Are human minds different from animal minds? Unless we confront that worldview, it will be remarkably difficult to put the stopper on our destructiveness. We are allowed to monopolise the Earth’s resources and use other species for our own ends not because we’re animals but because we are beings with special, unique properties. The trouble for us is that this downplays all that is precious and valuable about our physical, animal life, from the games between children to the joy we experience when someone smiles.Īnd, as humans, different rules apply to us. Theologians, philosophers, jurists, even scientists continue to claim that, while we may appear to be animals in many ways, being “human” is something different, something special or even non-biological. That legacy of thought has proven extremely difficult to shake. It was even suggested that we are our thoughts and that these soul-like mental aspects of humans are more important and somehow separate to our bodies. Humanists argued that we are separated from all other life through our exceptional minds, capable of moral thought and free will. Lucy and Ardi: The two fossils that changed human history.

A graphic introduction to human history from Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.And these intuitions took a new turn with the rise of scientific rationalism during the Enlightenment. Humans were thought to possess a better kind of soul in a hierarchy, with only the angels and God above us. But souls were still ranked in order of quality. In classical thought, it was assumed that all life had a soul of some sort. So why have we spent much of modern history arguing to the contrary? And why does the idea that, somehow, we’re not really animals continue to grip our imaginations?

We are not human beings having