Having recently read "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?" [1] by the brilliant primatologist Frans de Waal, the whole introductory paragraph reeks of the "humans only" dogma.
Even the link to the Wikipedia article directly contradicts the statement of humans being the only species to bury their dead.
How counter-intuitive it is: so many aspects of evolution we accept as continuum with shared phenotypes (and extended phenotypes) all the way through, yet when it comes to our intelligence and specialness, we forget all of this.
FWIW the author acknowledges in a footnote that some of the "human only" traits are contested.
I totally agree that anthropocentrism in a fallacy/trap that we can fall into in all sorts of domains of thought - metaphysics, ethics, behavioral/evolutionary economics or whatever its called, etc.
But, to paraphrase Marshall Sahlins, "'Animals are basically people' is a much healthier perspective than 'People are basically animals.'"[1]. Which is to say, I think we can let our biases slide in this case, because even though we're focusing on ourselves because of our misperceived 'specialness', we can still learn broader truths in spite of this because we aren't actually so special or apart from nature.
I hear what you are saying. But it is also a mistake to simply assume that there is nothing that is unique to human psychology. In particular, we need to explain why humans have been so remarkably successful, including at dominating other species.
For instance, in all other social mammals, as far as I know, the social group consists of only the group you directly belong to and are in immediate contact with, and this group is in competition with all other social groups of your species.
But in human foraging groups, you band is a member of a larger tribe of many bands that you cooperate with, even though the bands are in no immediate contact most of the time. Now think of all the behaviors and cognitive mechanisms required to make that happen.
Yeah, but I doubt that any non-anthropocentric measure of biological success puts humans anywhere special:
Biomass: krill dominate
Individual count: bacteria probably soon by a massive landslide
Evolutionary stability: the Goblin shark had been around for millions of years
When people talk about how special H. sapiens is they tend to always say that we're the only species to have some conjunctive list of traits. But for any given species there is some list of traits that single it out as unique and special, so I find those arguments pretty contrived.
However, perhaps humans do win out in the per capita production of waste heat category.
Tardigraves and some lichens can live most anywhere it seems. And then life forms get more advanced and their range of terrain generally implodes in size, even migrating birds usually don't cover more than one continent at any given time.
Then suddenly despite being just another big ole thing you'd expect humans to be trapped in a dinky little African savannah by a river, but no, here we are under the ocean and covering the planet pole to pole and under ground and in the air and in space. If its not possible to live there we import stuff and live there anyway like Antarctica or space.
No species has a range as large as us, not even close, other than little microscopic tardigrave critters, and maybe rats. And our internal and external parasites I guess. You don't see alligators in the arctic or polar bears in jungles or whales in space stations or dolphins in grasslands.
There is one interesting bean counter type trait where you do something with the ratio of brain mass to body mass and add a correction factor for total mass, and we kick butt on that one.
Another one is information bandwidth, we can transmit a couple K visually per second via reading and a good fraction of a K per second via speech and no other animals even remotely come close. A human toddler transfers orders of magnitude more data before kindergarten than the entire lifespan of most animals, and as far as humans go toddlers rate as pretty dumb.
I'm sure if ants brains were not so small in an absolute sense and if they could communicate as many bits per second as humans can they'd be teaching us a thing or two about math and physics, but ...
Wideness of niche. That's a good one. Once we become trans-planetary, I guess that will also be quite a distinguishing trait. Also, note my optimism :P
Akin to the brain-to-body-mass ratio that you mention, I wonder if this wideness of niche idea can be meaingfully quantified.
Would you be able to point me to some sources? I'd like to level up a little bit on this topic.
Humans have caused far more extinctions than any other species. In a way you could consider that a sign of success/dominance. (Obviously most would instead view it as a tragedy. Regardless, it's a distinguishing factor.)
Even the link to the Wikipedia article directly contradicts the statement of humans being the only species to bury their dead.
How counter-intuitive it is: so many aspects of evolution we accept as continuum with shared phenotypes (and extended phenotypes) all the way through, yet when it comes to our intelligence and specialness, we forget all of this.
[1] http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Are-We-Smart-Enough-to-Know-...