phil777 wrote:
And then mister ascan, do you think your reasoning applies to humans? -.- And i do mean by manual tasks, since intellectual tasks are diversed and kind of unique to humans ( at least by our understanding so far...) but available to most mammals in general.
Yes, my reasoning does apply to humans as humans are animals just like dogs. And that applies to cognitive ability, too. You could say, for example, that dogs are all very similar, just like you've done with humans. Afterall, dogs are just domesticated wolves -- humans domesticated them something like 10 or 15k years back. Similarly humans, outside sub-Saharan Africa, are all related to a male and a female who left Africa 40k years back(approx as I can't remember the figure usually quoted). Since then certain human populations have lived separately, isolated from each other for tens of thousands of years. Those populations were subject to different environments and culture that selected for different attributes. Would anyone seriously suggest several populations of any other animal that split 40k years back and subsequently didn't interbreed are all now exactly the same as each other? Why should it be different for humans? Dogs have had a more intense version of that forced by humans. Different breeds have different temperaments, problem solving abilities and size in order to carry out a specific task for man. For example Jack Russells are small, strong and tenacious so they can enter a fox earth to flush the animal out. Human populations are more subtly adapted to their environment, although we can see that indigenous people from, say, Australia are physically different to those from, say, Norway. There are other differences we can't see, but that are documented in the scientific literature. I would suggest (and it is controversial) that there are subtle cognitive differences, too. Why shouldn't there be? That's not to suggest any kind of overall superiority, just difference.
30 May 2010, 1:29 pm
