This thought has nothing to do with words, but it has me curious. A group of intelligent minds may be able to help.

Plenty of creatures have special abilities or characteristics, unique (or almost unique) to them. Bats echolocate; certain birds sense the earth’s magnetic field to guide their migration; monarch butterflies fly vast distances compared to other insects.

However, it strikes me that the human animal has numerous such special abilities:

• opposable thumb
  
• bipedalism (walking on two feet) as primary way to travel
  
• mental ability – including the ability to speak a complex language.
  
• physical ability to produce sounds in wide variety, for that language (requires hyoid bone, vocal chords)
  
• continuous estrus (the female is sexually available throughout the year, not just in a “heat” from time to time)

This can’t be coincidence. There surely must be a chain of causation, where one trait, when developed, provided a selective advantage for another.

But what are the connection?

quote:

But what are the connection?

The connection are singularly legion.

quote:

But what are the connection?

Try a creationist Web site, then a evolutionist site. Then try to reconcile their answers.

Check out this site.

quote:

However, it strikes me that the human animal has numerous such special abilities:

You could have added that homosapiens is probably the most omniverous species as well.

I suspest it is homo sapien's possession of a large number of reasonably good skills, rather than a few superlative ones, that has led to our ability to do so many things adequately, and thus successfully expand into a huge number of different living areas. This expansion has undoubtedly led to a reduction in many competing species as their own supremacy is challenged.

quote:

opposable thumb

Handy, and almost unique. Definitely an advantage, but

quote:

bipedalism

not so much. Just flightless birds and us. Lots of animals have had the opportunity to go bipedal and haven't. It clearly makes us slower than four-legged animals, and probably has something to do with the opposable thumb.

quote:

mental ability

The ability to make models of the world and use them to try to predict the future and influence our behavior is a definite survival advantage. Whether we actually have these mental abilities will be determined in the few centuries.

quote:

physical ability to produce sounds in wide variety

Again, I think birds have us beat. Also, it's not at all clear that other animals, chimps or cetaceans, for example, don't have the ability to make enough sounds to transmit language. Electrical engineers can transmit quite a big of information just by manipulating amplitude.

quote:

continuous estrus

There are lots of different reproductive strategies. Continuous estrus is one of them. There's nothing special about it.

quote:

This expansion has undoubtedly led to a reduction in many competing species as their own supremacy is challenged.

I'm reminded of line attributed to Chou En-Lai, when asked what he thought about the French Revolution: "Too soon to tell."
We've only been significant for a few tens of thousands of years. Lets have this conversation in 20,000,000 years and see how it turns out. I must warn you, though, that the results from the SETI program are not encouraging.

quote:

We've only been significant for a few tens of thousands of years.

I was talking about the situation as it is now; I would not try to predict even a million years ehead, let alone 20 million. Presently the human species is the most successful but it was not always thus and there is no guarantee that it will always be thus.

The SETI programme has only been running for a blink of an eyelid in astronomical terms; give that time as well.

quote:

human species is the most successful

That's my point: by what measure is it most successful?

quote:

That's my point: by what measure is it most successful?

One measure I use is the effect that a species has on its environment. The human species has been more successful than any other in modifying the environment to meet its needs.

Other measures could be used, of course, and by some of them homo sapiens is not the most successful; it is certainly not the most numerous by a long way.

quote:

One measure I use is the effect that a species has on its environment. The human species has been more successful than any other in modifying the environment to meet its needs.

Which species was most successful in modifying its environment 70,000 years ago, before modern humans left Africa? Which species currently comes in second? The point being it's not a measurement made (or even defined) for species other than ourselves. We begin with the assumption that humans are supreme, then we perceive that humans dramatically modify their environment (naturally, since we rarely venture outside of human-modified environments), and finally that becomes a criterion for success.

Shu's original list was, I think, an example of human triumphalism that is almost always simply assumed. First we declare ourselves most successful, then we convince ourselves that our unusual characteristics are somehow unique and ideal, when in fact they are rarely either.

What's been said only suggests that we are superbly self-centered. Dolphins also echolocate along with bats. Continual estrus? Not quite - it's monthly, not constant. Perhaps we are, within ourselves, the most highly symbiotic. We are an organization of organisms, not just a single variety. When the symbiosis goes askew we get cancer, and, from one point of view, we may ourselves be a cancer on the overall environment.

"Man is the only animal that blushes - or needs to." Mark Twain

quote:

Which species was most successful in modifying its environment 70,000 years ago, before modern humans left Africa?

As I wrote earlier, I am talking about now, not 70,000 years ago. Everything changes and I am sure that the most successful species will also change. It has in the past and no doubt will in the future.

But I have seen no evidence that shows that any past species has been so successful at modification as has homo sapiens. The dinasours were hugely successful for millions of years - for a far longer duration than homo sapiens has yet been - but there seems to be no evidence of their roads, buildings and machines - as there surely would had they modified their environment to the same extend as has modern man.

An analogy can be made with the most successful countries/empires. 2000 years ago it was the Romans; 100 years ago it was the British; now it is the USA. In just a few years the leadership will probably change again.

quote:

As I wrote earlier, I am talking about now, not 70,000 years ago.

There's nothing special about now. If you don't know who comes in second, how do you know we come in first? You don't know what the previous most successful, or the second most successful species is because there's no such measurement.

quote:

there seems to be no evidence of [dinosaur's] roads, buildings and machines

Humans make roads, buildings and machines, so making roads, buildings and machines becomes the standard. By this logic I'm the most successful person on the planet, if we define success as being most like me.

quote:

An analogy can be made with the most successful countries/empires

Yes, that is the analogy you think you are making. It's called triumphalism, and it's a bad analogy. That's my point. If it were a good analogy, you'd be able to list off previous successful species just like you listed previous empires.

quote:

It' If it were a good analogy, you'd be able to list off previous successful species just like you listed previous empires.

I vote for crocodilians in the #2 spot and cockroaches in #1.

quote:

There's nothing special about now. If you don't know who comes in second, how do you know we come in first? You don't know what the previous most successful, or the second most successful species is because there's no such measurement.

As I said, you have to decide on the criterion or criteria for success. I have told you what one of mine is. If you choose other criteria then you get different answers - as I also said.

And you don't need to know who's second to determine who's first in many instances. Indeed, in some situations there is no second place.

quote:

That's my point. If it were a good analogy, you'd be able to list off previous successful species just like you listed previous empires.

I could very easily have done so and did, indeed, mention the dinasours as just one example. But again you need to choose the criteria for success; if you were to choose population, then I doubt whether any multi-cellular lifeform would come close to being top. The likes of bacteria or other single-celled organisms have probably occupied that slot since life began on Earth,

I'm not so sure we are that successful. Arrogant and triumphalist, yes, but successful? We're more of a blight on this planet (that we share with so many other humans and non-humans but seem to forget that) than any species I can think of.

I mean, put a naked human and a cat in the wilderness (with adequate wild food sources for both) in a temperate climate, summer or winter, and I'd put money on the cat being the one to survive longest. I don't see much success in being so far removed from one's natural environment that ome has forgotten how to survive in it.

We've done some marvellous things to be rightly proud of, but we've also committed horrendous atrocities with far-reaching effects for all Earth inhabitants that a truly successful species would have avoided. Other animals seem to have grasped the concept of not crapping in your own bed rather more successfully than we have...

quote:

I mean, put a naked human and a cat in the wilderness

True. And put a naked cat and a naked human in a speeding car with no other occupant and I reckon the human would.

It's very easy to think of circumstances and situation where beings other than humans would do better. But humans are very good generalists and can survive in environments that would be instantly fatal to any other life-form, simply by modifying the environment to meet their needs.

As I said, though, you have to set your criteria for success before you can measure success.

A car isn't a natural environment though, and a human who'd never learnt to drive would be in just as much trouble. Humans can indeed adapt their environments to suit themselves (often with little thought for others - part of the reason we're in the mess we're in), but it takes time and trial and error. An individual or even group with no training in a new hostile environment would likely die just as another animal might.

I agree about deciding on the criteria of success. I mean, in the Western world, success is based mostly on material acquisition, which immediately excludes the sick and disabled who are unable to work enough to earn a decent wage; healthy people on lower incomes (someone has to clean the toilets) etc. It's a disgusting measure of success but sadly it's all too prevalent.

Personally, I measure individual success by less tangible things, but it is hard when you're surrounded by societal expectations not to be influenced, stressed out and saddened by it at times.

Cat, absolutely nothing to do with the topic but have you seen this?

It's what happens when you take Garfield out of Garfield - you get a post modern strip about "schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life".

So it says in the intro. it's right too.

Whoa. Says a lot that strip, doesn't it?

(On a lighter note, it's kind of fun trying to imagine Garfield's expressions in the originals.)

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Cat,

It works brilliantly but I agree that a lot of it doesn't make comfortable reading.

quote:

you have to set your criteria for success before you can measure success

That would be a good start. Next you might want to consider if your criteria were biased toward human success by our long-standing cultural assumption that we have dominion over the earth. You might also want to think about whether your criteria are measurable even in theory, let alone practice, or if your measurement scheme returns a value for species other than ours.

quote:

But humans are very good generalists and can survive in environments that would be instantly fatal to any other life-form

Most, but not any (and not by modifying our environment so much as bringing our environment along in a can). Tardigrades (water-bears) have us beat. They can survive boiling, freezing to 1 degree Kelvin, the vacuum of space, pressures six times that of the deepest ocean trench, complete dehydration, and a half million rads of X-ray radiation(ref).
They live from the Himalayas to deep ocean sediment, from hot springs to the Arctic, in deserts and beaches, and in your garden. That's live, not just visit occasionally in a can.

And they've been doing this for about 500 million years. Homo sapiens will come, and go, and the water bears won't even notice.

Plus they're kinda cute.

quote:

Originally posted by Cat:
Humans can indeed adapt their environments to suit themselves (often with little thought for others - part of the reason we're in the mess we're in)

Wasn't it Shaw who noted that the reasonable man adapts himse