我们与其他物种有着本质区别We Are Qualitatively Different From Other Species
Brett：你提出的是一种少数派的观点。我认为主流文化仍然停留在你刚才所说的后半段。
最初，我们认为自己处于宇宙的中心。这是宗教对人类在宇宙中位置的看法：地球被一层层天球环绕，万事万物都围绕它运转。因此我们是整个宇宙的继承者，这是上帝赐予我们的礼物。
后来科学告诉我们，事实上我们在宇宙中并不处于什么特别的位置。这就是宇宙学原理：宇宙在每个地方都大致相同，而我们只是其中一处尤其普通的位置而已。
我们不仅在宇宙学意义上毫无特殊之处，在生物学上同样没什么特别。我们只是处在从细菌、蟑螂、狗到黑猩猩的演化连续体上。
有一位天体物理学家，几乎在所有其他话题上我都非常喜欢他——尼尔·德格拉斯·泰森（Neil deGrasse Tyson）——他曾谈到，黑猩猩远比我们想象的聪明，而我们可能并不比它们高明多少。这几乎是所有人的看法。
现在我们许多人想要推广的第三种观点是：人类与黑猩猩之间的差异并非轻微的量的差别。从细菌到蟑螂、狗再到黑猩猩，确实存在一条连续谱，但我们偏离了这条轴。
我们是质的差别。我们只需要睁开眼睛去看。你望向窗外，那座恰好映入眼帘的美丽城市，就无法用生物复杂性的渐进式增长来解释。
Brett: You’re pointing out a minority opinion there. I think culture is still stuck in that second part of what you were saying.
Originally we thought that we were at the center of the universe. This was the religious conception of man’s place in the cosmos. Earth was surrounded by the celestial spheres and everything orbited around it. So we were the inheritors of the entire universe, and God had gifted us with this.
Then science showed us that, in fact, we’re not at a particularly special place in the universe. This is the cosmological principle, this idea that the universe is roughly the same at every single place and we are just one of those particularly unspecial places.
Not only are we unspecial in the cosmological sense, but biologically we’re nothing particularly special, either. We’re just on the continuum between bacteria to cockroaches through to dogs and chimpanzees.
An astrophysicist I absolutely love on almost every other topic, Neil deGrasse Tyson, was talking about how chimpanzees are a lot smarter than we think and how we might not be much better. This is what almost everyone thinks.
This third view that a lot of us are trying to promote now is that it’s not a slight quantitative difference between chimpanzees and us. There is a continuum between bacteria to cockroaches to dogs and chimpanzees, but we’re off-axis.
We are qualitatively different. All we need to do is open our eyes. You look out your window at that beautiful city that happens to be out there that cannot be explained by this gradual increase of biological complexity.