Are Humans Animals?

[Pinkie-Dawn]

I'm making this mini-argument I had from my previous thread as its own entry. There have been arguments that human interventions with the ecosystem or the environment as a whole are considered "unnatural," but that's only as if humans are considered separate from the animals and not labeled as animals ourselves, because any animal interventions with the ecosystem/environment are considered "natural." However, if we don't consider ourselves as animals, then does that make homosexuality "unnatural" to us, since homosexuality has been documented in other animal species? Not to mention, we have to avoid acknowledgment that both humans and apes share a common ancestor and how other animals besides us also use tools (e.g. finches at the Galapagos Islands) and go to war with other colonies of our own kind (e.g. ants) if we don't want to label ourselves as animals. Now discuss, are humans animals or not?

 

[Somewhere_]

I believe we are the "rational" animals. Scientifically, I guess we are?

 

[Her]

That intro goes on.... many tangents.

Natural selection is a species adapting to an environment and thriving in it, it is not meant to conjure up imagery of a species being chosen to survive or choosing others to die by its hand. In that aspect, the rise of humanity is natural selection in action. We outlived the neanderthals due to our superior intelligence and physical ability - that is natural. We were better suited to our surroundings and the neanderthals were not.
When we intervene in an environment, we are generally doing so to make it more fit for human interests. However, intervention by humans is natural to a point. Intervention does not equate to the wiping out entire ecosystems, accidental or otherwise - natural selection does not involve destroying nature, so to speak. Thriving in an environment is adapting to the environment as it is, damaging it with no progress is not thriving; it is unnatural.
We are most certainly animals, but ones that have superseded the traditional definition of natural selection to no one's benefit.

 

[Arylett Charnoa]

A human is considered a mammal.

A mammal is an animal.

Therefore, a human is an animal.

That's the simplest way to put it. Humans are unique to other animals on this planet, yes, but they are still animals. Just because they are different, this doesn't mean they are unnatural, or any better or worse. As I said in that homosexuality thread, I think that all that exists is natural. If it wasn't natural, then it wouldn't exist. Natural doesn't mean good or bad to me. It just means what's there.

We still need to eat and sleep as other animals do. And yes, we even have instincts. I am of the belief that these instincts control people more than they believe. Of course, we can use our more intelligent minds to surpass them better than other creatures (though again, they never quite go away), we can manipulate the world around us in ways they can't even dream of, and we can have conversations about ethics and reason and what not. But this doesn't mean we still aren't natural animals. Doing such things are a part of us, for better or worse. We were born to have this intelligence, and we use it. I'm not saying it's always right, because again, it isn't about that. It's just about what's natural.

Besides, I like being an animal. It means I'm not a plant who just kind of sits there and exists.

 

[Pinkie-Dawn]

Intervention does not equate to the wiping out entire ecosystems, accidental or otherwise - natural selection does not involve destroying nature, so to speak.

Wasn't the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, making it a mass extinction and complete change to the environment, considered as natural selection, which therefore makes it natural? Mammals and today's modern reptiles survived the impact, meaning they were chosen to live on to reproduce the next generation.

 

[Kanzler]

Wasn't the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, making it a mass extinction and complete change to the environment, considered as natural selection, which therefore makes it natural? Mammals and today's modern reptiles survived the impact, meaning they were chosen to live on to reproduce the next generation.

If I was walking across the sidewalk and there were two snails underfoot, and I step on one and not the other, it's not like I chose one snail to live and chose the other to die. Assigning agency to chaotic and natural processes is just anthropomorphizing. You're injecting human traits into something when you don't have a reason to.

 

[Lunaris Adamantine]

A human is no less an animal than anything in the zoo. We have more advanced brains and different physical features, but that's it. Overall, we are still very much an instinct-driven species. We don't have to fight for survival in most situations, and food is not hard to come by in first world countries. So our instincts for survival have changed to greed, power, love, lust, and other such things that all humans are addicted to.

Because we don't savagely fight for food, shelter, and protection, it gives the illusion that we are less 'animal' than the other species. But if you look at things from the right perspective, we really aren't any different at all.

Wasn't the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, making it a mass extinction and complete change to the environment, considered as natural selection, which therefore makes it natural? Mammals and today's modern reptiles survived the impact, meaning they were chosen to live on to reproduce the next generation.

It seems you mistakenly assumed that the meteor had a conscience. I can assure you, the meteor held no bias towards the mammals nor the dinosaurs. It just killed whatever wasn't in a safe place. Which was mostly dinosaurs, cause most were too big to hide.

 

[Her]

Wasn't the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, making it a mass extinction and complete change to the environment, considered as natural selection, which therefore makes it natural? Mammals and today's modern reptiles survived the impact, meaning they were chosen to live on to reproduce the next generation.

Just saying, there's no definitive agreement on what truly wiped out the dinosaurs. In any case, I'll stick to the meteor theory, but Kanzler put it better than I can. You can't take something like a meteor that caused unquantifiable damage to the entire planet, changes we can only barely comprehend, and compare it to natural selection. Not being able to adapt to the environment you're born into is far different to being unable to adapt to a catastrophic event changing every aspect of your environment.

 

[Kanzler]

Just saying, there's no definitive agreement on what truly wiped out the dinosaurs. In any case, I'll stick to the meteor theory, but Kanzler put it better than I can. You can't take something like a meteor that caused unquantifiable damage to the entire planet, changes we can only barely comprehend, and compare it to natural selection. Not being able to adapt to the environment you're born into is far different to being unable to adapt to a catastrophic event changing every aspect of your environment.

Actually, I agree with Pinkie-Dawn here. An extinction event would definitely be a situation where natural selection comes to play. If something radically changes the environment, and the organisms fail to adapt to it, then they get selected out. I don't think there's reason to make a distinction between an environment you're "born into" vs. a catastrophic event - environments can be more or less static. The thing I disagree with is the "chosen" bit.

 

[Her]

Actually, I agree with Pinkie-Dawn here. An extinction event would definitely be a situation where natural selection comes to play. If something radically changes the environment, and the organisms fail to adapt to it, then they get selected out. I don't think there's reason to make a distinction between an environment you're "born into" vs. a catastrophic event - environments can be more or less static. The thing I disagree with is the "chosen" bit.

I'm making the distinction because I don't think the inability to survive a near-instantaneous extinction of an entire branch of animal is equivalent to natural selection. However, I don't entirely disagree, as after all, the crocodiles (or their progenitors) survived that same event and have remained largely the same to this day.

I just don't want to make comparisons to a chaotic event like the meteor to something like the last ice age.

 

[Dusty]

It seems you mistakenly assumed that the meteor had a conscience. I can assure you, the meteor held no bias towards the mammals nor the dinosaurs. It just killed whatever wasn't in a safe place. Which was mostly dinosaurs, cause most were too big to hide.

This is just my nerd self making a point, if dinos died to a meteor, it would be because of the sudden change in ecosystem rather than the blast and not being able to hide. Meteor makes ash, ash kills plants, no plants mean no herbivores, no herbivores means no carnivores. The only animals that survived were much smaller because they were able to survive with less food.

Anyway, on to the actual question. I think whether humans are animals or not comes down to one simple question, are you religious or not. If you are, congrats, humans are created beings superior to animals, much in the same was that a god would be superior to man. For those that are not religious, humans are animals, but still are a superior animal in how humanity evolved. Sorry penguins, our ability to evolve opposable thumbs and the ability to create tools made us rulers of this planet, sucks for you guys.

I think a more interesting question here is whether we as humans should be at the top. There are some organizations out there that believe that humanity will kill this planet, and that we as a species should be eliminated in order to maintain the health of this planet, keeping it fair for all species to live (one organization is the VHEMT, Voluntary Human Extinction Movement).

So what gives us humans the right to live on this planet and choose the best for Earth? Do these (wacko) organizations have a point?

 

[Kanzler]

I'm making the distinction because I don't think the inability to survive a near-instantaneous extinction of an entire branch of animal is equivalent to natural selection. However, I don't entirely disagree, as after all, the crocodiles (or their progenitors) survived that same event and have remained largely the same to this day.

I just don't want to make comparisons to a chaotic event like the meteor to something like the last ice age.

Well, yes, it's a matter of degree. Those organisms that were obliterated within a fair distance from the meteor impact would have been killed regardless of their adaptive ability. But the ensuing climate change and ecosystem upheaval would have been in effect for a long period of time and would have caused the vast majority of extinctions, I imagine.

 

[Esper]

The difference between humans and a meteor is that humans can choose their actions (arguments about freewill notwithstanding) and the meteor just moves based on physical forces. Humans don't have to change the environment or to cause other species to go extinct. Whether you want to call humans and meteors the same thing, use the same term, there is at leas that distinction and it's a rather large distinction, I'd say.

I mean, humans are animals, but we're a different kind of animal, one that is self-aware and has other attributes that make it difficult to lump us in with most other animals. Humans, almost by our existence, kind of make the use of terms like "natural" unusable because we have all these contradictions about ourselves. But like, if we were to say that we're not animals that wouldn't make homosexuality "unnatural" since it's been documented in humans and is therefore a part of the human condition.

 

[Lunaris Adamantine]

This is just my nerd self making a point, if dinos died to a meteor, it would be because of the sudden change in ecosystem rather than the blast and not being able to hide. Meteor makes ash, ash kills plants, no plants mean no herbivores, no herbivores means no carnivores. The only animals that survived were much smaller because they were able to survive with less food.

Oh, yeah, I know all that. It just would have made that part of my post more boring than I wanted it to be. Besides, a large amount of the animals would have died from the impact, anyways, so it's not as if it's inaccurate. But yeah, I'm glad those tiny rodents and other such animals survived, considering they are my great*30,000,000 grandparents. Give or take a few greats.

 

[Jessie]

We are animals.

The difference is that we are more intelligent than most animals (well, some of us). We also have written and spoken language to develop complex ideas.

 

[KorpiklaaniVodka]

If you get exposed to constant brainwashing, you're not too far from a regular animal.

 

[Pebbles]

my biology teacher says we are all animals, so....^_^​

 

[Exodrake]

This shouldn't even be a question.

Human beings are just animals with specialized brain complexity for building. Everything we build comes from our environment, and this behavior comes from an instinctive drive to alter our environment to suit us better. If that causes other animals to die out, tough. Adapt or die out has been the law since the dawn of life on Earth, and the evolution of new species has caused the extinction of other species long before we ever existed.

Nothing we do could possibly be "unnatural" because we are a product of natural events, bound by the laws of nature, and everything we do, therefore, is a natural phenomenon. Our technology is merely a product of natural events, and therefore is natural phenomena itself. Animals building organized structures out of smelted metal found inside of their planet is not much of a stretch from inanimate forces altering the environment, the only difference is the rate at which the modification occurs because the animal is capable of rapid movement and reasoning out ways to make this happen faster and with greater complexity. "Natural" is an imaginary human construct and is a moot point because nothing that exists could ever not be natural. You can't have "un-nature". The non-taxonomic concept of "animal" is also a faulty anthropocentric construct. Humans aren't special, we are just another great ape species who happen to possess exceptional cognitive skills.

 

[Pinkie-Dawn]

This shouldn't even be a question.

Human beings are just animals with specialized brain complexity for building. Everything we build comes from our environment, and this behavior comes from an instinctive drive to alter our environment to suit us better. If that causes other animals to die out, tough. Adapt or die out has been the law since the dawn of life on Earth, and the evolution of new species has caused the extinction of other species long before we ever existed.

Nothing we do could possibly be "unnatural" because we are a product of natural events, bound by the laws of nature, and everything we do, therefore, is a natural phenomenon. Our technology is merely a product of natural events, and therefore is natural phenomena itself. Animals building organized structures out of smelted metal found inside of their planet is not much of a stretch from inanimate forces altering the environment, the only difference is the rate at which the modification occurs because the animal is capable of rapid movement and reasoning out ways to make this happen faster and with greater complexity. "Natural" is an imaginary human construct and is a moot point because nothing that exists could ever not be natural. You can't have "un-nature". The non-taxonomic concept of "animal" is also a faulty anthropocentric construct. Humans aren't special, we are just another great ape species who happen to possess exceptional cognitive skills.

So you're in full agreement that saving critically endangered animals caused by human activity is a waste, because they failed to adapt to our changes, and we could easily replace them with ourselves to maintain the ecosystem, much like how new species replace older species in the past?

 

[Midnight shadow]

We are animals.

The difference is that we are more intelligent than most animals (well, some of us). We also have written and spoken language to develop complex ideas.

"The ability to speak does NOT make you intelligent."

Regardless, you are right that we are definitely animals, which is why I find it odd that we use the term gender differently between humans and other animals. If we weren't animals, what scientific classification would we have?

Now, going back to Harley's original point regarding human's "unnatural" effect on ecosystems, we aren't the only ones who do this. There are a lot of other species that are just as destructive (or would be if they the numbers we do). One example of this are the Lion Fish in the atlantic ocean, who are so populous now that they have started destroying the ecosystem. Left alone they would completely destroy it.