Difference Between Man And Other Animals

A thought arose in me: What is the difference between man and other animals:

Any primitive culture of man seemed to only procreate and eat (and conquer more lands), not much different from animals except in the rituals they followed. Come to think of it, don't animals have rituals?

In trying to answer the question above, I have quoted from sources widely. All quotes are numbered or bulleted and indented (and without permission).

While all animals and men have a need for more food and sex, perhaps man is the only one that could do something to make his life easier. Maybe that's why he learned to talk, then to store the communication on paper and so on.

I thought a basic difference was man's tendency to control the environment around him for his betterment. This is something that animals don't seem to do. The need to improve his own life perhaps led to discovery of stone, invention of fire, agriculture and then on to internet. 

The question then is: why don't animals want to control the environment? What is it in man that made him want to control or make life easier for himself?

Why couldn't predators in the Amazon forest arrange things so that specialist predators killed a whole lot of deer, buffaloes etc and set up shop (maybe call it amazon.eat) where others of the species could buy. Maybe others of the species who were not good hunters could specialize in poacher detection techniques which the specialist hunters of the species could hire / buy and prevent themselves from being shot at or killed by human poachers or by other animals higher up in the food chain. 

Apparently animals do something of this sort. Quote from article by Nathan Lants: "Some species engage in even more complex social behaviors. Think about cooperative hunting, predator alarm calls, and prey-predator signaling, those are highly complicated phenomena and require an animal to deeply analyze the world around her and then communicate to conspecifics about that."

Why couldn't the lions organize a service industry? Why are all the lions actively indulging in only sex and food? Why don't they have sports? Why don't they play tennis? Why is there no Lionder Paes among them? 

An important difference is that a basic economy is highly decentralized. You have to find your own food, have your own baby, take care of your own sickness and find your vacation spot and go there alone (or with your spouse). It's only in an advanced society that you have people to grow food or sperms in a bank or Thomas Cooks or doctors etc whose products or services you can purchase.

Maybe the original man who was very different from the current man and who was more like an animal, who never had a dress...the man had perhaps got enough food and he had extra emotions or thoughts which propelled him to do something more. "More" being to make life easier. 

Does it mean that if lions and tigers had more thoughts and emotions, more in excess of what is required for food and procreation, they might go the same direction as man did? The decision to centralize... that not every member of the species do ALL the things.. That some members should specialize in acquiring food, some handle protection etc... I think this was the most important factor which led to man taking the path he did. Animals use minimal centralization. Females give birth and raise the little ones. And males get food and take care of females and the young ones. Centralization is being done (in the sense males don't give birth too and females usually don't take up security jobs within their species) but to a very limited extent. 

Thus man, because of his extra thoughts and emotions, perhaps decided to centralize his activities, specialize in them. And may be this was the basic reason why man is where he is and animals, not having centralized stuff, are where they are.

God help us if Cobras or Lions or Mosquitoes decide to specialize / centralize their activities.

One more related question: Did man's ability to talk cause the extra thoughts or emotions? Or did he start talking because of this extra thoughts and emotions? Meaning which came first? 

I found a relevant link on the same subject: 

A question from the link:

In asking about the origins of human language, we first have to make clear what the question is. The question is not how languages gradually developed over time into the languages of the world today. Rather, it is how the human species developed over time so that we — and not our closest relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos — became capable of using language. 

Other quotes from the link: 

• According to current thinking, the changes crucial for language were not just in the size of the brain, but in its character: the kinds of tasks it is suited to do — as it were, the 'software' it comes furnished with.

• About the only definitive evidence we have is the shape of the vocal tract (the mouth, tongue, and throat): Until anatomically modern humans, about 100,000 years ago, the shape of hominid vocal tracts didn't permit the modern range of speech sounds. But that doesn't mean that language necessarily began then. Earlier hominids could have had a sort of language that used a more restricted range of consonants and vowels, and the changes in the vocal tract may only have had the effect of making speech faster and more expressive. Some researchers even propose that language began as sign language, then (gradually or suddenly) switched to the vocal modality, leaving modern gesture as a residue.  See this article on body language and gestures. Quote from the same article: "The study of the rich gestural repertoire of bonobos adds further weight to the theory that humans first found our voice through body language. "

• We do know that something important happened in the human line between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago: This is when we start to find cultural artifacts such as art and ritual objects, evidence of what we would call civilization. What changed in the species at that point? Did they just get smarter (even if their brains didn't suddenly get larger)? Did they develop language all of a sudden? Did they become smarter because of the intellectual advantages that language affords (such as the ability to maintain an oral history over generations)? If this is when they developed language, were they changing from no language to modern language, or perhaps from 'protolanguage' to modern language? And if the latter, when did 'protolanguage' emerge? Did our cousins the Neanderthals speak a protolanguage? At the moment, we don't know.

These seem to indicate that man started to talk about 100,000 years ago. So something must have caused him to talk. Once he talked and started expressing, his memory became useful. He could recall from memory and express stuff. He could carve his thoughts on walls and leave it for next generations to read. 

That brings me to the next question: What were human beings like before they started to talk? Were they more or less like other animals? 

1. If yes, then communication and language is the fundamental difference between man and animals. What then caused human beings to talk?
2. If no, then what is the basic difference between man and other animals?

I now quote from Wiki on Human Evolution to answer the question.

• The earliest documented representative of the genus Homo is Homo habilis, which evolved around 2.8 million years ago, and is arguably the earliest species for which there is positive evidence of the use of stone tools. The brains of these early hominins were about the same size as that of a chimpanzee, although it has been suggested that this was the time in which the human SRGAP2 gene doubled, producing a more rapid wiring of the frontal cortex. During the next million years a process of rapid encephalization occurred, and with the arrival of Homo erectus and Homo ergaster in the fossil record, cranial capacity had doubled to 850 cm3. (Such an increase in human brain size is equivalent to each generation having 125,000 more neurons than their parents.) It is believed that Homo erectus and Homo ergaster were the first to use fire and complex tools, and were the first of the hominin line to leave Africa, spreading throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe between 1.3 to 1.8 million years ago.
• ... which suggests the human divergence from chimps occurred between 7 and 13 million years ago. 

That we had stone tools a million years ago and that we learned to talk about a 100,000 years ago and that other animals don't make tools seem to indicate that man was not like other animals even before he started to talk. (Option 2 above). 

So now we have the question: What is the basic difference between man and other animals? What caused man to diverge from chimps between 7 and 13 million years ago?

And here is a quote from an article by Nathan Lants:  "Natural selection would thus favor individuals with bigger and smarter brains that can navigate the social interactions (assuming that there is a benefit to survival and/or reproduction for those who perform well in these social interactions)." Another quote from the same link: "As I’ve written previously, the tenuous balance between cooperation and competition, was likely a major driving force in the evolution of the human intellect." Nathan Lants' book (mentioned in Additional reading at the end of this blog) and his blog have tremendous content. Another blog of his talks about why humans are smarter than other animals.

Quote from this article: "Indeed, the social intelligence hypothesis (3) states that intelligence evolved not to solve physical problems, but to process and use social information, such as who is allied with whom and who is related to whom, and to use this information for deception."

Incidentally as per this article, the human brain is shrinking probably because we have become more social and we don't need so much effort to fight or compete to survive. In this blog post http://vbala99.blogspot.com/2017/06/relation-between-nt-sf-natural.html I have written about the shrinking size and which gender in human beings is likely to survive.

Is it the surplus thought / emotion in excess of what was needed for food and sex which in turn caused the brain size to be larger which created the need to control the environment which in turn led to other changes including acquiring ability to speak? 

This quote from the same Wiki article seems to explain...

• The use of tools has been interpreted as a sign of intelligence, and it has been theorized that tool use may have stimulated certain aspects of human evolution, especially the continued expansion of the human brain. Paleontology has yet to explain the expansion of this organ over millions of years despite being extremely demanding in terms of energy consumption. The brain of a modern human consumes about 13 watts (260 kilocalories per day), a fifth of the body's resting power consumption. Increased tool use would allow hunting for energy-rich meat products, and would enable processing more energy-rich plant products. Researchers have suggested that early hominins were thus under evolutionary pressure to increase their capacity to create and use tools. This article is on crows' usage of tools.

More interesting quotes from the Wiki article:

• It should be noted that many species make and use tools, but it is the human genus that dominates the areas of making and using more complex tools. The oldest known tools are the Oldowan stone tools from Ethiopia, 2.5–2.6 million years old.
• Among concrete examples of modern human behavior, anthropologists include specialization of tools, use of jewellery and images (such as cave drawings), organization of living space, rituals (for example, burials with grave gifts), specialized hunting techniques, exploration of less hospitable geographical areas, and barter trade networks. 

It seems the answer is yes to the question in the para in italics above.

More interesting stuff about animals:

Quotes from http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/03/animal-minds/virginia-morell-text:

Certain skills are considered key signs of higher mental abilities: good memory, a grasp of grammar and symbols, self-awareness, understanding others’ motives, imitating others, and being creative. 

They gave Betty [a crow] other tests, each requiring a slightly different solution, such as making a hook out of a flat piece of aluminum rather than a wire. Each time, Betty invented a new tool and solved the problem. “It means she had a mental representation of what it was she wanted to make. Now that,” Kacelnik said, “is a major kind of cognitive sophistication.”

This is the larger lesson of animal cognition research: It humbles us. We are not alone in our ability to invent or plan or to contemplate ourselves—or even to plot and lie.

Deceptive acts require a complicated form of thinking, since you must be able to attribute intentions to the other person and predict that person’s behavior. One school of thought argues that human intelligence evolved partly because of the pressure of living in a complex society of calculating beings. Chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas, and bonobos share this capacity with us. In the wild, primatologists have seen apes hide food from the alpha male or have sex behind his back.

Birds, too, can cheat. Laboratory studies show that western scrub jays can know another bird’s intentions and act on that knowledge. A jay that has stolen food itself, for example, knows that if another jay watches it hide a nut, there’s a chance the nut will be stolen. So the first jay will return to move the nut when the other jay is gone. 

This study, by Clayton and her colleague Nathan Emery, is the first to show the kind of ecological pressures, such as the need to hide food for winter use, that would lead to the evolution of such mental abilities. Most provocatively, her research demonstrates that some birds possess what is often considered another uniquely human skill: the ability to recall a specific past event. Scrub jays, for example, seem to know how long ago they cached a particular kind of food, and they manage to retrieve it before it spoils. Quote from page 1904 in this article "When jays were allowed to cache perishable and nonperishable foods, they were able to remember not only which foods they cached where, but also how long ago they had cached them."

 “Animals are stuck in time,” explained Sara Shettleworth, a comparative psychologist at the University of Toronto in Canada, meaning that they don’t distinguish among past, present, and future the way humans do. Since animals lack language, she said, they probably also lack “the extra layer of imagination and explanation” that provides the running mental narrative accompanying our actions. 

Additional reading:

1. System 1 and System 2 thinking by Daniel Kahnemann - as discussed here (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_process_theory) seems to contradict what is mentioned in this blog post (for example that animals do not have system 2)
2. The book "Not So Different" by Nathan Lents - seems lovely. So is this presentation by him: https://thehumanevolutionblog.com/2016/08/25/book-talk-not-so-different-at-the-san-francisco-public-library/
3. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/08/dogs-words-speech-people-brains/: Dogs are more like humans Quote from this article: "Wallis then observed the dogs' reactions as she gazed toward a door. Surprisingly, only the untrained border collies followed her gaze—the trained animals ignored it. That may be because trained dogs learn to focus on a person's face, and not where the person is looking." 
4. Need for a sense of control: http://changingminds.org/explanations/needs/control.htm
5. Nice articles on when humans start speaking - maybe 100,000 to 1 million years ago: http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/09/05/219236801/when-did-human-speech-evolve and www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2656465/Did-learn-speak-mimicking-apes-Early-language-formed-combining-noises-primates-birds.html and http://blog.dictionary.com/origin/
6. Speech in primates: https://thehumanevolutionblog.com/2014/10/21/other-primates-use-speech-and-vocabulary/ Quote: "The point here is that humans most certainly did not invent the concept of words. Primates have been using vocal communication, with precise vocabulary, for millions of years."
7. Speech of prairie dogs: https://thehumanevolutionblog.com/2015/08/18/a-career-studying-the-sophisticated-vocabulary-of-prairie-dogs/
8. Life span of various animals: https://propelsteps.wordpress.com/2013/08/29/know-life-span-of-animals-list/
9. https://thehumanevolutionblog.com/2017/06/19/waist-hip-ratio-number-of-offspring/comment-page-1/#comment-2508