Isn’t everyone tired of this conclusion by now? Who even gets surprised anymore? We should’ve flipped our thinking on human exceptionalism long ago. We’re animals and have more in common with other species than we have uniqueness.
- https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/aug/07/cats... “Cats appear to grieve death of fellow pets”
- https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/dogs-word... “Man's best friend can understand both the words we say and the tone in which we say them, new brain scans reveal.“
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human%E2%80%93canine_bond “Psychologists believe that the relationship between human and canine is a bidirectional attachment bond, which resembles that of the typical human caretaker/infant relationship, and shows all of the usual hallmarks of a typical bond.“
But yeah, no serious biologist thought dancing was exclusively human before this study. We've known for over half a century that bees communicate by dancing.
Disagree. Humans are hard-wired for anthropomorphism. We recognize two dots and an arc as a human face. Taking the hard-wired position and labeling eveything as "human-like" by default is lazy and wrong.
We don't know that. You're just assuming things.
Sure, it is plausible there are indeed some things only humans can do. But at the same time there are a myriad of other things other animals find trivial and we know we can’t do.
Thus we’re not exceptional, just different like every other species is. We’ll be much better served scientifically by being humble than by believing everything we do is unique and being constantly proven wrong.
Eh, why do I bother, there will be another of these studies, and another, and a decade from now I'll be posting on a similar thread. I should know better. But these studies aren't making progress toward something, they aren't building up a weight of evidence where the dam will eventually burst and we'll say "oh those dogs and crows and octopuses and horses were people all along, how blind of us not to notice". No, things like the mirror test for self awareness (which is passed by some fish, but not by dogs) are sketchy and inconclusive, and every such "animals are just like us by the way" study that I've seen over the decades has been sketchy and inconclusive, and they're all just piddling around trying to discover something that isn't there to be discovered.
What? No there isn't! "People are animals" is not equivalent to "animals are people"
If you're saying that people are "animals plus", nobody says otherwise. We are after all undeniably made out of meat and shaped like apes.
Actually, we aren't. Apes have a body built for climbing trees. (Like all primates.) Homo sapiens definitely doesn't. It's one of nature's big unsolved mysteries how that came to be.
But as always these discussions are just a vehicle for making facile political points, talking about science is a distant second.
The viewpoint expressed two comments before yours: human exceptionalism.
Then people in the comments complain that everybody already knew this, then other people come in to complain about the complaints, explaining that scientific evidence for things which are common knowledge is still valuable and we shouldn't hold sensational headlines against the researchers because they're just competing for attention and besides they probably weren't even the ones to write the sensational takes, blah blah blah. It's all so tiresome.
The irony being that so far you’re the only person doing something even remotely similar to that in this submission. Why would your objection to the objection be more valid than the objection? Why be the one to start it when you’re ostensibly annoyed by it?
> we shouldn't hold sensational headlines against the researchers because they're just competing for attention
I quoted a section of the article, not the headline. You’re no longer competing for attention once someone clicked on it. On the contrary, every sentence you write which annoys readers is a new opportunity for them to leave.
> and besides they probably weren't even the ones to write the sensational takes
Irrelevant. I didn’t complain of the scientific work itself, I commented on the boring, repetitive remark. That’s on the writer.
> blah blah blah.
Indeed. This whole interaction was unnecessary. My comment wasn’t on this particular study but on the general default belief that humans are cognitively unique, despite umpteen proofs to the contrary.
If you think my comment constitutes an apology for the attention whoring researchers and/or their PR departments do, you're mistaken. My comment is a weary moan about the repetitive nature of internet discourse.
Our bodies are definitely mammalian, and therefore most of our instinctive behaviors, but it's the differences that make us unique.
We have the capacity for abstract conception with its reasoning and communication and advanced tool building. More than that, however, we have a moral compass and mind to learn and understand the difference between compassion and selfishness, good and evil -- and then we have the free will to choose between those potentials.
Animals only have instinctive self-protection. Only we have the responsibility to be caretakers of each other and the Earth, herself, and all its wonderful creatures.
Love will help us transform this world beyond this selfish, destructive idiocy.
Peace be with you. We love you.
It's almost certainly best for them to remain in their natural habitat, however.
So for that, I don't need a 'study' to tell me that dogs are jumping left and right (let's very freely call that 'dancing').
And it is also so directly obvious for most, in the end they are us... we just have developed recordable speech and have the best "hands" it seems... we are not too far off from "them".
On-topic: Look at this parrot getting the drop better than most ravers there https://www.instagram.com/reel/C8YwaMitT4F/?igsh=Ym5nNW00MDh... :D
If you are a professor somewhere and this is all you can come up with to publish, might I suggest you need to find a different line of work. Everyone has the right to _try_ becoming whatever they want but there is no right to success at it.
Given the number of people with budgies (parakeets to those who speak broken English) I'm amazed no-one has taken advantage of this to get published before.
How do you think I'm gonna get along
Without you, when you're gone?
You took me for everything that I had
And kicked me out on my own
Are you happy, are you satisfied?
How long can you stand the heat?
--Queen "Another One Bites the Dust"
Out of the doorway, the bullets rip
To the sound of the beat
Look out
We can dance if we want to
We can leave your friends behind
'Cause your friends don't dance
And if they don't dance
Well they're no friends of mine
--Men Without Hats "Safety Dance"
Me and all my friends are dancing for ALL the birds trapped in cages, kept away from the beauty of nature, by ignorant narcissistic human beings who know not what life is really worth.
What about Peacocks?
Lyrebirds?
But then, I'm not sure what claim us being made. Is the cockatoo being playful for the sake of exploration? Maybe, maybe not. Does it have unlimited capacity to learn new things and expand its horizons through exploration? No, it's just going to repeat the same things all its ancestors did, transferred into new contexts.