[kirab]

"an ability previously thought to be unique to humans".

This sentence.

I’ve read and heard it so many times now, that according to Bayesian statistics, I should correct my assumptions and assume that, in the end, we will find out that there is not a single thing that’s unique to humans.

[NiloCK]

The general sentiment is spot on - animals are amazing, complicated, sophisticated, and we will continue to be "humbled" over and over again, but maybe you've gone too far.

A few candidate "unique to humans" characteristics:

- surgical replacement of defective organs. I wouldn't be surprised if some animals have processes for amputations - especially insects - but I'd be pretty surprised if there are any kidney transplants going on.

- written language systems for durable information passing, phonetic alphabet systems. As far as I know, a phonetic alphabet was invented only once among humans, which makes it a rarity even for us.

- haircuts. This one is super plausibly wrong, but I don't think that any animals do this, and its a good example of something that they could do but just don't.

[Kim_Bruning]

> As far as I know, a phonetic alphabet was invented only once among humans, which makes it a rarity even for us.

A bit of an aside, but I'm a bit puzzeled by this statement. There are many phonetic alphabets invented through history of course. Are you saying they all have the same root or inspiration?

[andsoitis]

> A bit of an aside, but I'm a bit puzzeled by this statement. There are many phonetic alphabets invented through history of course. Are you saying they all have the same root or inspiration?

I think you're thinking "alphabet", which indeed, has been independently invented multiple times. The most widely used alphabet is the one derived from the Phoenician script. Other alphabets that were independently invented include the Brahmic scripts and the Hangul script.

However, the "phonetic alphabet" (also known as the NATO phonetic alphabet) was only invented once. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet#

[Tijdreiziger]

Why would it only have been invented once? Various spelling/phone alphabets are and have been in use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_alphabet

[andsoitis]

There was indeed a first invention from which others were inspired, if my history knowledge is accurate and the Wikipedia article is read carefully.

In contrast, alphabets have been invented multiple times completely independently without knowledge of the others.

[funnybeam]

Yes, all phonetic alphabets come from the same root - the Greek alphabet - it has only been invented once.

There are many other writing systems but they tend to be pictorial or syllabic.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/writing/Types-of-writing-sy...

[hoseja]

Yes, that seems to be the case.

[dwighttk]

Wear clothes

Write about history no one currently alive has seen

Make music

Go to space

Theorize

[CaptainMarvel]

Wear clothes - I know that hermit crabs wear shells

Make music - I know that birds sing, and a quick Google search shows whales and seals seem to make "music" as well

Theorize - Depending on what you mean of course (but I agree with you about e.g. scientific hypotheses to be tested), but as an example apparently birds "theorize about the minds of others", again by Google search

Writing - Definitely a stretch here (and so I agree with you) but animals do leave chemical markings for others

[andsoitis]

> Wear clothes - I know that hermit crabs wear shells

You show me one outfit, I raise you an entire textile, clothing, and fashion industry allowing us to show our features in displays of status all the way to enabling us to walk in space.

[wizzwizz4]

Sounds like industry is the unique part, then, not clothing.

[burnished]

So a difference in degree then, not kind

[andsoitis]

Both degree and kind. While hermit crabs and other animals who wear garments do very little manufacturing (they use something as is or do some “minor” fashioning), the techniques and kinds of clothes we make are of a totally different sophistication. Our clothes allow us to enter ecosystems and hostile environments, for example. Our clothing is both functional and cultural. Etc.

[dwighttk]

Wear items of clothing that aren’t scavenged detritus

Compose music

[calepayson]

> Go to space

Laika does not approve of this message :)

[vinhcognito]

> Wear clothes - I've definitely seen pigeons sport around a piece of bread like a luxury jacket.

> Theorize - I always thought cats who look at a gap for a while before jumping are theorizing if/how to make the jump.

[groestl]

> Make music > Theorize

Not sure about those.

[orangepanda]

Were we less human when we couldnt yet replace defective organs?

[andsoitis]

> Were we less human when we couldnt yet replace defective organs?

Over time, humans have demonstrated a vastly more impactful ability to manipulate our environment and ourselves than any other living organism we have encountered.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

There aren’t many fundamental unique differences between an 8086 and a M3 Max.

But the differences in scale are so vast that it opens massively different capabilities.

At some point, quantitative differences are so large they become qualitative differences.

Although both can hold matrices in memory and do math operations, the M3 Max can hold so much more and run math operations so fast that LLM inference becomes possible making it seem “intelligent” on a whole different level than an 8086 even though they are at some fundamental level very similar.

[bayindirh]

You're implying that bees are less intelligent than humans.

However they can sense electromagnetic fields and can sense whether a flower they're interested have pollen or not without looking at it with their eyes.

Elephants and whales can communicate over vast distances via sound. Bats can see without eyes. Salmons and pigeons can find the point they have born without even trying. A dog can smell history of a place, plus get much more information from a single smell.

Humans can do none of these things without tools.

Also, in electronics, there are accelerators which are much simpler in transistor count and architecture, but which can do much more than a more complex counterparts. GROQ inference cards and FPGAs come into my mind.

So neither capability, nor capacity in numbers is a valid measure for intelligence or capabilities in practice.

Just because a bee has less neurons than a chimp doesn't mean it can't have some kind of comparable intelligence when you compare the things they can accomplish.

Oh, also crows understand and exploit physical phenomena and can manipulate things with tools to get what they want.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

> You're implying that bees are less intelligent than humans.

Intelligent is not a synonym for “have amazing capabilities” but rather the ability to process and adapt to new information and transform their environment.

No other life form comes even close to humans in that regard. Our abilities (for better or worse) are godlike compared to other animals. There is a reason this epoch is called the “Anthropocene”.

[CuriouslyC]

This isn't so correct. Humans in isolation aren't so vastly superior from other animals, if you observed primitive humans and your typical troop of chimps it wouldn't be the slam dunk you're singing about. The truth is we're just enough better to develop and use written communication, and the majority of human progress beyond that has been trial/error and imitation with successes preserved through writing. Transmission of the written word enabled humanity to become a collective intelligence of sorts, individually we aren't that smart.

[notahacker]

Our communication and experimentation was sufficiently far ahead of other advanced mammals to cause mass extinction events long before writing came into play. (It's debatable whether some fairly advanced civilizations even had "writing" in the sense of general symbolic communication)

"Just enough better" is doing a lot of work when that leads to space travel and computers and inventing reasons to feel bad about our phenomenally efficient expansion and predation, whilst members of other species prove extremely limited at acquiring human knowledge even when we're expressly trying to share it with them.

[FrustratedMonky]

"comes even close"

I think the argument in this thread is more between people thinking animals have 'zero' ability, it is just instinct, or some other mechanism different than what is taking place in a human. And the group that is saying, animals are using the same mechanisms as a human, just humans are scaled up. Abilities between Humans and animals is a sliding scale.

They are wanting to argue that Humans have a singular ability that does NOT exist anywhere else, kind of a 'divine' argument. And animals are doing something different.

"comes even close" is indicating, it's a scale, might be a big scale, but it is the same scale.

[SilasX]

>You're implying that bees are less intelligent than humans.

>However they can sense electromagnetic fields and can sense whether a flower they're interested have pollen or not without looking at it with their eyes.

Which, yes, like your other examples, is an impressive feat, but not an impressive feat of intelligence. Perceiving one or another part of the spectrum isn't intelligence. Neither is hardwired responses. In contrast:

>Oh, also crows understand and exploit physical phenomena and can manipulate things with tools to get what they want.

That would be a feat of intelligence. But you're lumping all impressive feats into "intelligence", regardless of what's responsible for them.

[andsoitis]

> You're implying that bees are less intelligent than humans.

While bees thrive in their ecology by using intelligent behaviors like dancing, counting, navigating, remembering colors and scents, and making decisions using a process that resembles cost-benefit analysis, the sheer scale and complexity of human intelligence is unparalleled in teh animal kingdom. Our neocortex facilitates advanced cognitive functions, including our capacity for reflection, conceptual thought, and technological innovation generally puts humans at a higher level of cognitive complexity.

[hoseja]

Humans can predict the future better than any of the listed examples.

[_acco]

It’s a common trope that “we are no different from animals,” but this is not true. Of course we are.

Far more interesting than the fact that animals “can” ape behavior is how they do - and how that differs from humans.

Check out the work of Richard Byrne [1]. Our best theories suggest that the way primates share behavior is through literal parsing and replication of sequences. A chimp is able to watch a fellow chimp complete a complex maneuver to open a nut, and can replicate that sequence. But the sequence can contain odd moves that obviously have no effect, and those moves too will be replicated. This signals a lack of understanding. Primates use an advanced copycat mechanism, which makes innovation very slow.

The way humans learn and transfer behavior is vastly different. We watch another complete a task and develop an explanation for how it works. Our reproduction isn’t us following a literal sequence, but using our understanding/mental model to solve the task. For example, if I watch a complex sequence to open a tricky nut, I’ll have developed a model for the physics of the nut, weak points, ways to get leverage, etc. I might memorize and repeat your sequence, but I might also get creative with my own method, knowingly or not.

And, of course, we can do this one-shot.

It’s the difference between a parrot mirroring words and a person retelling a story they heard.

We are super different than animals, and denying that fact will hide important secrets about knowledge and creativity.

[1] https://web.media.mit.edu/~cynthiab/Readings/Byrne-99.pdf

[somenameforme]

The "extremely complex" problem solving in this study, for chimps, was putting a ball in a draw, and then closing it. Would you have assumed that training a chimp to do so would be impossible before this study? Or that it would be impossible for other chimps to ape him, so to speak? In other words, is this study actually shifting your assumptions in any way? Or is it just the arguably grandstanding language being used that may be swaying you?

So for instance I think it's pretty well known that monkeys in Bali have taught themselves how to steal from tourists and then exchange the goods for treats. [1] And that was entirely self-learned/taught. That, to me, seems somewhat more impressive than putting a ball in a drawer, yet didn't really leave me with any awe beyond what one would normally have when interacting with monkeys. And such things leaves me decidedly unimpressed with chimps and a drawer, and even more cynical about the language used to describe it.

[1] - https://www.sciencealert.com/how-wild-monkeys-in-bali-took-t...

[graemep]

I am surprised anyone thought unique to humans. How is this different from commonly observed behaviour like these: https://www.britannica.com/story/how-other-species-learn

It does not even need scientific study to see these. Its common enough for causal observation.

[timeon]

My assumption is that difference is not that something is missing but just in complexity of things.

It is strange that people put other mammals in same category with birds for example. Thinking that humans are separate kingdom. I'm closer to pig than pig is to chicken.

[calepayson]

I believe the one truly unique thing humans can do is imitate complex actions with high fidelity. When we evolved this ability it lead to an explosion of behavioral complexity simply because imitated behavior satisfies all the criteria for evolution (s/o Dawkins).

We’re not unique in our ability to imitate, but we are unique (for now) in our ability to imitate well enough that imitated behaviors are stable enough to evolve.

[est]

> we will find out that there is not a single thing that’s unique to humans

There is, make fire and cook.

[bee_rider]

There are of course some Australian birds that famously spread fire, so partial credit IMO.

Also, figuring out how to make fire is pretty hard. I’d argue it isn’t something “humans do” in general. It is one of the earliest examples of something that somebody figured out, (or maybe it was figured out independently in a couple different places) but mostly it is a taught skill.

Teaching and long distance running are our special abilities. In both cases other animals might do the thing, but we’re much better at it than they are.

[est]

> There are of course some Australian birds

IIRC that's more like a Australian media stunt from one single source, never verified or replicated.

There's this one guy trying to explain why there's wild fire and it's not any human's fault, which inadvertently caused a great debate "animals can utilize fire".

[someuser2345]

I agree about fire, but I'm pretty sure you can count bees making honey as cooking.

[andsoitis]

> I agree about fire, but I'm pretty sure you can count bees making honey as cooking.

Cooking is to apply heat to transform raw ingredients into a different, often edible form. Bees make honey by collecting nectar from flowers, storing it in their honey stomach, and then regurgitating it into honeycomb cells. During this process they add enzymes to the nectar and fan their wings to reduce the water content, transforming it into honey. Bees transform raw material, but not by heating it.

[est]

I mean cooking with fire. 100% carbon life (proteins) gets killed by excessive heat

[andsoitis]

> there is not a single thing that’s unique to humans.

It doesn't bother me. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

[FrustratedMonky]

That is true. There is nothing unique to humans.

Everything is a sliding scale.

Eagles can 'see' better than humans. No one is is up in arms about how wonderfully unique human eye-sight is, how Eagles are using 'just instincts'. Humans are divine in how complex their sight is, that it could never occur in other animals or machines. Totally impossible that we would ever have a machine that can 'capture images'.

[Ginden]

This, but unironically. Humans have the best daylight eyesight in mammals, and only birds of prey come close.

[FrustratedMonky]

I picked 'sight'.

But there is laundry list of features that some animal does better.

Humans on whole do everything 'ok'. Humans have a lot of features, and for each feature they aren't the 'best', but on aggregate they do them all together on average better. They are one animal that combine total features better than any single animal.

Guess my point, is when it comes to 'mind' people are still thinking humans are divinely 'exceptional'. But really, it is one more 'feature' that the human animal does best, but that does not mean other animals don't have the same feature, but scaled down.

Seems like people complaining that 'bees' aren't intelligent are just trying to keep humans propped up on a pedestal. When really, it is one more feature that is scaled.

[bee_rider]

Does it effectively keep the humans on a pedestal to consider our traits as fundamentally different?

I think it is all on a continuum, humans are animals. But putting us on that continuum makes all the animals look like absolute garbage, intelligence-wise. If we want to put humans in the game, we’re going to be absolutely dunking on, like, every animal in terms of ability to abstract and teach concepts.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H-fC9uNyhWo

[FrustratedMonky]

Technically humans are dunking on all other animals. We're killing them all rather handily.

I'm arguing against the group that think humans aren't animals, that they are imbued with some extra metaphysical secrete sauce that we are incapable of understanding.

This group usually come out strong against any of these studies that hint at some continuum that includes humans and animals on same scale. Even if humans are on far end of the scale.

[wyclif]

Didn't Kubrick prophesy this? I'm thinking of the first act of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey where one advanced primate learns how to use the femur of a tapir as a tool, then teaches the other primates in his tribe how to use bones as a weapon and how to walk upright (though we are not shown the teaching or knowledge transmission process).

[wizzwizz4]

No, since those are supposed to be the ancestors of humans.

[wyclif]

But they're still primates, and therefore presumably more similar to chimpanzees than humans in terms of the ability to model and learn behaviour.

[wizzwizz4]

Humans are primates, but we don't presume we're more similar to chimpanzees than to humans.

[krapp]

Humans share 96 - 99% of our genome with chimpanzees. Presumably the difference between human sub-species would be even less.

[tiborsaas]

We have nice relatively longer and more distally placed thumbs, it's something :)

[CuriouslyC]

That would be the first step in becoming a brilliant scientist who goes unrecognized in his lifetime.

[katzgrau]

At some point, can’t we just admit to ourselves that we operate from a human-centric worldview and that clouds pretty much all of our thinking on what makes humans special (if anything)?

As a species we definitely have some narcissistic tendencies.

[zvmaz]

> At some point, can’t we just admit to ourselves that we operate from a human-centric worldview and that clouds pretty much all of our thinking on what makes humans special (if anything)?

I think this is true. The evidence being our ruthless exploitation of our fellow animals without any regard to their interests, suffering, etc.