What makes us human?
In Monday’s assembly, we attempted – in just a few minutes – to answer a question that philosophers, politicians and many others have asked throughout history – What is it to be human?
Many have tried to distill this question into a pithy answer – Steve Jones, a prize-winning author who has written extensively about evolution, once defined a human being as ‘a 15-foot tube through which food passes, usually in one direction,’ a definition most people would regard as overly simplistic. The Greek philosopher Plato didn’t fare much better, however. He defined man as a ‘featherless biped’ but of course as long ago as the dinosaurs walked our earth there have been creatures who would fit this description.
As you might expect, Shakespeare took on this challenge and his effort – offered by Hamlet – was more prosaic:
‘What a piece of work is a man. How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties. In form and moving, how express and admirable. In action, how like an angel; in apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals… this quintessence of dust.’
The 19th Century American author Mark Twain defined human beings as ‘the only animals that blush. Or need to.’
Language is obviously one of our distinctive characteristics, as is the ability to cooperate and work together, but these are – in different ways – features of many other species too. The ability to make music is something else that marks humans out as different, but of course, many birds also communicate through song, albeit in a far less sophisticated and complex manner.
Other activities that are found only in humans include cooking, art, religion and sport. Cooking, for example, was important in evolutionary terms because it meant, over thousands of years, we did not need to chew our food so much, which in turn made our faces flatter and jaw bones more delicate, which aided the development of a more complex language. Art, religion, and sport all rely upon conceptual thought – the ability to have abstract, creative ideas. Art is difficult to define – in its broadest sense, it is anything that we do that is unnecessary, while a more nuanced definition is that it’s a deliberate, consciously conceived representation of the world. Religion is an attempt to make sense of our lives, by overlaying upon the world a spiritual dimension, where powers greater than ourselves pursue their plans and we can change things for the better by engaging with them through offerings or prayer. Sport codifies physical prowess into rule-based systems. Animals are capable of running, jumping and throwing but only humans make a game out of these actions by adding rules and scoring.
Our answer to the question ‘What makes us human?’ partly depends on how we approach it. At a genetic level, it’s our 23 pairs of chromosomes, but most people would, I think, prefer to think of humans as much more than this. Consciousness, empathy, creativity, resilience, and the pursuit of meaning and purpose are ingredients that – when put together – separate us from other species. In an age when more and more will be done by artificial intelligence, it’s perhaps never been more important to consider and celebrate the uniqueness and potential of our species.
If we put all of this together, we can offer a definition of a human as a musical, running, communicative, social, sophisticated, cultured, conceptually thinking, competitive, featherless biped. That’s at least better than a 15-foot tube that food passes through.
There are lots of interesting books with the title ‘What makes us human?‘, a couple of which can be found below.
Have a great weekend, humans!
Best wishes
Michael Bond
