Different in degree or kind: our hands (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, March 06, 2016, 17:00 (3184 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: We are the only organism with hands like ours. Imagine an ape playing the violin. They can't even hammer:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0146193
dhw:Yeah, yeah, our variations enable us to do things other organisms can't do. Now try and pick up a log with your nose, or walk through the desert for a week without any water, or flap your arms and fly 6000 miles without stopping.-DAVID: Brute force wins over aesthetic nuance? Come on, be reasonable. No comparison.-Who is talking about “winning” and “aesthetic nuances”? You drew attention to the special abilities of human hands. I agree they are special. So are elephants' trunks. All species (broad sense) have special qualities of one sort or another. They are all different in kind. And according to you, your God specially made or preprogrammed them all. Perhaps you want me to say that although your God specially made or preprogrammed them all, he specially, specially, SPECIALLY made or preprogrammed humans and their hands, because the elephant's trunk and the weaverbird's nest and the amoeba community and all the dead dinosaurs and trilobites were specially made for the purpose of feeding and/or producing humans. But I'm afraid I could never say such a thing.