Sad news: baby elephant has died.

[Quinn]

Originally Posted by StirCrazy

thats a Pablo's dog.

Pavlov.

So what separates us from the other animals? We thought it was tool use, then Goodall and others found out otherwise. Is it self-awareness? Good research suggests that many animals know they're looking at themselves when you put a mirror in front of them, and not another individual. Is it the ability to feel compassion? In one particular species of monkey, if you set up an experiment so that everytime one individual presses a button to get a piece of food, it electrocutes another individual in its line of sight, the first animal will quickly stop pressing the button and come close to starvation, apparently to avoid causing harm to its counterpart. Based on what humans value, we certainly are more successful than other primates. However, to say we are somehow fundamentally different than any other animal is pre-Darwin religious drivel.

Instinct is "a behaviour pattern that appears in fully functional form the first time it is performed, even though the animal may have no previous experience with the cues that elicit the behaviour." They are coded for genetically, and most biologists/animal behaviourists accept that behaviour is the result of both genetics and modeling. Salmon know to swim back to where they were born to spawn. But even organisms as simple as wasps can learn that they've made a mistake when they attempt to mate with an orchid for the first time.

Humans have large brains, and the current hypothesis for this is that we evolved them in order to function in complex social environments where relationships with our peers are very different from individual to individual. But I doubt any of us could remember the location of 1000+ seeds over the winter like some birds. So again, what is success in the grand scheme of things?

I'm not a "tree hugger". But seeing ourselves as superior to other animals is a quaint notion that has long been abandoned in scientific circles (since Victorian times). We don't "own" anything on this planet.