
The Mystery of Human Uniqueness (2013) - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/72/quandary/the-mystery-of-human-uniqueness
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anon1m0us
I don't see our uniqueness as something _different_ , something not seen in
other species.

Rather, we are only _slightly_ better, a fraction of a percent better. The
compounding of that fraction of 1% over 4-7 million years has led to the
dramatic differences between us and the rest.

That's why the article says it's a mystery. Humans are looking for a thing.
Something we have they don't. There isn't anything. We just do those things
better, faster, more dramatically and for longer which has widened the gap
between what we have and what they have.

Same would be true of a human being who compounded their wealth over time.
Families who have compounded their wealth for just a few decades now have as
much wealth as half a planet of humans. We don't ask for what one thing
separates them from us, we know what it is. The power of compounding interest
over time.

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roenxi
And from that perspective, the major difference between humans and animals is
that we are just slightly better at organising than they are. Written script,
the ability to perfectly capture and preserve commentary, enables intellectual
compounding across millennia. That knowledge is probably our biggest advantage
as a species and it comes as an offshoot of us using communication to organise
ourselves in a flexible way. It isn't that much different from any other pack
animal in one sense, the outcomes are just much better.

There are animals that are more cooperative, there are animals that are better
working independently. Humans seem to have found a real optimum in how we
interact with an odd and malleable mix of independence and cooperation. Even
different human civilisations show remarkable variance in material results
depending on how they choose to organise themselves.

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fifnir
>That knowledge is probably our biggest advantage as a species

And if you take this knowledge out of a person, they are little more than a
wild animal.

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Xcelerate
I think we're probably going about this the wrong way. Imagine trying to
figure out how two computer programs are different by looking at their
compiled machine code. Small differences in input can produce _massive_
differences in program output. So if our brains are at least partly
"algorithmic" (as opposed to a smooth function that maps input to output),
then superficial similarity in brain structure probably doesn't mean a whole
lot.

There have been some recent attempts in biology to understand the genome of
different organisms using approximations to Kolmogorov complexity. The basic
idea is to tweak the existing genome slightly in different ways to see if it
"compresses" better or worse. I wouldn't be surprised if this approach
eventually reveals a starker difference between organisms than trying to
compare physical structure.

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smartbit
Humans eat cooked food which gives us 2 major advantages

1\. we can digest a lot of energy and power our brains with it that consume
some 30% of our energy intake

2\. we digest it fast, giving us ample time to do other things

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YUMad
Also it kills parasites. Parasite load is a significant fitness parameter.

