Let me rescue it, then. It's a valid point that other species don't have literature. It shows that they don't have ideas. If they did, it would be really obviously evident. Instead we have to look hard for traces of memetic transmission of idea-like behaviours involving sticks and leaves, and rocks and shells, and calls and signs. These memes don't go anywhere, and the animals aren't creative. If they develop, it's by accident.
That is false. If you gave a whale five digits and an opposable thumb and have them live on land, you'd strongly reconsider that. Even without this, it doesn't take very long when studying animals to see that they have a plethora of ideas. Orcas demonstrate strong examples of this all the time.
And how can you possibly claim that you know any animal's internal dialogue?
Apes do have opposable thumbs. They still don’t really engage in any intellectual activity that we can recognize beyond basic communication. They probably have an internal dialogue, but their curiosity and capacity for communication stops at immediate needs like hunger and danger.
And there we go. That's an us problem and not a them problem.
> but their curiosity and capacity for communication stops at immediate needs like hunger and danger.
There are several interviews with native tribes who still practice hunting and gathering and that's the exact thing they worry about. Those humans are identical to us. But by your argument, "civilized" humans are more exceptional than these groups of humans?
Humans still have these basic needs and worries and thoughts. Just because we layer meta-societal pieces on top of that doesn't make them go away.
What makes humans different is technology. That does not make us different in an inherently exceptional way.
That is why I gave the whale counterexample in the first place. If you place humans in the ocean with magic to allow them to survive, you will not get technology. If you placed whales on land with dextrous hands, you would very likely get technology.
Our mental faculties are not wholly unique. Look at an orca brain vs a human brain and ask who the smooth brain is, even ignoring the size.
That's better, yes! Although it makes me want to cite this other guideline:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
- because I think the article already addresses this "other species don't have literature" argument, though it doesn't talk about literature specifically.
But the article, or the book it's promoting, isn't making any very strong point. I checked. It's saying that animals have great senses, and some of them can see Saturn's rings on a clear night. But they don't know or care that they're seeing Saturn's rings, and they don't have telescopes anyway, and we do and can see the rings much better if we want to, because we do want to, because we think about the things that we can see. So, I don't know, maybe there's nothing to talk about here except sidetracks.
The strongest plausible interpretation isn't "humans are not exceptional". Every species is exceptional by definition, so that's a weak and easily dismissed claim. This critique is not so interesting.
What's meant by "human exceptionalism" is something more like "humans' longstanding habit of regarding ourselves as the apex of a strict hierarchy of species, a worldview which has had profound consequences for ourselves and others". That is a complex thing worth exploring, and what the work in the article is about. A critique from that level would be more interesting. But to do this, one would have to take in a larger working set of information.
Comments that engage with only the title of an article or the tip of its iceberg tend to be rather boring, and also reflexive/indignant. On HN, a good comment is reflective rather than reflexive [1], and engages with specifics rather than just being a generic reaction to a generic claim (like "humans are/aren't exceptional") [2].
One way to "engage with specifics" is to dig beneath the top of the abstraction heap (i.e. the title or top-level claim) until you hit a layer of substance of the relevant work or argument. In this case that's pretty easy to do: there are two paragraphs which, in their first sentences, get more specific:
* when we assess other animals, we use human beings as the baseline
* our tests of the abilities of nonhuman animals [...] study them under highly artificial conditions
One can disagree or debate the significance, but a response on this level is likely to be less reflexive and therefore more interesting.
To me the noteworthy thing in this HN thread is how rapid the reflex is to wholly dismiss the article (and the research it's about) and also how shallow that reflex is—how little information is processed before doing the dismissal. Strong emotional conditioning means little information can be tolerated before a reaction needs expressing. This thread is such a clear a case of that, that it points to how deeply what is called "human exceptionalism" lives in us.
Edit: actually, I was describing what I saw in the thread last night. Having looked it over again, there are a least some more substantive subthreads. That's good, and it's also common for those to take longer to appear, as described at [1] and [3].
Valuing other species based on human traits is misleading. Literature doesn't mean anything to animals, it's not applicable. Same thing as the ability to glow isn't applicable to humans, but is for bacteria. Ideas are a human-only trait. Trying to argument that animals don't have ideas, therefore they are worse, is like saying that humans are worse than dolphins because humans can't breathe under water.
If you value animals based on human traits, humans will always be better. Because you take your own good traits which other species don't have. But that's not the point. Animals have animal traits. For example, low factor of self-extinction is something we should be learning from from animals. Acceptance of death. Limiting the use of our own resources. Taking these aspects into consideration make humans a stupid race that destroy the environment they live in.
