| Human being are only "special" within the context of our very recent modern world. Take an average human being and drop them at an island. Now we have a "base" human being, the pure species if you will. Things like humour, sarcasm and ethics have lost all meaning now, which shows they're not special at all. The typical urban person would probably die at the island as they can't hunt or farm. Somehow this pretty critical base knowledge was not passed on. In the more optimistic scenario, the island people adapt to relearn basic survival, which would rank them as social hunters. Which is fine, but not that special. Importantly, these smart hunters would be unable to reinvent even the basic necessities of the modern world. Because even a human with 20 years of education doesn't know how anything works, they only make use of things. Again, the knowledge is NOT passed on. So it's not us that is special, it's our modern world that is special. Which is situational and the result of a handful of critical inventions, many less than a century old. These inventions were not guaranteed or destined to be. There's even historic cases of anti-development in humans, where a population failed to pass on learned techniques and tools, after which subsequent generations became increasingly less "sophisticated". None of which is surprising, as for the entire existence of our species, minus 10K years (agriculture), we were social hunters. Not god-like creatures. The average modern human being is less than a social hunter when the electricity goes down. |