A Key Insight for us to Collectively Recognize

From the book chapter: Life

The long-held view within the Western world according to which humans distinguish themselves from nonhumans through particular cognitive and moral abilities is now falling apart. According to ethologist and primatologist Frans de Waal, “It is time to stop running after a human specificity. In my life, I have probably seen some twenty-five proposals on human particularity. They have all been rejected”; “it is a difference of degree not of nature.” de Waal calls the deniers, who remain many in science, “neo-creationists,” as they recognize that we humans have evolved from primates but act as if this does not relate to our brain or mind.