R

E

A

D

T

H

I

N

K

C

R

E

A

T

E

Many other animals, to see the night sky and see the stars, but we stare at them, I do not know how many people there are, I do not know how to stay away from them, do not know how they got there, I do not know what made them, and no wonder - in fact - why where they carry out their activities. We organize themselves into a simple model and weaving stories around them, to help us straighten out their existence, and remember what it is a model - hunters, heroes, Princess Margaret, bears, swans.           On Being Different     Many other creatures look up into the nighttime sky and see the stars, but we stare at them, wonder how many there are, wonder how far away they are, wonder how they got there, wonder what they are made of, wonder — indeed — why they are there at all. We link them into simple patterns and weave stories around them to help us to rationalise their existence and to remember which pattern is which – the Hunter, the Hero, the Princess, the Bear, the Swan. Although we cannot get inside other animals’ heads, we see no evidence that any other creature looks outside its personal universe in this manner. Maybe chimpanzees and dolphins do; maybe the whale’s enigmatic and interminable song is an exercise in submarine philosophy — but maybe it’s just the whale’s way of saying ‘Hi, anybody out there? This is me.’ Chimps and dolphins and whales don’t build astronomical observatories, they don’t make calendars to predict the seasons, they don’t carve symbolic versions of their thoughts on rocks. Maybe they’re wiser than we are, having fun instead of agonising about their place in the vast uncaring universe; but wiser or not, even the bright ones behave differently from us.   …We lead a dual existence — in nature but not of it, perpetually reacting to our estimate of what the world will be rather than what it is right now. We mirror the world outside us with another in our heads: our perceptions of that world. It’s a distorting mirror, an imperfect representation, but to us it seems real. In a funny self-centred way we see ourselves as existing slightly to one side of the rest of the universe. We are in control of our world, we can make choices, we have minds that we can make up or change. Everything else is just following the inexorable impulses of nature. When we think of an amoeba, a fox, an oak tree, or a dinosaur, we think of them as a part of nature. The amoeba fiddles about putting out pseudopods and ingesting food particles, and that’s about it. The fox runs through the bushes chasing a rabbit for dinner, and when it encounters the occasional bunch of subhumans on horseback it’s too busy running from the dogs to debate the morality of blood sports. The oak tree is just sitting there synthesising, drawing in water from its roots and carbon dioxide from the air, and if it’s worrying about anything it’s about the impending winter and dropping its leaves — not whether the neighbouring oak tree thinks it’s a cad for fertilising too many of its acorns. We see dinosaurs as eating, breathing, multiplying, and dying out against the great backdrop of natural forces, like the K/T meteorite that hit the Earth 65 million years ago and caused mayhem all over the planet. Gary Larson’s ‘Far Side’ cartoons often work by imputing human-type motivation to animals, and they are funny because we know that most animals don’t worry about [even] their circle of friends.   All very well. But how much of our belief that we are special is grounded in fact, and how much is just a comfortable illusion of superiority? The belief that we are superior to other animals is a human value judgement, and as such is likely to be biased in our own favour, but there can be little doubt that we are different — in important ways — from the other animals on our planet.           —Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen, Figments of Reality - The Evolution of the Curious Mind             Indexes/06