What makes us human?

What is it that makes us different from other animals? Is it the skin, hair, eyes? Not really, all our organs are present in other animals too, but our brain is truly unique, so you might say that our brain makes us different from all the other animals. But the brain itself is useless without other features.

Let's imagine, for example, that dolphins are smarter than humans. This might even be true, but it's not my point. What could they do with that intelligence? They would not be able to do anything interesting with it, really. They can't discover fire under water, they have no use for wheels or clothes, they couldn't use tools even if they had them, they can't grasp anything, they don't have hands.

Throughout the ages, people have often tried to find a definition for the term “human”. Obviously, there is no such thing. These definitions often contained the fact that we are bipedal, we have opposable thumbs, we wear clothes, we are capable of abstract reasoning, and so on, but, obviously, this is silly. There are lots of bipedal animals, some animals with opposable thumbs, such as apes.

This reminds me of a story, when some biologists or philosophers said that “humans are bipedal beings with no fur”, or something like that, someone said: “I'll pluck a chicken and that will make it human.” So, even if a human is not bipedal, if he lost a leg, he is still human, if a human does not wear clothes, it is still human, and so on.

Some people might say that we have religion and that makes us really different. But from my point of view, religion is superstition and other animals also have superstition, a famous example being Skinner's experiments with superstitious pigeons.

There may be a case for a DNA definition of a human, but DNA is unique to each individual (except some cases, like monozygotic twins). But I think it is possible to say that a being is a human if he is within a certain deviation from a human DNA strand.

Anyway, from my point of view, the only thing that makes us different from all the rest of the animals is technology. Some other animals create and use simple tools, but nothing that compares to what we do. I believe that a technological civilization is what stands out from the crowd.

You might say that there are still primitive tribes of humans in the Amazon rainforest. Obviously, they are human, but, from my point of view, they are not much different from other animal groups. This is probably how a technologically advanced alien species would see things also, they would probably search for radio signals.