[statstutor]

I often find it "justifying human exceptionalism" presented as science. The unstated assumption is that humans are somehow better than chimpanzees (here, it is almost literally stated), and therefore that we must reverse engineer and fill in the gaps to justify this. It strikes me that I have no reason to believe the assumption, nor any way of reverse engineering the random process of natural selection.

In my opinion, other sciences are not immune to this.

[TeMPOraL]

> The unstated assumption is that humans are somehow better than chimpanzees

"Better" always has to carry the "at what?" part, explicitly or implicitly. There's no universal Better, thus humans aren't Better than chimpanzees - but humans are better than chimpanzees at quite a lot of things, including intelligence, learning, preserving knowledge across generations, use of tools...

> therefore that we must reverse engineer and fill in the gaps to justify this

There's nothing to justify here. We just are better - by far - than every other animal on this planet at the things that makes a species rule every other. This is an observable fact of reality. We had no contenders for this status as far as the recorded history goes. But it's interesting why this is the case. Why us, and not chimpanzees.

> any way of reverse engineering the random process of natural selection

Natural selection isn't completely random! If it were, there wouldn't be any complex life forms on Earth. Or, more strictly, for natural selection to be completely random, the universe would have to be a fully uniform blob of matter.

There's randomness involved in natural selection, but that randomness has a strong bias. That bias itself is the part that's interesting to understand / reverse engineer.

[statstutor]

I appreciate these points, which are well-considered.

> But it's interesting why this is the case. Why us, and not chimpanzees.

As you admit, we could ask about exceptional adaptations in other species, e.g. "why do birds rule the sky, and not other species?". This might be sometimes studied, but there is not nearly a comparable level of interest in that form of exceptionalism. I'd say there's so little interest, that we often fail to even observe such cases.

It strikes me that we are really just interested in ourselves. (I have no problem with that.)

I don't think we will learn very much as long as we start with the assumption we are primarily exceptional above all other species. I think it immediately leads to circular logic, where any and all differences become evidence supporting the assumption.

I accept what you say about natural selection having a bias. I remain doubtful that we are truthfully observing that bias over the noise of essential randomness. (Edit: on further consideration, I'd strengthen this and believe it is statistically impossible to distinguish evolutionary pressure from randomness, if you are considering N=1 runs of evolution).

[jjk166]

Evo-psych is certainly concerned with the psychology of other animals - why for example the peacock has its feathers. But we can't have a peacock say "I don't know, the feathers don't seem sexy to me, but if I were a tiger I think I'd be scared of them."

Humans have both much more complicated psychologies than most animals (whether we have true peers is debatable), and we certainly are much easier to collect data on. It makes sense that human evo-psych should dwarf animal evo-psych for the same reasons terrestrial-biology dwarfs astro-biology. I wouldn't interpret that to mean we don't consider the questions interesting.

[hntrader]

Mutation is completely random and selection mostly isn't. Many confuse mutation with selection.

[vagrantJin]

Yeah.

We are just primates, doing what all primates do just with a lot more suave and panache

Not much more really.

[tryonenow]

>I often find it "justifying human exceptionalism" presented as science. The unstated assumption is that humans are somehow better than chimpanzee

You find it unscientific to observe that humans are exceptional for being the only known species with the ability to dominate and shape any environment, create, process, and communicate abstract thought, practice science, generate art, communicate across the planet instantly, travel to the bottom of the ocean and to space, with technology that other humans conceived of, designed, and built?

If that isn't scientifically provable exceptionalism, I don't know what is. "Better" is a loaded term because you can weasel in talk of destroying the environment and what not - but I don't think there's any argument against obvious and overwhelming human exceptionalism, the origin of which unquestionably begs exploration and explanation.

[statstutor]

> If that isn't scientifically provable exceptionalism, I don't know what is

My point is that it isn't scientific at all.

Any person can declare themselves exceptional - I have observed consistently that if a person has to declare they are exceptional themselves, it means they probably aren't.

I don't assume that general rule to be different on a species-level: if we (as the human race) feel a need to spend a lot of effort making claims to why we are exceptional, acting both as the judge and the jury, it leads me to suspect that we probably are not.