What Makes Humans Different

I’ve been reading Boyd Varty’s “The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life,” and finding many poignant observations. One in particular was about imagination. Varty points to early humans needing a keen sense of awareness for survival. Being acutely aware of each sound, smell, and sight, they were more easily able to track animals. A track that ends without another forces the mind to imagine all the possibilities of where the animal went.

Interestingly enough, Drs. Morgan and Feldman at my alma mater, Arizona State University, have a new peer-reviewed paper out in Nature, tackling the age-old question—what makes humans different from other animals. If you are equally obsessed with this notion, you know that Darwin was somewhat dismissed for saying the equivalent of “not much.” Over the years, scientists have moved goal posts as research findings and technology have evolved. We know that tool use and making, language, adaptation, self-awareness, and even group norms (“laws,” if you will) are not unique to humans. Some primatologists have even been so bold as to hypothesize that the concept of “faith” may have been used in other homo species. So, what makes us human animals different?

Morgan and Feldman postulate our endless ability to accumulate. They use the term “open-endedness.” For all we complain about technology, technology has enabled us to grow as a species. Basic tool use is technology. And with modernization, it is becoming exponential- which again goes back to our open-endedness that makes us (possibly) unique in the world.

Bringing this back to Varty, our capacity for imagining where the animals went after the last track has gone from just our minds, from just shared conversations, from just scrawled onto a wall, written into a book, typed onto a computer screen or cell phone note, to inventing a tool (AI, or perhaps more correctly stated Language Learning Models such as ChatGPT and Gemini) to now continue that open-endedness.

So what does all of this mean? Perhaps it means we can be a little less afraid of technology and recognize that if this is what makes us unique, it may also be what keeps humans alive through the coming hundreds of years, which will be perilous due to climate change. It may keep us alive for millennia, and lead the first humans off the planet, exploring the galaxy and beyond.

What are your thoughts on this new possibility of what may make humans unique? Do you think it’s important to know or does it create divisions in compassion for other species? How do you feel about technology being another way humans manifest our open-endedness?