01 JUN 2012 by ideonexus

 Differences Between Humans and Apes

It is well-known that both rude and civilized peoples are capable of showing unspeakable, and as it is erroneously termed, inhuman cruelty towards each other. These acts of cruelty, murder and rapine are often the result of the inexorable logic of national characteristics, and are unhappily truly human, since nothing like them can be traced in the animal world. It would, for instance, be a grave mistake to compare a tiger with the bloodthirsty exectioner of the Reign of Terror, since the form...
Folksonomies: instinct animals humans
Folksonomies: instinct animals humans
  1  notes

It's not possible to compare the violence in the general animal world to that of humans.

23 MAR 2012 by ideonexus

 The Argument Against Man Being a Social Animal

From the time of Aristotle it had been said that man is a social animal: that human beings naturally form communities. I couldn't accept it. The whole of history and pre-history is against it. The two dreadful world wars we have recently been through, and the gearing of our entire economy today for defensive war belie it. Man's loathsome cruelty to man is his most outstanding characteristic; it is explicable only in terms of his carnivorous and cannibalistic origin. Robert Hartmann pointed ou...
  1  notes

Man kills for fun, Dart argues, which no other animal does. This is not exactly true.