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...Man kills for fun, Dart argues, which no other animal does. This is not exactly true.
11 APR 2011 by ideonexus
What Makes Humans Remarkable
What is remarkable about man is not the size of his brain, no greater than that of a dolphin, nor his loose incomplete development as a social animal, nor even the faculty of speech or his ability to use tools. Man is remarkable because by the combination of all these things he has created an entirely new entity. When socially organized and equipped with technology even as rudimentary as that of a Stone Age tribal group, man has the novel capacity to collect, store, and process information, a...It's the the characteristics we share will other species on Earth, but the way we combine those characteristics.