As I recall, Marx said what makes humans a unique animal...

[Broletariat]

Is that we picture in our head what we're going to do before we do it. Has modern zoology disproved this? I asked a Zoologist this and he responded with this.

"Experiments are done all the time with crows and ravens. They have to complete multi-stage tool use tasks. They are shown various sticks and wires and cages and which boxes the food is in. The crows that are used to it look at it all for a few moments, then go straight to the exact tools they need (they even bend paperclips into hooks, having never seen a paperclip before).

I can't find the really cool video I saw from PBS Nature but here's a short example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofjo26O0z_o

And of course there's the famous example of the cigarette smoking chimpanzee that would gather stones and then wait for tourists to gather up before he started hucking them across the pond at em"

[VeritablyV]

That we produce our subsistence. Manipulate nature for our means.

[Broletariat]

That we produce our subsistence. Manipulate nature for our means.

Well I'm CERTAIN that one's been disproved, IF that's what Marx said of course. I'll see if I can dig up the quote I was referring to in the OP.

[Broletariat]

"We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will."

Capital Chapter 7

[Tablo]

Marx was not a biologist, zoologist, or an evolutionary scientist so I would take anything he says on the subject with a grain of salt.

[jake williams]

Humans are a unique animal, but, if you will, in a sense more quantitatively than qualitatively. It's difficult to talk about anything specific to us as an organism that makes us special - except that we have calculus, symphonies, written language, special relativity, and we've literally walked on the fucking moon. There's a lot of pretty clever parrots and chimps and whatnot, but they're a long way from space travel.

I'm not ruling out sort of a Chomskyan special property of human cognition, but we don't have any biological evidence for it.

[S.Artesian]

Well I'm CERTAIN that one's been disproved, IF that's what Marx said of course. I'll see if I can dig up the quote I was referring to in the OP.


I think it's in the German Ideology. Marx says something like [not a quote, from memory]:

"You can distinguish mankind from animals by any number of things-- by religion, language, etc. Mankind, however, distinguishes itself from animals when it creates the means of its own subsistence."

[Aurora]

You might like to read http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1876/part-played-labour/index.htm by Engels. It doesn't deal exactly with your question but it's an interesting read nonetheless. It's a short attempt to analyze the evolution of modern humans with the dialectic and it goes into what differentiates humans from other apes.

[VeritablyV]

I think it's in the German Ideology. Marx says something like [not a quote, from memory]:

"You can distinguish mankind from animals by any number of things-- by religion, language, etc. Mankind, however, distinguishes itself from animals when it creates the means of its own subsistence."

Yes, that the reading I was thinking of when I wrote earlier. However, still interesting Broletariat's quote and how they can distinguish man.

While Marx was not a biologist or any of the mentioned professions, he still can provide an interesting view on what man is I believe. It's a different perspective on man, but we should not limit outselves to his or even, for example, Aristotle's conception of man as being "political".

[ar734]

I think the quote from the German Ideology is (the last sentence): "... By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life."

I think the distinction between animals and humans (according to Marx) would be that humans produce their own subsistence. Lions appropriate or kill zebras, zebras appropriate or eat grass, chimpanzees gather fruit etc.

But, by that definition, humans only came into existence about 50k years ago when farming and herding were invented. Homo sapiens sapiens has been around at least 500k yrs.