical dismissal is usually delivered wrapped in a very emotive "this is offensive" coating. But why should such ideas be offensive? On the one hand I understand how it's different when it's "us" and not "them", but on the other I can't see how a supposedly rational mind can't overcome that difference.

So to me it seems that a lot of people, despite taking the rational stance of "yes we are animals", still have this inherent belief that we're still somehow in a different, special class. Where, despite our messy animalistic origins, we've somehow evolved to the point where we've attained some sort of sublime intelligence or spiritual purity where we are able to entirely rise above any innate animalistic differences or tendencies to the point where they no longer influence us at all. Indeed, just looking at intelligence, not only is the idea that different races may (on average) display different levels of intelligence generally considered to be an unnacceptable proposition, but the idea of intelligence itself often seems to be treated with mistrust (in humans that is). Despite the fact that we've all obviously met stupid people and intelligent people and can clearly see the difference, there's very often a general denial that things like the results of IQ tests even mean anything at all, as if intelligence is some entirely nebulous and immeasurable concept and that we can all be as intelligent as we want if we just choose to do so. Perhaps I'm wrong on that one and perhaps it really is just the tests themselves that people have problems with, but often it seems to me that the objection is born out of some resentment over not being one of the top scorers and not wanting to feel limited.

That last point suggest another another possible motivation - the desire to hold on to the concept of free will. We like to think that our beliefs, our interests, our behaviours, our morals, are all entirely our choice, that we can choose to be anything we want, or behave any way we like, that we are entirely our own masters. We can accept restrictions and rules for anything else in nature, but if they are applied to humans then we have to accept that we are included in that and perhaps this is simply not acceptable to a lot of people, not necessarily (or even likely) on a conscious level.

An example on CFC recently was the thread where some company claimed that they had a system for detecting if people were (or would become) paedophiles or terrorists or geniuses. Again, the claims might well be complete rubbish, and a lot of other criticisms were along the lines of "even if this is possible, we shouldn't persue technologies like this for moral reasons". But also I saw a number of responses that seemed to be just immediately dismissive of the idea, seemingly on the grounds that people just can't be predicted in this sort of way.

Anyway, discuss?
 
We are product of evolution. Our closest relatives in animal kindgom are known.

What seperates us is differences in DNA. Are these differences big enough to put humans in a different class? That's a question which can be answered only by analyzing human DNA to the limit. At the moment DNA research is still in early stages.
 
We are a part of the Animal Kingdom. We belong to this group whether we like it or not. We are not robots or supermen from another planet.

If you ignore biology and assign a different meaning to the word "Animal", then sure, maybe we're not. Depends on your definition of "animal".

Are humans toasters? Depends on what you mean by "toaster", etc.
 
Bit of a bad faith argument there, Warpus. You're basically implying (by comparing it with "you could use toasters to include human") that he has to make up new meanings of "animal" out of nowhere to exclude humans.

It's an easily demonstrated fact (by opening a dictionary at "animal") that a definition of animal that excludes humans already exists. As does one that includes them.
 
Tl/dr, yes we're animals, our brains are more complex animal brains, our emotions are more nuanced versions of lower animal's emotions. We're more similar to other mammals than mammals are to reptiles for example.
 
Bit of a bad faith argument there, Warpus. You're basically implying (by comparing it with "you could use toasters to include human") that he has to make up new meanings of "animal" out of nowhere to exclude humans.

It's an easily demonstrated fact (by opening a dictionary at "animal") that a definition of animal that excludes humans already exists. As does one that includes them.

That's what I'm saying, if you are going by the biological/traditional definition of the word "animal", then we are animals.

If you go by another definition, then it depends on that definition.

Where's the bad faith? That's very accurate as far as I can see
 
Humans are a bit further along on a continuum of complex life than our nearest ancestors. We have capabilities far beyond any other life form we know of. These capabilities have, in our own minds, set us apart from other life forms. As a race (humans) our individual egos are more pronounced than in other living things and we are able to act on that egotism in more diverse and impactful ways than, say, lions and chimps and eagles and whales. This powerful egotism is one of the things that sets us distinctly apart from all the rest. It is often a contributor to our individual successes and failures. People with less pronounced egos tend to fade into the social background.
 
You know what the problem is? Racists.

If racists would stop trying to push their trash ideologies then these things could be investigated on neutral grounds.

Maybe if racists could stop having agendas and looking to stab their fellow man in the back, then investigating such thigns would not be potentially threatening and offensive.
 
Racism is just ego wrapped in a particular style of body.
 
I had a dream about this last night. Was going to a weird wilderness retreat. Had to walk through a narrow bit of forest with lots of wild animals that were down to eat/hoof me. It was like something out of Zelda in terms of zone instancing. I remember thinking, "I really am just another animal to them."
 
Warpus - the bad faith is when you bring up "Are humans toasters" in comparison.

The difference being that there IS a definition of animal that excludes human. You don't need to make that up or to "change the rules" to conclude that humans are not animals. You just have to use one of the existing definitions of the world.

There is, however, NO definition of "toaster" that includes human beings in general (there is a specific definition of toaster that describes some human beings). T

So "human beings are toasters" and "human beings are not animals" are not equivalent. But you imply them to be in your post.
 
Yet whenever such subjects are raised they're often met with outright hostility, incredibly emotional responses, and more often than not the word "Nazi". So why are people so unable to approach such ideas as rationally as they would when discussing any other animal species?

This may not be THE reason but a contributing factor, that you almost got to here, is for historical reasons. In the past groups of people have tried to justify their hatred and cruelty towards other groups of people by pointing to "science" to validate their superiority and therefore the right to do whatever they want. So when the topic of difference between races or genders or whatever comes up, you sort have to wonder what people's motivations are. Are they being objective or are they trying to justify cruelty?

In my opinion human beings as a whole seem ill equipped to handle such knowledge without performing monstrous acts towards other people.
 
For each person who's neutral and unprejudiced and wants to talk about (say) the different IQs of different human races, there's a ton of those who have a poorly hidden agenda. That's why people don't take those talks on face value.

On IQ specifically, the differences of races in any reasonable research that I've seen are about 90-110, which is a part of the scale you really don't notice outside the test situation. You may spot someone who's exceptionally intelligent or stupid, but that's about it. Even then you may be surprised by some people's IQs.

More over, even though IQ might be the best available method of measuring intelligence, it's far from being perfect. For example, think about how you would measure someone's physical fitness. Would it be about how much he lifts weight? How fast he runs a 100 m? What's his Cooper test? How much he pants after running a kilometer? How resilient he is to diseases? A combination of these, what kind of? What if the guy had no legs at all?

Similarly IQ is meant to measure something we all know from everyday life, but for which there is no natural measure. Testing intelligence is even harder than physical fitness, since usually the idea is to measure only the capability you were born with. In the above imagined fitness test it doesn't matter how you became fit, only the result. This is why IQ tests often test only "culture and education neutral" things, but at the same time omit things that we consider a big part of intelligence in the everyday life. On the other hand the neutrality is dubious too, since some sources say that rehearsing improves your score.

Now, more to the topic, if there was a research that proved for example that Jews have average IQ 111 whereas white non-Jew Europeans only 102, what would that really prove? Not much really. More importantly, what would be the consequences of that being true? Should we put Jews in different position? Should more education be allocated to them? Or more to the people who are disadvantaged? If you were hiring a person or choosing them to study in your school, would you rely on his race, or would you rather want to know what the individual is like?

It's hard to imagine any reason why a person would think differences in races are at the same time 1) demonstrable enough, 2) important enough and 3) should result in actions, so that he'd really want to have an earnest discussion about it. Especially since people know these are flammable issues. For each such person there's a ton of people who just are racist. (If you dig up the mudpits of the Internet, you'll find surprisingly many people who think they deserve praise for conquering space because they are the same colour as Neil Armstrong).

When you think about the motivations of bringing up IQ differences between races, it's really hard to think of any other than racism, or promoting your own intelligence and capabilities of free thinking. People who do this often have the same kind of aura that the 9/11 truthers used to have.

But also I saw a number of responses that seemed to be just immediately dismissive of the idea, seemingly on the grounds that people just can't be predicted in this sort of way.

That's because in that specific case, it's entirely inconceivable that they could be. The idea that pedophiles or terrorists could be predicted from their genes is absolutely crazy. Ok, not absolutely crazy, in theory it could be possible, but if these guys had made a program capable of doing that, I surely wouldn't have read of it only in CFC. It would be all over the news.

Even crazier it becomes if you think that the program would predict if someone also acts according to his pedophilic or terrorist impulses.

Similarly, it's not entirely impossible that the horoscopes would dictate our lives. It's just very unlikely idea and one of whose veracity there is absolutely no show. I won't be open minded on every single horoscope I see, and think maybe this deserves a shot. No, instead I think that they have to put something real on the table before even thinking if it's true.

The same thing with this. All the justification these people had for their claims was a dubious experiment in a poker tournament, in which they also failed to guess those who really won. (They said they guessed some of the guys who did best, but that is pretty far from what I would expect from treating pedophiles and terrorists). If they want anyone to even consider the idea that their program isn't BS in new clothes, they should bring forth the evidence first.
 
For each person who's neutral and unprejudiced and wants to talk about (say) the different IQs of different human races, there's a ton of those who have a poorly hidden agenda. That's why people don't take those talks on face value.
What human "races"? Unless there are whole groups of humans who are incapable of reproducing with other humans, we're ALL ONE RACE. The differences such as skin color, etc. are superficial when it comes to basic reproductive biology.

Similarly, it's not entirely impossible that the horoscopes would dictate our lives. It's just very unlikely idea and one of whose veracity there is absolutely no show. I won't be open minded on every single horoscope I see, and think maybe this deserves a shot. No, instead I think that they have to put something real on the table before even thinking if it's true.
I suppose that a society could mandate that no significant action be taken unless the stars and planets were favorable toward that action... oh, wait. That's exactly how some societies have been in history. For that matter, even within the last 40 years. I seem to recall that astrology is what got some things decided when Reagan was president.

Scary thought, that a world leader would leave his decision-making to a pseudoscience-pushing charlatan.
 

Of course humans are animals and are tightly constrained by their genetics, shaped by millions of years of evolution, all but the last 10,000 years of which occurred in hunter-gatherer contexts and all but the last 250 years of which occurred in pre-industrial contexts. You’re also right that this does have some implications that are troubling for modern-day liberals. Pointing these out is of course politically radioactive, but I’m not afraid. I collect and measure and play with radioactive things. Some people own guns, I own uranium.

(okay, only 2.3 g of depleted U metal, and a little chunk of ore. It’s legal, don’t call the FBI. ;) )

So I’ll just jump right in and mention one of these things. You know how people take the fact that sex ratios in many fields (esp. some STEM fields) are skewed to be more than 50% male, and use it to demonstrate sexism? I’ll look at the breakdown among physics, chemistry, and biology bachelors and Ph. D. degrees in the US and draw some conclusions from that.

In the biological sciences, the proportion of women among doctoral degrees conferred is 53%, according to NCES. For undergrads the proportion is 59%. For chemistry, the proportions are 39% doctoral, 49% bachelors. For physics, it’s 20% doctoral, 19% bachelors. Interestingly for physics, the undergrad proportion plateaued out around 20% about a decade ago and now the proportion of both grads and undergrads have equalized at about this figure.

Of course, all of the sciences were male-dominated 50 years ago. There’s no real reason to believe that women were somehow able to shatter the glass ceiling in biology while physics remained so stubbornly sexist that women were only able to claw their way up to 20%. People talk about how girls get socialized in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that reduce their interest in math and physical sciences, but of course they were socialized away from all sciences in 1960 but nonetheless climbed to majority status in biology. It wouldn’t surprise me that if all sexist biases magically disappeared, there might be a new equilibrium around 30% or so, but it strains credulity to think it would reach 50%.

The obvious conclusion is that a man has a higher probability of being interested in highly abstract fields like physics than a woman even if all social factors were identical. For the social sciences and to a slightly lesser extent for biology, it’s the other way around. The differences are probably rooted in the slight differences in the way an average man’s mind is structured, versus that for an average woman. The differences in how men versus women think on average are slight, but they get greatly magnified when it comes to deciding whether you want to spend a large chunk of your life thinking about some particular science.

(edit: I should probably say very explicitly that I don't believe that women who make the choice to go into physics are less capable than men, or that women are worse at physical sciences. In fact my experience as a physics undergrad was the opposite. What I'm talking about is a difference in probabilities of being interested in physics, not in ability.)

Of course this can’t be absolutely proven, and there’s enough wiggle room for people to convince themselves that we really are all blank slates with no biology-based cognitive differences, and that differences in outcomes must be down to some type of discrimination. But, speaking as someone who really does have no axe to grind and could easily be convinced of the opposite (in fact, I would rather believe the opposite) if that’s where the evidence points, the data seem as clear as they can be for something like this.

As for the IQ stuff, though, it’s a lot more complicated than you’ve made it sound. There absolutely are biological factors at play, but it’s not totally clear what we’re really measuring and the Flynn effect is impossible to explain on the basis of biology alone. Atticus did a great job of explaining some of the problems with reaching conclusions based on IQ differences.

What I have found in all my time exploring and debating things on the internet is that there is a very small but nonzero number of people who are interested in exploring issues from a nonideological perspective and going literally wherever the evidence leads, including learning all the nuances and caveats that go with truly understanding anything that is at all complex. The vast majority of people who bring up things like inherent biological differences between people and groups thereof are not at all like that – they bring up these issues to justify their preexisting sexist/racist/etc beliefs. That’s the biggest reason there’s such a negative reaction when someone posts about this, and it’s an uphill battle to prove that you’re actually interested in learning about something that happens to be controversial, not in justifying prejudice. It’s even more of an uphill battle for someone who, let’s say, beelines straight for every thread about controversial social issues in order to do battle with the SJW types.
 
What human "races"? Unless there are whole groups of humans who are incapable of reproducing with other humans, we're ALL ONE RACE. The differences such as skin color, etc. are superficial when it comes to basic reproductive biology.

I think you're confusing race and species. It's species that are incapable of reproducing with other species (although there're exclusions even there). Races are subdivisions within a species and don't have such limitations. E.g., domestic cats all belonging to Felis catus species have different breeds (i.e. races) having distinctive characteristics making it possible to tell one from another. Say, Persian cat and Sphynx cat.

The difference between "race" and "breed" is that breeds are artificially bred to meet required parameters while races naturally evolve (or preserve from being reduced/lost) their parameters to better meet the environmental conditions they live in, like skin pigments to cope with higher insolation.
 
I think you're confusing race and species. It's species that are incapable of reproducing with other species (although there're exclusions even there). Races are subdivisions within a species and don't have such limitations. E.g., domestic cats all belonging to Felis catus species have different breeds (i.e. races) having distinctive characteristics making it possible to tell one from another. Say, Persian cat and Sphynx cat.

The difference between "race" and "breed" is that breeds are artificially bred to meet required parameters while races naturally evolve (or preserve from being reduced/lost) their parameters to better meet the environmental conditions they live in, like skin pigments to cope with higher insolation.
I am not confused in the slightest. :huh: I've had dogs most of my life, and have raised cats for over 38 years. My college major was anthropology, and it was my instructor who told us that there is only one human race, that includes everyone.
 
Then it was your instructor who was confused. At least Merriam Webster confirms what I said:

3race noun
3 a : an actually or potentially interbreeding group within a species; also: a taxonomic category (as a subspecies) representing such a group
b : breed
c : a category of humankind that shares certain distinctive physical traits

I'd like to add that it's in no way derogatory or hierarchical or anything.

And I guess that because the instructor was a college instructor and you were a student, you were provided with this definition #3 also given by Webster:

Definition of race for Students

1: any one of the groups that human beings can be divided into based on shared distinctive physical traits
2: a group of individuals who share a common culture or history <the English race>
3: a major group of living things <the human race>

Though for students specializing in Biology I'd still emphasize definition #1 of the same set.
 
Then it was your instructor who was confused.
Considering that I took this class nearly 35 years ago, it's not to be expected that I can just dig up my class notes to see exactly what he said, nor can I email him and ask, because he died a long time ago. But he was adamant that a human is a human is a human, no matter what the exterior differences might be.

I'd like to add that it's in no way derogatory or hierarchical or anything.
No, of course not. That's why the words "racism" and "racist" are meaningless. :rolleyes:

Some people talk about the "Jewish race" (Atticus did, a few posts ago). I really don't understand how people of a particular religion can be a different "race" from people who believe in a different religion. Honestly, what's next - Conservatives are a different "race" from Liberals, and both are different "races" still from an NDP voter, or a Green Party voter? As an atheist, am I not as human as a non-atheist?

:mad:
 
But he was adamant that a human is a human is a human, no matter what the exterior differences might be.
Absolutely. And so am I. Ethically.

Though technically there are subgroups which can be split further all the way down to individuals probably.

No, of course not. That's why the words "racism" and "racist" are meaningless. :rolleyes:
Well, these words are in fact meaningless if you ask me. And they definitely are as long as we talk Biology.

Sociology and Psychology are different pack of knowledge, and these words have meaning there, and I don't think the meaning they have there is good.

Some people talk about the "Jewish race" (Atticus did, a few posts ago). I really don't understand how people of a particular religion can be a different "race" from people who believe in a different religion.
Well, probably he took it from Webster as well. Definition for Students #2.

I mean, if there is an English race Webster gives as an example, why shouldn't there be a Jewish one? It just shows distinguishable cultural groups, nothing bad implied.

Though I admit it's a thin edge to ride, which is why I personally don't use this word for that, leaving it to strictly Biological stuff.

Honestly, what's next - Conservatives are a different "race" from Liberals, and both are different "races" still from an NDP voter, or a Green Party voter? As an atheist, am I not as human as a non-atheist?

:mad:
Yeah, I agree that it shouldn't be overdone with.
 
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