Let’s forget about what geneticists tell us for a moment, and focus solely on how they look, and behave.
Here are four ‘primate’ skulls, the top right one is obviously human.
To me, it looks as if the human skull is clearly the odd one out, the most different of the four.
Now, that could be just my bias, thinking humans are special, just because I’m human, but as far as I can tell, honestly it looks as thou we’re the odd one out.
Do humans even have such a cognitive bias thou, that we want to be special, to stand out, or maybe Scientists are just telling us that we do, because they themselves have a bias.
For whatever reasons, they don’t want to feel special, they want us to fit in, and everything to be natural, and normal.
You could say humans have a tendency to want to feel like we’re special, like we’re different from animals, but maybe that’s not a natural tendency or bias, maybe that’s just how Europeans are, or were, used to be like centuries ago, when we took Christianity more seriously.
Many cultures such as native Americans or Australian aborigines were more than happy to think of man as not differing at all essentially from animals.
Humans individually, and collectively, might have as much or as many biases to want to fit in, as stand apart, it may depend on the individual/culture.
Now look at our behavior.
Now we could go detail by detail, but just intuitively for now, is human behavior not by far and away the strangest of all primate behavior, in many ways, of all animal behavior for that matter?
I mean sure, other animals build things, but they do so by instinct, largely.
Spiders don’t improve their webs, or build anything else, they build the same webs they’ve always been building for thousands or even millions of years, and it takes thousands or even millions of years to meaningfully modify them, where as humans can alter their constructions in the blink of an eye.
Same with the social insects, ants, bees, termites, or birds with their nests, or beavers with their dams.
The more intelligent or sophisticated species may even have a few small examples of culture, or minor modifications to their behaviors/structures that’re then taught to or aped by other members of their species, but they pale in comparison to ours.
It would be interesting if we could set up an experiment where we ask other ‘primates’ what they think about us, if they think we’re the odd ones out.
Perhaps we could train them to select which item is the odd one out of 4 items, show them 4 animal species, 4 plant species, 4 shapes, 4 articles of clothing and so on.
Train them to select the odd one out, and after they’ve gotten the knack for it, show them a picture of four primate skulls, one of them human, and see if they think we’re the oddball, I bet they would.
Now most of what I’m going on is intuition, but it would be interesting to compare each trait mathematically.
Like start with cranial capacity, or proportional cranial capacity, and see which species of primate has the most peculiar cranial capacity.
From there you could go brow ridges, which primate has the strangest brow ridges of the four, teeth and so on.
It would be an interesting study.
Humans have puny eye brow ridges compared to the other three, we have proportionately larger craniums, their brow ridges are nearly on the top of their sloping heads, and so on, their canines are enormous by contrast, their jaws protrude, ours are flat, etcetera.
Can you point to one of the other three skulls and say, this is a thing peculiar to it, and not the other three, other than the size of the bottom left one, and primate skulls vary in size, many are that size.
It’s difficult isn’t it?
It really looks as thou the human skull doesn’t belong.
How different does something have to be, in order to be separately classified?
The boundaries between one species, or family, or genus, are somewhat subjective.
Mainstream scientists try to make them as consistent and as based on the objective world and not our biases as possible, or at least they’re telling us that’s what they’re doing, but even then, so much of it will forever be arbitrary and subjective, based on human cognitive limitations, and cultural, linguistic, social and institutional conventions.
What if Mainstream Science has just sold us all a story.
A compelling story, perhaps the most compelling of all the stories about the origin of life, species, and in particular our species ever told, with a lot of data that could certainly be interpreted as substantiating it, but nonetheless it is still just that, a story.
There might be a more compelling tale to tell yet untold, the likes of which both mainstream science, religion and philosophy can hardly imagine now.
I mean a few centuries ago, this naturalist Linnaeus came along, before genetics, and just lumped man in with the other apes, because for the naturalist, yea, we have to fit in somewhere, everything else does, and yea, there’s a lot of similarities between us and them, relatively, but there’s some major differences, too.
I mean to me the other three skulls are all basically the same, there’s hardly any difference between them, where as we’re not arguably basically the same.
And then there’s so many other things, the fact that we walk upright, that we’re comparatively naked, and so on, so much sets us apart.
Are we primates, or do are we deserving of our own order, and can we be entirely certain of our origins?