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Sean Faircloth:
Attack of the Theocrats!
Comment #466623 by Luke_B
My comment still stands. Whether Horizon is the best, worst or somewhere in between depends on the time of year, as well as varying from year to year.Agreed. Why are we different from other species? For the same reason every species is different from other species - speciations have been followed by adaptations and neutral fixations that depend on the species's history. People probably have in mind us being number 1 at X, Y and Z. Of course, lots of living things are number 1 at something else. Why are we more worthy of the question? Because our skills are more important. Why are they? Maybe because we're framing the discussion. Somewhat less cynically, because our skills are the only ones that can permit such discussion. But what's really silly is that, since being number 1 at something probably takes more causes than just being reasonably good at it, we can expect the answer to why we are so smart to be a large number of things we're lucky happened to us. Indeed, as any expert on human evolution knows, the list of things that made us smarter (in all senses, including our social skills) is pretty long.
Permalink Fri, 05 Mar 2010 09:05:00 UTC | #446706