Two interesting news…
First: Where do humans fall in the food chain? You can probably already guess it’s somewhere between cows and polar bears, but a new study now puts a number to it: Somewhere between 2.0 and 2.6, depending on where you live. That’s on a scale of 1 to about 5, in which plants are 1s and carnivorous apex predators like killer whales are 5.5s. In other words, humans are in kind of the same plane as anchovies and pigs. (1, 2)
Secondly: Which organism is the fastest evolving? It seems the slitherers got off to a fast start. The first two full snake genomes to be sequenced – belonging to the Burmese python and the king cobra – show that they have one of the fastest rates of genetic evolution among vertebrates. (3)
If we do not have the largest genome (see here), if we are not at the top of the food chain, if we are not the fastest evolving species, then WHAT are we anyway?
Our efforts to find out who we are via the materialistic “all research and analysis is based on our body” path has met a dead-end. According to that path, we are something between the… strawberies and the anchovies – well behind the snakes.
But do you FEEL unimportant?
Do you FEEL like nothing?
Do you FEEL an animal?
Do you believe you are like a pig or less than a strawberry?
Maybe in order to think more clearly we should stop thinking…
You are right about culture. This is more complex than what animals usually. Although they do teach things to one another.
Isn’t it clear that what sets humans apart from other animals is our capacity to learn and to then teach our knowledge to others?
So apes or other primates do not learn? Dolphins do not learn?
All mammals learn, but they don’t learn like humans. They don’t teach their knowledge to others or write their findings in books. They don’t have culture.