Thursday 19 December 2013

Why Are We So Different From Animals?

An article in Nature looks at what makes us special.




Joel Kontinen

A recent article in Nature looks at why humans differ from all other living beings. Taking a Darwinian approach, it sees man as a result of natural selection acting on random mutations and attempts to discount our uniqueness.

While we might share some traits with animals, the differences are huge. Animals will hardly ask why they differ so much from humans. They do not record their past in annals or plan long-term for the future.

Unlike humans, animals were not created in God’s image. But if we have the wrong assumptions of our past (evolution), we tend to arrive at the wrong conclusions, as the Nature article does, failing to understand what really makes us so special.

Source:

Radford, Tim. 2013. Us and them. Nature 503 (7474): 34- 35.