Change

The most evident difference between animals and humans is the later's continuous quest and obsession with changing things, or mildly put Culture of Change.

The thing that most clearly differentiates humans from animals is the capacity to self-reflect. Although chimpanzees, our closest genetic relative (around 99% similar in DNA) can be taught to do almost everything humans can, albeit at a more primitive level, they purportedly cannot self-reflect.

Since the dawn of civilizations, humans have inadvertently had a devastating impact on our natural world. For many animals, changes in behavior can often help to explain whether species are lead to a change in fitness when organisms share the same resource.

Over time, humans have been consciously responsible for much of the pollutants causing changes in the environment and affecting animals and plant species alike. Humans have been taking-up more space on Earth for habitats, industries and cities, indiscriminately hunting if not exterminating animal species, or bringing exotic ones into habitats. Much of these activities have been overthrowing natures resources and equilibrium.

Deliberate human activities have often consciously changed or destroyed the habitats that are essential to plants and animals survival. Due to human populations alarming growth, animals and plants alike have been disappearing 1000 times faster than they have in the past 65 million years. Scientists estimate that during the 21st century at least 100 species will become extinct every single day.

Philosophers who consider subjective experience the essence of consciousness also generally believe, as a correlate, that the existence and nature of animal consciousness can never rigorously be known.

The American philosopher Thomas Nagel spelled out this point of view in an influential essay titled 'What Is it Like to Be a Bat?' He said that an organism is conscious "if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism, something it is like for the organism"; and he argued that no matter how much we know about an animal's brain and behavior, we can never really put ourselves into the mind of the animal and experience its world in the way it does itself. Other thinkers, such as the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, dismiss this argument as incoherent.

Several psychologists and ethologists have argued for the existence of animal consciousness by describing a range of behaviors that appear to show animals holding beliefs about things they cannot directly perceive, Donald Griffin's 2001 book 'Animal Minds' reviews a substantial portion of the evidence.

Notwithstanding the aforesaid, animal consciousness, or animal awareness, is the quality or state of self-awareness within an animal, or of being aware of an external object or something within itself. In humans, consciousness has been defined as sentience, awareness, subjectivity, qualia, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of self-hood, and the executive control system of the mind.

Point is, do humans consciously or are they aware of the damage caused every time they effect a change? and are animals more conscious and aware than humans of the balance of nature, thereby not attempting to effect any change?

Food to reflect on….