The idea of taking all of the arguments
for humans to be the end all supreme species instead of using each on individually to disprove it would be my first approach. I mean, with the initial noder's logic, anything seems like it can be disproven by throwing what seems to be a handful of random rocks at the sun. By listing statements and then quickly disproving them, it seems like we are expected to just agree wholeheartedly, only to find that we had no legs to stand on in our argument and have made no headway. The existance of God can be disproven thus, for the individual, as many other things. But again,
what is the point? That's all I ask here, what is being acomplished?
However, I do see Footprints' point that all of the arguments laid bare by other donations to this node are not succeeding. I doubt my own will suffice, but I will have to try, as humans amaze and confound me every day too. The following idea came to me after a reading of the book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander (I will be making direct quotes if I ever get my friggin' copy back):
The human world, everything we see and wear, everywhere we live (except for a small percentage), most of what we eat and how we move about all came to be in the physical world from an idea in a human brain.
You might be able prove that other animals do this, that they envision something that does not yet exist and somehow make it into being. I am interested to see what "proof" you can get, since even though animals communicate and use their own language as we do ours, we seldom have ability to understand their dissertations on the matter. By saying this I am not addressing those things animals create out of necessity. I'm talking the grand scale to which humans create and the scope of our creativity, creation as means of understanding and expressing our understanding about the world.
Humans are, as far as I know, the only species who can imagine something that does not yet exist and create it into being, literally taking things that exist and organizing them into a completely different thing, eventually making things (machines) that make things which are in themselves new and have never existed before on this planet (alien visitation theories aside). It's the God complex we have, and there's reason for that.
Sure, we have emotions, we have sentient thought, we're social, and yes, all animals can do these things. Perhaps animals possess remorse, guilt, regret too, perhaps they mourn, express joy and anger as well, perhaps they build nests, eat the flesh of other animals as well as their own kind, fucking only the strongest species and never for love, and perhaps for all these reasons we are indeed much like them.
Even if an animal could imagine things that don't yet exist, has an animal been able to not only create it, but perfect it through generations of his kind? What proof have you of that?
To respond to Footprints response, I thought I was making it pretty clear that what humans invent vs. what animals invent are significantly different. I'm not saying that animals do not create, I'm saying that they do not create (nor desire to)
to the extent that humans do. A nest or a
spider web serve specific functions brought about by
self preservation. We invent things often because we're bored and not because we need them to
survive. On the contrary, humans have not "needed" condos and duplexes for quite some time, and I've yet to see a spider web that, as a construct, had undergone change or
evolution to the extent that man's inventiveness has in a much shorter evolutionary span of time. I don't understand why my node seems like it's the only one being downvoted. I thought I was
making sense and expressing it pretty well and since I don't want to assume someone's just out to get
me, I'll assume I'm just speaking some strange strain of moronspeak.