Different in degree or kind (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, November 13, 2013, 16:21 (4028 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: As for anthropomorphism, as I have said repeatedly, this approach puts carts before horses. Social animals came before social humans, and they laid the ground rules. ..... We are not imposing human values on them ... we inherited those values from them.-DAVID: That is a huge leap of faith on your part. From our horses I know that they do not experience pain like we do, from the injuries we have cared for, but they can tell us when they hurt by their movements or posture. Horses herd together by instinct and have pecking orders, but they don't act like ant colonies. Ant colonies are a whole different ball of wax. Our inheritence from them is nil, judging by the social inventions of organisms at our level. Talk about anthropomorphizing!!!-You are dodging around like a cat on a hot tin roof. Evolution doesn't jump from bacteria to horses to ants to humans! There is no huge leap of faith here either, but a hypothesis based on what we know ... or think we know ... about evolution. The first cooperation occurred when single cells merged to form multicellular organisms. Experts in the field have noted the way bacteria form communities, so that is not exactly science fiction. We know that all organs and organisms consist of cellular communities that cooperate. As evolution has proceeded, so cooperating communities have diverged. The more complex the community, the greater the degree of cooperation necessary. Ants are believed to have evolved about 120 million years ago from some kind of wasp ... so the history goes back many millions of years. You may be surprised to hear that I do not believe we are directly descended from ants. I believe we are descended from earlier forms of primate. But I believe ALL societies descended from those earlier cell communities, and ALL societies have had to follow certain basic principles in order to survive. I will now restore the crucial lines which you unfortunately omitted from my paragraph above: if social animals (among which I am happy to include ants) hadn't "felt pain and fear, cherished and trained their offspring, shared with one another, learned from mistakes, planned for the future etc., they wouldn't have survived." I am not saying all organisms and societies feel or act in the same way, but I am saying the ground rules have been inherited. In our case, directly from our primate ancestors, in the case of the ants I presume directly from their wasp ancestors, but in all cases organisms build on what came before them, right back to the first communities. Do you really believe that humans invented even the brief list I've offered above?