Why Humans Are Unique

Two Indisputable Facts about which Scientists Are Silent

(Photograph by Marina Vitale on Unsplash)

Apes share many physical attributes with humans — two legs, two arms, hands with opposable thumbs, feet, lungs, a heart, a brain, and so forth. “Human Evolution Evidence,” on the Smithsonian website notes, “Study of human genetics show how closely related we are to other primates.”

So far so good. On the surface, no one can disagree although one could question where that close relationship begins and ends.

As G. K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy wryly observed, “That an ape has hands is far less interesting to the philosopher than the fact that having hands he does next to nothing with them; does not play knuckle-bones or the violin; does not carve marble or carve mutton” (p. 44).

Indisputable fact number one: Humans alone create art for art’s sake.

Cave men (and probably women) drew illustrations on the walls. We have proof. That fact means from their earliest origins, humans alone were motivated to create for beauty or communication or another intentional purpose. It took some impulse arising from their capacity for abstract thought to be able to conceptualize and reproduce representational art.

Chesterton continued: “Who ever found an ant-hill decorated with the statues of celebrated ants? Who has seen a bee-hive carved with the images of gorgeous queens of old?” (Orthodoxy, 144).

This point brings me to the second indisputable fact: Humans alone are capable of reasoning.

Notice I specified reasoning rather than singling out possessing consciousness because all animals possess some level of consciousness. Theirs is not identical to human consciousness. Humans are self-aware and can speculate about and plan for future events. They comprehend extremely abstract concepts, such as money, the stock market, contracts, law, marriage, cocktail parties, and government.

There are not many chimpanzees who are day traders or poodles running for mayor. But there are many animals that display wide ranges of emotions as well as establish and maintain attachments to one another. They are in some mental “state” at all times: conscious or unconscious [or perhaps asleep which is itself an odd altered state of consciousness].

The Smithsonian website notes that scientists have no way of knowing at what point in time humans began to use spoken language. We just know it happened only in the human lineage.

Now no one can argue that other animals and even some insects possess varying levels of intelligence as well as sophisticated forms of communication (e.g., that of dolphins and bees). Scientists know from studies that the nature of that communication is limited to pragmatic interests, such as food gathering issues and safety concerns.

Scientists are sometimes guilty of making assumptions, especially indirectly or implicitly. For instance, the illustrations on the Smithsonian website depict naked cave people sitting around the campfire. How does that artist know cave men and women were naked?

Scientists [and I include artists who illustrate scientific articles and should be held to the same standards of accuracy] are not supposed to base their findings on the absence of evidence. Again, the wit of Chesterton is apropos: “The other day a scientific summary of the state of a prehistoric tribe began confidently with the words, ‘They wore no clothes.’ …It was doubtless hoped that we should find a stone hat as well as a stone hatchet. It was evidently anticipated that we might discover an everlasting pair of trousers” (The Everlasting Man, p.45).

Even though Chesterton died in 1936, his commentary on the scientific method and the uniqueness of humans is still relevant.

The truth is we don’t know and can never know at what point humans began to wear clothes. We do know, however, that at some point, they did. If we are so similar to primates, why don’t gorillas at least wear crude leafy jock straps?

The answer? Humans are different in kind, not just in degree.

To rehash a previous point, no primate’s ancestors began to draw bad pictures and gradually, as the years passed, became more proficient. Yet we know from actual evidence that the earliest human cave dwellers drew pictures. They had smaller skulls and lighter weight brains than we do today, and their limbs were sometimes longer or shorter, but these folks were not members of any primate family. They were human beings.

The Smithsonian website clarifies the scientific position on whether humans descended from “apes”: “But humans are not descended from monkeys or any other primate living today. We do share a common ape ancestor with chimpanzees. It lived between 8 and 6 million years ago. But humans and chimpanzees evolved differently from that same ancestor. All apes and monkeys share a more distant relative which lived about 25 million years ago.”

It seems as if the clarification above basically just means we did not descend from one ape; we descended from that other ape.

This “common ancestor” ape has never been identified through fossils or by any other means. In fact, the Encyclopedia Britannica online reports, “This ancient primate has not been identified and may never be known with certainty because fossil relationships are unclear even within the human lineage which is more recent. In fact, the human ‘family tree’ may be better described as a ‘family bush’ within which it is impossible to connect a full chronological series of species, leading to Homo sapiens, that experts can agree on.”

Furthermore, Britannica continues: “The nature of specific fossil specimens and species can be accurately described, as can the location where they were found and the period of time when they lived; but questions of how species lived and why they might have either died out or evolved into another species can only be addressed by formulating scenarios, albeit scientifically informed ones.”

To be fair and factual, some facets of evolution within species have been absolutely proven. As the Smithsonian website points out, “DNA shows all organisms are related to each other” and “We’ve uncovered millions of fossils that provide evidence of how one life form evolved into another life form over time.”

But those facts are light years away from explaining unique attributes of humans that suddenly popped into existence without any hint or trace of foreshadowing.