It's not saying that modern science and technology are necessary for saying that humans are exceptional, only that it's sufficient.

We could also point out the fact that no other animals write books (or even come close), and that arguably takes us back to about 3000BC. That doesn't mean that humans before then weren't exceptional, only that it's enough (sufficient) to point out this feature as one example in which humans are exceptional. We haven't really changed biologically since then - these are cultural developments - but there are features of humans that allow these cultural features to manifest and to build upon previous ones.

Of course as we go back in time towards our last common ancestor with chimps and bonobos there are fewer features of human behaviour that make us exceptional, pretty much by definition. The interesting questions are what those features were and when they emerged that allow the later and obviously exceptional developments to occur.

As an aside, I'm not sure what you mean by measuring an outcome - to me, outcomes are all that we measure. Roughly, outcomes=observations. So I think you're using the word "outcome" in a different way

> measuring an outcome

As opposed to a trait. Let's take writing: most humans for most of human history simply couldn't read or write. At some point, we educated humans to be able to read and write.

Now, you're correct in that we've not taught animals to read or write at the level of a human but that's also a question: is there a fundamental trait that humans have that allow for this? Do we have a part of our brain that no other animal has, or could have, that means we can become literate and no other animal ever could?

Or, is this a hyper-specialisation of other traits that are shared but we have more of it? Is it a result of traits like pattern recognition, socialisation, communication and fine motor skills that combined and specialised to turn into reading and writing? Literacy then becomes an outcome of combining those traits in a certain way. We know that other animals have these traits, just not in the same way.

The reason I say this makes it not sufficient is because it reduces "exceptional" to just mean "things humans can do," without trying to look deeper than the surface level things we see. Dolphins being able to see your organs by clicking is pretty fucking exceptional. But because humans can't do it, it's not "exceptional."

When we ask "what makes us exceptional," we're asking "what makes us different from animals?" The fact that our combined traits allowed for different outcomes doesn't make us fundamentally different any more than a frog is different to a cat.

Ok, I think I see you mean "outcome" as an eventual behavioural manifestation, and by "trait" you mean a biologically inherited property or feature or capability, at least roughly.

> Do we have a part of our brain that no other animal has, or could have, that means we can become literate and no other animal ever could?

I think clearly yes, depending on what you mean by "could have". I wouldn't rule out the possibility that somehow over evolutionary time some other animals might be able to reproduce human behaviours of reading and writing. But I'm not talking about that: I'm talking about what other animals can do now, and it seems none of them can write or read like a human.

Now, let's say there are chimpanzees that we can teach to respond appropriately to things like "Spot has a ball. Spot has a big red ball. What colour is Spot's ball> Blue or Red?" Maybe they can do that. But what about doing the exercises in, say, Loring Tu's Introduction to Manifolds? They're just not doing that. They don't come close. You might say most humans aren't doing that either, which is true, but if you train a human their whole life in an appropriate way then I think most of them can do at least some of those exercises, while no chimp or bonobo has been shown to have this facility. This is just one almost silly example, but I think you can see what I'm getting at.

> Dolphins being able to see your organs by clicking is pretty fucking exceptional. But because humans can't do it, it's not "exceptional."

If this is unique to dolphins, I would say it's definitely exceptional. Even if it's not unique to dolphins, but only a small subset of animals can do it, it's still exceptional to that small subset of animals. There's no reason why "exceptional" should pertain only to one species: different species are exceptional in different ways, and we're asking in this thread about whether and how humans are exceptional. Horseshoe crabs are also exceptional in that they've been physiologically constant for 200 million years or whatever it is. The fact that some species are exceptional in their own ways doesn't mean that humans aren't exceptional in their own ways.

> The fact that our combined traits allowed for different outcomes doesn't make us fundamentally different any more than a frog is different to a cat.

I think I can see what you're getting at: every animal is arguably exceptional in its own way, and picking out the ways in which humans are exceptional as being more significant than others is stacking the deck in favour of finding humans to be uniquely (or exceptionally) exceptional in an anthropocentric way.

It's definitely right to be aware of, and cautious of, anthropocentrism. But this is what I'm trying to get at: the mere fact that something is unique to humans doesn't make it significant or valuable - e.g. being a featherless and relatively hairless biped doesn't seem significant to me. But the fact that we're able to communicate in the way we're doing now, and the fact that we're even capable of sustaining this complex technological society is to me just a clear way in which humans are exceptional. We can look into why that is, and that to me is a very interesting question, and we might find that many of the traits that make this possible are shared in some ways with other animals, but there's just obviously the fact that no other animals come close to being able to replicate it.

Having said that, I do have the feeling that the ways in which humans are exceptional are themselves exceptional: we can consider dolphin sonar or echolocation in bats, or cultural practices like chimpanzees learing from each other how to crack nuts with stones, still it's a long way from creating a sophisticated technological civilization.

> I think I can see what you're getting at: every animal is arguably exceptional in its own way, and picking out the ways in which humans are exceptional as being more significant than others is stacking the deck in favour of finding humans to be uniquely (or exceptionally) exceptional in an anthropocentric way.

This is 100% my point. When people talk about "human exceptionalism," they're referring to this type of "exceptional."

> we might find that many of the traits that make this possible are shared in some ways with other animals, but there's just obviously the fact that no other animals come close to being able to replicate it.

This is true, however I posit this makes us no more exceptional than other animals. Evolution pushed our ancestors down a certain track and this was the result but that also means there's no reason another species can't emerge to do the same thing.

The reason I think this is important is because "human exceptionalism" carries a baggage of divine right (the Bible called it dominion over beasts) that leads us down the wrong path with respect to our understanding of the world and how we treat it. When we engage with other animals on their own terms, we learn so much more about them than if we simply look down on them.

> The reason I think this is important is because "human exceptionalism" carries a baggage of divine right

That is on you, that doesn't mean humans aren't exceptional. The fact that we are even discussing our role in nature and how we shouldn't abuse it makes us that exceptional.

If humans weren't that exceptional we would just go and destroy nature everywhere it benefits us with no thoughts about the future or how this could ever hurt us, just like animals does when they have the power to.

Everything you said just made my point for me.

In what way does what I say have anything to do with divine rights?

Rather I'd call your stance "divine obligations", which is also a stance that humans are exceptional. You don't hold that for any other species than humans.

> If humans weren't that exceptional we would just go and destroy nature everywhere it benefits us with no thoughts about the future or how this could ever hurt us

Let’s start here: humans are literally in the process of doing this via carbon emissions. There seems no way of stopping it as we’re all slaves to economic incentives. If you take a step away from the details of how we do this, you’ll see plenty of animals destroy their local ecology through things like over grazing, and need predators to bring them back under control. Again, the details and scale are different but the base behavioural trait is there: optimising local maxima and causing long term damage.

So no, humans don’t follow a divine obligation: we actually do the same thing every animal does and tries to maximise our short term goals to the detriment of everything else. We’re not exceptional in this regard.

> When people talk about "human exceptionalism," they're referring to this type of "exceptional."

Yeah, ok. I think it should be clear by now that people use the word "exceptional" in different ways, and it's not really clear just from the use of the word which of these ways it is.

For me, "exceptional" just means "different", but you seem to be suggesting that people use it in the sense of "better", or something like that. Maybe that's true in some cases, but I would also say that humans are exceptionally destructive, and even in some ways exceptionally evil, in the sense that some people seem to take pleasure in causing harm, which is a feature that isn't shared with many other animals - or at least it's difficult to make the case that this is shared with many other animals. So "exceptional" doesn't mean "better" to me.

Let's try to be objective about things: dolphins are exceptional in their sonar abilities, curiosity, complexity of social organisation for a marine animal, range of sonic vibrations they emit, and so on. We can similarly evaluate the complexity of human behaviours according to objective criteria: our range of vocalizations is objectively more complex than any other species (we could get into the details of this if you like: I think the informational entropy of average human behavioural outputs can easily be shown to be higher than the highest way you have of evaluating non-human vacalisations or behavioural outputs), the comeplxity of human tool use can also be objectively quantified: New Caledonian crows, dolphins, or chimpanzees have technological assemblages which consists of maximally two or three moving parts (let me know if you know of exceptions), while human ones often consist of thousands. We're really comparing one large rock, a nut, and a hammer rock, against a nuclear reactor. It just should be abundantly clear that there's an exception here.

About your ethical point that "exceptionalism" translates into "divine right", I draw the opposite conclusion. Human exceptionalism doesn't mean that we can just do whatever we want, it means that with our increased abilities and awareness comes increased responsibility: we can become aware of the harms we cause to other life and other humans exactly because we're more capable and more preceptive

> For me, "exceptional" just means "different", but you seem to be suggesting that people use it in the sense of "better", or something like that.

I’ve already explained why this is the only real definition you can take: because otherwise “exceptionalism” doesn’t create a new meaning, it’s just a synonym for “different,” which means “human exceptionalism” would mean literally nothing.

I know I’m banging on about this definition but I think it’s a really important thing to keep in mind.

To be clear, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to point out humans are better at doing things than animals. That’s an objective fact at this point in time. My point is that this doesn’t make us “different” to other animals any more than any animal is different to another animal! This piece of human exceptionalism is what I object to.

If you want a simpler way of putting it, we can take Douglas Adams’s quote:

Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

So why do you think it is fine for the Dolphins to say they are more intelligent but not fine for Man to say they are more intelligent? You are saying us humans should stop saying that, why?

> To be clear, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to point out humans are better at doing things than animals. That’s an objective fact at this point in time. My point is that this doesn’t make us “different” to other animals any more than any animal is different to another animal! This piece of human exceptionalism is what I object to.

Many animals play around all day like Dolphins do, but Humans is the only animal that acts anywhere close to the way Humans do, learning to build new things over generations and doing things like going to space. No animal species has managed to go to space, that makes humanity more exceptional than any animal species. Many animals swim around in the ocean and eat fish, but only one have made spaceships, air planes, cars, computers etc.

Another way to see it is how much would earth change if the species didn't exist. Remove humans and the face of the earth massively changes. Remove dolphins and earth would hardly change at all. Humans have exceptional impact, and thus can be said to be exceptional.

> So why do you think it is fine for the Dolphins to say they are more intelligent but not fine for Man to say they are more intelligent? You are saying us humans should stop saying that, why

I didn’t say that and neither does Douglas Adams. I’m not even sure how you came to that conclusion. Your entire second paragraph misses my point.

> Another way to see it is how much would earth change if the species didn't exist. Remove humans and the face of the earth massively changes. Remove dolphins and earth would hardly change at all. Humans have exceptional impact, and thus can be said to be exceptional.

Remove bees and many environmentalists think we’ll see ecological collapse. I guess bees are exceptional by that definition.