If We Are Not Just Animals, What Are We?

Philosophers and theologians (神学家) in the Christian tradition have long regarded human beings as separate from the other animals by the presence of the divine spark (神圣的火花) that is believed to exist within them. This inner source of illumination, the soul, is something that can never be grasped from without, and, as such, must be something that is detached in some fundamental manner from the natural order of things such that the soul continues to exist even after the death of the body, perhaps taking wing for some supernatural place following its demise (死亡).

Recent advances in genetics, neuroscience and evolutionary psychology have all but killed off this idea. 【小题1】 For quite clearly, although we are animals, bound in the web of causality (因果关系) that joins us to the zoosphere, we are not just animals.

This fundamental question is as relevant to the philosophical inquiry of today as it had been for the ancient Greeks. In a thousand different ways, we have drawn and continue to draw distinctions between ourselves and the rest of nature. 【小题2】 We believe that people have rights, that they have sovereignty (完全独立的) over their own lives, and that those who live by enslaving (使成为奴隶) or abusing others are denying their own humanity.

Evolutionary psychologists tell another story. Morality, they argue, is an adaptation. If organisms (生物体) compete for resources, a strategy of cooperation will be more successful in the long run than a strategy of pure selfishness. Cooperative features of an organism will therefore be selected over time. And all that is special in the human condition can be understood in this way — as the outcome of a long process of adaptation that has given us the unbeatable advantage of morality, whereby we can resolve our conflicts without fighting and adjust to the demands that upset us from every side.

The astonishing moral equipment of the human being — including rights and duties, personal obligations, justice, resentment (憎恨), judgment, forgiveness — is the deposit (沉积物) left by millenniums of conflict. 【小题3】 It is an evolved mechanism whereby the human organism proceeds through life sustained on every side by bonds of mutual interest.

I am fairly confident that the picture painted by the evolutionary psychologists is true, but I am also convinced that this is not the whole truth. 【小题4】 We human beings do not see one another as animals see one another, as fellow members of a species. We relate to one another not as objects but as subjects, as creatures who address one another “I” to “you.”

By speaking in the first person, we can make statements about ourselves, answer questions, and engage in reasoning and advice in ways that avoid all the normal methods of discovery. As a result, we can participate in dialogues founded on the assurance that, when you and I both speak sincerely, what we say is trustworthy: We are “speaking our minds.” This is the heart of the I-You encounter. Hence as persons we live in a life-world that is not reducible (可简化的) to the world of nature, any more than the life in a painting is reducible to the lines and colors from which it is composed.

Babies are surrounded by human language, always listening and processing. Eventually, they put sounds together to produce a “Daddy” or a “Mama”. But what still confuses neuroscientists is exactly how the brain works to put it all together.

To figure it out, a team of researchers turned to a frequent stand-in (代替) for babies when it comes to language learning: the song-learning zebra finch. “We’ve known songbirds learn their song by first forming a memory of their father’s song or another adult’s song. Then they use that memory to guide their song learning,” said Neuroscientist Todd Roberts. “It’s been a long-term goal of the field to figure out how or where in the brain this memory is. This type of imitative learning that birds do is very similar to the type of learning that we engage in regularly—particularly when we’re young, we use it to guide our speech learning.”

Roberts and his team had a feeling that the interface (交叉区域) between sensory areas and motor areas in the brain was critical for this process, and they focused on a group of brain cells called the NIf.

“In order to prove that we could identify these circuits, we thought if we could implant a false memory.” First, they used a virus to cause the neurons (神经元) in the birds’ NIf to become sensitive to light. Then, using a tiny electrode as a flashlight, they activated (激活) the neurons. The length of each pulse of light corresponded with the amount of time the neurons would fire. And the birds’ brains interpreted that time period as the length of each note.

Soon enough, the birds began to practice the notes they had learned, even though they never really heard the sounds. Amazingly, the birds produced them in the correct social situations. The researchers say this is the first time anybody has found exactly a part of the brain necessary for generating the sorts of memories needed to copy sounds.

“This line of research is going to help us identify where in the brain we encode memories of relevant social experiences that we use to guide learning. We know that there are several neurodevelopmental disorders in people that have really far-reaching effects on this type of learning.”

More than five million different kinds oforganisms(生物体) live on the Earth. For thousands of years, humans have searched for ways to organize thisdiversity(多样性). In the eighteenth century, a Swedish professor, physician, and naturalist named Carolus Linnaeus developed the system of naming and classifying organisms that we use today.

Linnaeus contributed to the modern classification of organisms in two ways. He first developed a convention for naming life forms.

Before Linnaeus came up with a standardized system of naming, there were often many names for a single species, and these names tended to be long and confusing. Linnaeus decided that all species names should be in Latin and should have two parts, one indicating thegents(plural: genera), a group that includes similar species and one indicating the specific name of the species. When written alone, the specific name is meaningless since many different species in different genera have the same specific name. The specific namefamiliaris, for example, is commonly used to describe species. Therefore, when used by itself, it would not describe any one organism. When the genus is also given, however, as inCanis familiaris, we know that the name refers to a specific organism: the domestic dog.

Linnaeus was also the originator of modern taxonomy, a system of classifying nature based onhierarchical(分层的) groupings. Linnaeus first grouped life forms into three broad groups, called kingdoms. These kingdoms were animals, plants, and minerals. He divided each of these kingdoms into classes, classes into orders, orders into genera (genus is singular) and then genera into species, grouping organisms according to shared physical characteristics.

Although modern taxonomists still use the hierarchical structure of Linnaeus’s classification system as well as his method of grouping organisms according to observable similarities, they have added hierarchical levels and significantly changed Linnaeus’s original groupings. The broadest level of life is now a domain. All living things fit into only three domains. Within each of these domains there are kingdoms. Each kingdom contains phyla (singular is phylum), followed by class, order, family, genus, and species.

In addition to the Linnaean kingdoms of plants andanimals, biologists recognizeprokaryotes,protists, andfungias separate kingdoms. Theprokaryotesare the oldest and most abundant group of organisms. They are also the smallest cellular organisms. Common bacteria, which have been known to survive in many environments that support no other form of life, fall into this category. Theprotistkingdom is made up of a variety of single-celled or simple multicellular organisms.Protistsdo not have much in common. They are, essentially, those organisms which do not fit into any other kingdom.Fungicompose a third kingdom. Like plants, the cells of fungi have cell walls, giving them a tube-like structure. However,fungido not produce their own carbon as plants do. Rather, they acquire nutrients by absorbing and digesting carbon produced by other organisms. Yeasts and mushrooms are examples offungi.