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Quote:
Pick any task you like, there is an animal that does it better.
Building?- Termites and corals...dwarf anything man has EVER made.
Navigation?- Sea turtles and migratory birds..
Comunication?- blue whales converse over hundreds of miles.
Energy harnessing?-- plants
Man is only mediocre in may areas. We have only been here a split second geologically and will be gone shortly. We may be smart, but not that smart.
By Fishteacher
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Building? Debatable. If you use proportional scaling and consider growing an artifact as equivalent to actually taking materials and forging casting and combining them into new structures then you have a good case for the coral, not so much for the termite. But have you considered that humans currently build artifacts that are called
nations that correspond biologically to your coral reefs and termite mounds?
Navigation? Currently sea turtles and migratory birds cannot navigate by clock and star. So for the last two hundred years they have been no match for the average human navigator for navigation precision and accuracy ovewr a similar distance travelled.
Communication? I'm typing on a machine that reaches globally. Plants' communication systems (telegraph vine?) might be locally comparable
Harnessing energy? Humans use much greater energy densities though not as efficiently as plants.
Actually, when measured against the endurance of the average animal species (2-4 million years) on Earth, it looks like the current hominid is in trouble. This is true of most or the large mammals as of the present. There is only one species of hominid, lion, horse(unless you count the zebra and the ass as near enough to the horse to be differentiated from a common origin,-> in which case you have three lines of horse, but then you would have to lump the tiger with the lion and the chimp with the human giving them two lines each.), and as Stephen Gould noted from the fossil record indicators, when you have one surviving line of species decent, extinction is one disrupted food supply and one disease away.
Intelligence can mitigate that single line of decent danger by introducing human directed speciation differentiation in the hominid line, but that too carries an extinction event danger.
Sidebar.
What will future archaeologists wonder(those raccoons), when they dig up our sentient machines' remains alongside ours and try to fit those into our common hominid line of decent?
As to the organizational principle of life at the hadron/lepton/boson level? I find the virii to be an interesting boundary between the animate and the inanimate. If the organizing principle of "living" matter is "eating" and reproducing" of the morph type, then the earliest that we on Earth can call anything "alive" in my
opinion as far as matter is concerned is when a complex chemical compound structure can take matter and organize it into copies of itself. That means I don't necessarily agree that crystals or plastics that aggregate size according to well understood chemical catalytic reactions fit the definition. The object must have a discrete boundary that defines it when it replicates itself. When it replicates itself, its copy must separate by a discrete distance and time from its "parent" to be a valid living organism.
As to a potassium atom being different, embedded in its mineral form from a bonded atom in a chemical compound inside a human mind? Nonsense. Take potassium from a mineral state and process it as a dietary supplement. Feed that inanimate potassium to a human. It is no different inside the human than it was when you found it in the rock.
