Humans are not different from animals.

And yet we do define animals based on biological traits. What if we classified living creatures by the colour of their hair? By the length of their intestines? By the shape of the beak? But we don't, we have the classification as it is and it's based on that that we might or not define humans as animals. This is material for another debate. 1. Love is more than an instinct, it's an emotion. It might be analogous to an instinct but it also has secondary effects such as hedonic sensations. Most bacteries duplicate themselves, they don't use sexual reproduction (http://en.wikipedia.org... , the first microbe with sexual reproduction). Those that do have a sexual reproduction don't have a brain and therefore can't feel love, they only act the same way they would if they did have a brain and could feel love. I'm pretty sure you can't feel emotions, because there is no mind-reading device available. You go prove the opposite. By the attitude of an animal it's emotions can be seen. 2. "Responding to my first point, my opponent believes that animals have the capability for technological development. In fact, no animal has ever developed a new technological outcome" What about apes? We evolved from them. Look at a chimp. Now think what we looked like millions of years ago. Look at your computer screen. It was made by a species that evolved from ape. Animals are able of technological advancement. Even if you don't consider us to be animals now, we had to come from something that you consider an animal, and that animal was able to evolve in something able to build ships and writte on a cellphone. That's what i said earlier: "You could very well imagine any other animal species could attain our level with enough time to evolve (it wouldn't be the same species as the one from the beginning of course) and develop." The fact that there were no other significant technological advancements (apes and birds know how to create and use simple tools) only means it's unlikely for an animal species to evolve in something able to create technology. Should we consider that another ape species is not an animal because they might evolve in some kind of "intelligent" species? Where do you see them being distinguished? Every animal species is different from each other, should we create as many words to define their groups as there are species? Legitimises their work? Come on... 3. How do you explain that children with completely different cultures share the same type of moral rules? Different cultures is not one from America and one from Europe. They tested it with completely different cultures. (I read about it in The God Dellusion by Richard Dawkins, don't know the source tho). Morality followed similar rules. Such as "it's ok to sacrifice someone to save others, but it's not ok to use someone (and kill them) to save others". The concrete example for the European kids was something like: There's two people tied to a train track, and one to a bifurcation of the same train track. Is it ok to redirect the train towards the one person to save two people? To which people answered majoritairly yes. There's two people tied to a train track. Is it ok to take a fat man (that would be able to stop the train) and kill him to save the other two people? To which people answered more "no" than in the first question. They used an analogous question for kids from a different culture, and the results were similar. First this shows that morality is not dependent on culture. It also proves that it's (most likely) intuitive. Why should humans be the only ones with a "sense" (of morality) that allows them to live in group? Do you see dogs bitting other dogs' necks while they sleep? Humans don't prefer to be seen as |-|uman (with a big "h") than animal. Proof of this is that i started this debate and i'm human. I can't be completely different from every other human. 4. Cockroaches or rats live on the same planet as us and they don't interact with us. Since we're so smart, and intelligent, and moral, and artistic, and whatever else, we should be able to regulate our population to what it was 2000 years ago (35 times less or so) and leave an-humans some space. The truth is, we're occupying as much as we can, and this is an animal instinct, untill we can't occupy anything anymore. Do you think America would be well considered if we were intelligent and moral creatures? If this was the case we would rebel againsts our governments, Europeans, Americans, everything that force a polluting industry and nocious consumming habits on us. We're either not intelligent or not moral.