Pilot whale meat fed to Japanese school children

[Zingtea]

I was planning to cite that Washington Post article about morals being natural and not unique to us (I had used it in a Theory of Knowledge essay), but I couldn't recover the location, so I gave up posting. Thanks for finding it Cetacea!

[Ghandi]

There enlies what I (this may be what Sea_Lion was getting at earlier) and many famous theologians from and philosophers from Aristotle to C.S. Lewis believe- that humans are unique in our knowledge of right and wrong.

sorry just quickly returning to an earlier point, just because people think something is a certain way doesn't mean it is so. Furthermore this reminds me of a point raised in another debate on the forums- why are we citing the opinions of philosophers in a debate which is clearly biology based? scientific fact wins out and theres no scientific basis for thinking that humans are a special case.

btw the two you name- aristotle is an ancient philosopher from a long time before when we didn't know a lot of what we know now and C.S.Lewis is/was a christian and henceforth his opinions are quite heavily biased.

[kopii]

I'm not sure if this should be here, or if it's been already, but it's still an interesting article that explains that many animals have complex emotions but only we have the ability to be spiteful:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1 ... otion.html

Maybe spite is the only thing that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom ? If so, it's not really something to be proud of!

I think that we have 'evolved' emotions as they are now, purely because we evolved large brains and as someone said in an earlier post, too much time on our hands to think up things. But, as we are alive now, this strategy is working, as every other animals' strategy works to keep them alive. Perhaps in the future, as we destroy our resources, greed, spite and all the 'bad' emotions will evolve to some other, or get much worse.

[Belugalover]

Someone once told me that the only thing that makes us really different from the rest of the animal kingdom is that

1) We use fire to our advantage
2) We use tools to make tools.

I don't entirely agree that those 2 things are the only things that make us different, and I'm not entirely sure if humans are the only one that use tools to make tools (I think I read an article somewhere about gorillas doing this. Using a rock to carve a bamboo stick that they later used to grab insects or something).