Different in degree or kind (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, December 18, 2013, 19:52 (3775 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: ...And why should the hominins drop from the safety of the trees? It required more plastic brains to think their way out of trouble. And what was the driving need in nature to make them adapt that way. We know of none.-The post you were replying to was mine, not Matt's, and we covered this in great detail earlier. We can only speculate, but it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that in different local areas, tree-living became difficult or impractical (down came the hominins), while the chimps stayed up elsewhere. You don't need a global catastrophe to change the environment. You seem to be implying that suddenly God stepped in to do one of his dabbles, or he'd fixed a hominin-here-you-go programme in the very first cells, which they passed on through a few billion years and species until something triggered the programme (and you still don't know any more than the rest of us what that trigger was).
 
DAVID: The key point comes down to how different does one have to be to be different in kind.-I really cannot see this as a key point except for someone who is desperate to prove that God's ultimate purpose was to create humans (a hypothesis that comes strangely from someone who claims that he doesn't try to read God's mind.) As a human, I proudly claim that my species can question its origins, extend its influence all over the planet and beyond, write books and symphonies, and make chocolate ... wonderful talents I believe to be unavailable to any other species. I admit that I can't do half the things that dogs, crows and ants do, but who cares? We are all different in one respect or another. And this would be so whether God exists or not. Why, then, is it a problem for you if we say that humans are simply different from the other primates, just as chimps are different from gorillas, and primates are different from dogs, crows and ants?-Matt, I agree with you that our form of language was a prime influence in our development, though I wonder which came first: the thoughts or the mechanisms involved in our sound making, without which we could not have expressed the thoughts to others. The origin of human language remains as mysterious as the origin of life and the origin of consciousness. Perhaps David thinks that all languages were preprogrammed into the very first cells, along with the billions of other innovations, lifestyles etc. that God crammed in there. We do know, however, that cells communicate, and cell communities communicate, and our fellow animals communicate, so perhaps it was a matter of intelligent cell communities coming up with innovations to meet the new requirements of the ground-dwelling primate. Convergence would see to it that different cell communities in different environments would devise similar solutions.