By: Tom Scheve. Scientists speculated in the s that chimps share almost 99 percent of our genetic makeup. It was a good guess -- research in the following decades proved them right. Humans do, after all, have a lot in common with other animal species. We feel pain, and if you've ever watched a cat attempt to jump onto a hot stove and quickly retreat, you'll have decided that felines do, too. We have emotions, and as any dog -owner can tell you, their canine friends exhibit joyful, affectionate and even depressed behavior.
And if you observe a chimp -- a species believed by many to share a common ancestor with humans -- you'll see many traits and behaviors that seem far more human than animalistic. At the genetic level, DNA comparisons reveal certain alterations -- a slightly mutated gene here, a different protein there.
These deviations show us why human jaws are smaller than those of chimps, and why we're more, or less, susceptible to certain diseases. Though the genes are remarkably similar, their expression isn't. Arguments around these issues are generally the preserve of scientists. But there is a set of behaviours that are also inspected forensically and with evolution in mind whose reach extends far beyond the academy. Most animals are sexual beings and the primary function of sex is to reproduce. The statistician David Spiegelhalter estimates that up to ,, acts of human heterosexual intercourse take place per year in Britain alone — roughly , per hour.
Around , babies are born in Britain each year, and if we include miscarriages and abortions, the number of conceptions rises to about , per year. What that means is that of those ,, British encounters, 0. Out of every 1, sexual acts that could result in a baby, only one actually does. In statistics, this is classed as not very significant. If we include homosexual behaviour, and sexual behaviour that cannot result in a pregnancy, including solitary acts, then the volume of sex that we enjoy magnificently dwarfs its primary purpose.
Is Homo sapiens the only species that has decoupled sex from reproduction? Enjoying sex might seem like a uniquely human experience, yet while we are reluctant to consider pleasure in other animals, we are certainly not the only animals that engage in non-reproductive sex.
Zoo behaviour is often weird, as animals in captivity are far from their natural environment, but there are two male bears in Zagreb zoo who enjoy a daily act of fellatio, while simultaneously humming.
Males of some 80 species, and females of around 50 species of primates are frequent masturbators. Some behaviours reflect deviant or criminal sexual behaviours, such as sea otters who drown females and then keep their bodies to copulate with.
The award for sheer ingenuity goes to the dolphins: there is one reported case of a male masturbating by wrapping an electric eel around his penis. Some — not all — of these seemingly familiar sexual practices can be explained readily. Male Cape ground squirrels are promiscuous, and masturbate after copulation, we think, for hygiene reasons, protecting themselves from sexually transmitted diseases by flushing their tubes.
Other behaviour is still mysterious to us: giraffes spend most of their time sexually segregated, and the vast majority of sexual relations appear to be male-to-male penetration. As with the myriad examples of sexual behaviour between members of the same sex, it demonstrates that homosexuality — once, and in many places to this day, decried as a crime against nature — is widespread. Because sex and gender politics are so prominent in our lives, some look to evolution for answers to hard questions about the dynamics between men and women, and the social structures that cause us so much ire.
Evolutionary psychologists strain to explain our behaviour today by speculating that it relates to an adaptation to Pleistocene life. Briefly, issues with that idea are pretty straightforward: most fruit is not red; most skin tones are not white; and crucially, the test for evolutionary success is increased reproductive success. No, we do not. Zoological Gardens were first established in the early s.
And so around Darwin's time they started housing monkeys and apes in zoos. Darwin met an orangutan, Jenny, in the London Zoo, and this was really quite formative for him. It gave him more courage to say that humans are also primates, because this animal, Jenny, was so similar to us.
Q: You draw from Darwin, Piaget, lots of different sources. Was it once thought that raw intelligence distinguished us from the apes? We gave them a big battery of tests — a big IQ test if you will. It covered understanding of space, causality, quantities, as well as social learning, communication, reading the intentions of others. We found that 2-year-old children — before they can read or do anything mathematical — look just like the apes on physical things, such as causality, quantities and space.
But in the social domain, they are already way ahead. All neural tissue is spontaneously active, nerve cells beat out electrical signals on their own throughout life, much as does the tissue of the heart. In man this spontaneity becomes organized early on so that he produces propositions, makes sentences. And then he begins to play with these sentences, receding them into different forms and reasoning with them. Each new batch of teenagers attests to the human proclivity for productively receding what is given.
Why not utilize this marvelous capacity to advantage in our educational effort? To summarize briefly: man's brain is different in that it makes imperative the productive use of linguistic signs symbolically and linguistic symbols significantly. The flexibility derived from this difference is immense. Given the power of this flexibility man codes and recedes for fun and profit. Every artistic endeavor, every working accomplishment depends for its effectiveness not only on the information conveyed by the theme but on the variations on that theme.
Human encounter is sustained not just by an exchange of information but by an infinite variety in familiar communication. Animals use signs and symbols only in special circumstances; man productively propositions all his encounters and he reasons about all his experiences. Thus man and only man shows this thrust to make meaningful his experiences and encounters: he intends, he holds on to his images.
But this is not all. By means of the motor mechanisms of his brain man hopefully and continuously sets and resets his sensitivities so that his images can become actualized in his environment both by virtue of his own behavior and that of socially contiguous others.
Man's culture expresses these hopes, this active thrust toward meaning. For to be human is to be incapable of stagnation; to be human is to productively reset, reorganize, recode, and thus to give additional meaning to what is. In short, "to be human is to be a problem. Many important aspects of the problem of the brain's coding processes are dealt with here altogether too briefly. But the present paper will serve as a prolegomenon to a more comprehensive study which will appear under the title Languages of the Brain: Experimental Paradoxes and Principles in Neuropsychology , to be published by Prentice-Hall in [ 9 ].
Samuel T. John F. Frank A. Alfred S. This work has been republished by invitation. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. J Biomed Discov Collab. Published online Nov Karl H Pribram 1. Author information Article notes Copyright and License information Disclaimer. Corresponding author. Karl H Pribram: ude. Received Aug 9; Accepted Nov This article has been cited by other articles in PMC. Abstract What makes man human is his brain. Introduction "The hippopotamus may well regard man, with his physical weakness, emotional unpredictability, and mental confusion as a freak.
Today we seem to look for proof for the existence of man" [ 1 ] What makes man human is his brain. What a code is "Wonder, or radical amazement, is a way of going beyond what is given in thing and thought. Thus the bootstrapping program now consisted of a sequence of twenty patterns of four Arabic numerals, such as: etc. Brain function in awareness "The experience of meaning is an experience of vital involvement. Open in a separate window.
Figure 1. The motor mechanism and acts "The deed is the distillation of the self. Figure 2. Figure 3. Signs and symbols: association or differentiation? Figure 4. Figure 5.
Propositions and reasoning: using signs symbolically and symbols significantly "Man may, indeed, be characterized as a subject in quest of a predicate, as a being in quest of a meaning of life, of all life, not only of particular actions or single episodes which happen now and then. Conclusion "Thinking is living and no thought is bred in an isolated cell in the brain. Note Many important aspects of the problem of the brain's coding processes are dealt with here altogether too briefly.
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