On Being Human on the First Saturday of May
When I was a kid, I do not remember any of my peers asking it, but adults kept trying to give us the answer to the question, “What makes us human?” Many religious folks would say that our souls are the single factor separating us from animals, but what exactly does having a soul mean? What evidence of the soul can we gather? Incidentally, this what my secular education seems to have been trying to answer. The first answer I remember receiving to this question is that it is our big brains that make us human. This makes sense from the religious and secular perspective. It is our big frontal lobes that gives us personality, empathy and all sorts of fun stuff that looks and feels like a soul. The problem with this answer is that we don’t have the biggest or most complex brains. Dolphins and other mammals have highly developed brains that outpace us in several metrics. The teachers would often point this out as if it were an interesting bit of trivia, but I always thought it completely undermined their initial goal. That can’t be what makes us human or gives us a soul. Maybe, Dolphins have bigger souls than us? Child-Nick was perplexed.