What Does It Mean to Be Human?
TWEET EMAIL MORE What does it mean to be human? Or, putting the point a bit more precisely, what are we saying about others when we describe them as human? Answering this question is not as straightforward as it might appear. Minimally to be human is to be one of us, but this begs the question of the class of creatures to which “us” refers. Homo sapiens , others equate it with the whole genus Homo , some restrict it to the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens , and a few take it to encompass the entire hominin lineage. These differences of opinion are not due to a scarcity of evidence. They are due to the complete absence of evidence − or, to put the point with greater clarity, the absence of any conception of what sort of evidence can settle the question of which group or groups of primates should be counted as human. Biologists aren’t equipped to tell us whether an organism is a human organism because “human” is a folk-category rather a scie...