Saturday, November 8, 2014

Are we animals or humans?

    Scientists can classify humans quite easily into their naming system for animals: Homo Sapiens (literally, "wise/thinking" man). But if we are indeed a "thinking man" quite literally placed in the ranks of other animals on an evolutionary standpoint, then how much more human are we than animal?
    Every now and then I get these sacrilegious ideas that, in a couple million years or so, other animals could possibly acquire the neural capacity to think and reason as we do. You also hear stories about animals acting strangely right before natural phenomena occur (I always remember a story about a normally docile elephant running rampant immediately before a tsunami made landfall). This, of course, leads me to more questions: can humans also tap into this reservoir of innate senses, or has our ability to reason blotted out this function entirely?

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