Reflections 29 July

What is the difference between a man and an animal? Well 50 minutes of heated, animated and sometimes funny discussion arguments weren't enough for us to come to a conclusion. Personally the only visible difference I see is that humans have a knack for wearing clothes, while animals, well they are of the perception that natural beauty is all that matters! :P
There were many points that my classmates perceived to be major differences. First was the fact that human beings reason, while animals act only instinctively. I strongly disagree with that statement as firstly its fallacious to generalize such a large group of beings and make one categorical statement about them! But nevertheless it’s wrong to say that animals ALWAYS act instinctively. Birds for instance have their entire migration routes planned to save them from the winter frost of various continents. They even fly in various formations to save energy and for aero-dynamical reasons! How can we then say that animal’s don’t reason? It is also wrong to generalize and say that even humans always act with appropriate reasoning. There are countless instances in one's life where emotion is the only ‘reason’ for committing a particular course of action. One just needs to ask Zinedine Zidane about emotions taking the driver’s seat in his life to know what I am talking about.
The second point of difference was that humans have an effective language to communicate while animals don’t. I personally thought that that was ridiculous. Just because we don’t understand animal languages does not mean that they don’t have one. This just epitomized our own shortcomings towards things we don’t comprehend. Language is an essential part of every organism’s life and activity! Animals may be conversing through their barks or their roars and we humans might just never know! We are denying the fact that a certain knowledge stream exists simply because we do not possess it yet!

Our teacher argued that humans have a freewill will animals do not. Again I just could not accept that statement. We can provide counter arguments both ways to prove this statement fallacious. Humans don’t always have a free-will ( just think of an under fire employee wanting to leave everything and go for a vacation, but just cannot due to societal and community constraints) and animals also can possess free will ( a whale cruising aimlessly through the high seas).

Since we could not find any answers, I came to a conclusion that the question itself was an impossible question to answer. To answer such a question one would need to generalize on a large scale basis, and this would only lead to grave inaccuracies! We just cannot generalize and say that all animals don’t reason or all humans never react instinctively without reason. There’s always an exception, and in this case, much more than a sole one! There isn’t much of a natural difference between humans and animals, and if science is to be truly counseled, a man is also a part of the animal category.