Humans have not advanced beyond their technology for its entire existence.

Darth: My reasoning for pointing out all these traits animals share is this: we have done nothing truly special. Reply: If special is unique, then I can give you one glaring difference between humans and other animals--other animals adapt to their environment for survival, humans adapt their environment to fit their needs. So I think given the fact that humans don't have poisonous quills or fangs, but yet, keeping in mind our body size, we have been able to survive across varying environments, even outer space. I don't think that happens unless there is something special, in this case it is the human mind. Darth: We don't have any claws, thus without guns, knifes, or otherwise, we are not predators, but prey. Reply: And this proves what? That bears want to eat us? Darth: We like to imagine or structures to be superior, when while they are larger and on a grander scale to a bee hive or beaver dam, are nothing to truly boast about. Reply: We aren't building really big beehives. It's not size (we also build things on a molecular level--nanotechnology), but complexity that is interesting. Darth: But what can you physically do with a brain?...DOes the brain build sky scrappers? Reply: That is exactly what builds skyscrapers--the mind. To build things of that complexity, investigation into the working of the physical world is required, and to do that, you have to have evolved the proper apparatus to do such investigations. Darth: The only leeps and bounds we make beyond animals is the manipulation of what is already around us. Reply: Again, what does this really have to do with anything? The only way I can think of that your sentence makes sense is that humans just rearrange matter, so nothing is new. This is fallacious because you are assuming that the property of the part of the whole applies to the whole itself. A tank is made of matter. Matter has always existed. Therefore, tanks have always existed. Darth: If everything we have was striped away we would die in an instant. Reply: ....Because? Weren't people living before the internet and central heating? If there were some disaster like that, we would just resort back to a hunter-gather lifestyle and then rebuild. If birds couldn't build bird's nest for whatever reason, they would probably die. Darth: What advancement have we made to ourselves? None. Reply: From what I can gather you think, apart from technology, humans haven't changed at all. This is wrong for several reasons. 1. We are constantly evolving, as is everything. 2. In order for there to be technology as it is today, humans had to develop opposable thumbs, bipedalism, enlarged cranial capacities. Over the years humans have built up immunities to diseases, different skin pigments to deal with the elements, more coarse hair in some climates , etc. 3. I'm not sure why you think waking up with fangs would be some sort of advancement, but any sort of radical restructuring like this would take millions of years by natural causes. These are things we don't make, but nature does (but, another special thing about humans is that this might no longer be the case, I'll elaborate in a little bit.) So I think you only have a fuzzy understanding of what evolution is and how species change. Darth: . We are no better than the apes of Africa. Reply: Last time I checked, apes are endangered and there are about 6.6 billion people on the planet. I would say given our size and complexity, we are kicking @ss in terms of evolutionary success. Darth: There is a man versus a tiger, who will win? The tiger obviously. But now there is a man with a tank versus a tiger. Who will win now? The tank will. Reply: Okay, to be fair, lets give the tiger a tank. Who wins? Still the human in the tank. Why? Because the tiger hasn't evolved the mental capacities of abstract reasoning to operate such a machine, let alone build one. Tanks haven't just been lying around and we figured out how to operate them. Darth: The tank holds the real power, not the man. Reply: No, because the tank can not be operated unless a homo sapien does it because only homo sapiens have evolved in such a way to be able to. Darth: In the early days, nearly all human trades where nomads. Reply: And why are we not nomadic hunter-gathers anymore? Because certain features evolved that made technology possible. Darth: We don't have a superior living method, true. In fact, we eat food as do animals. Drink, another shared animal trait. We also mate, as do every single other thing on the planet, so that doesn't make us special either. Reply: 1. Considering our size and complexity, I would say that our exponential growth in terms of population means that as a species we have been very successful in the game of evolution. If you are saying humans are animals, I'm not going to disagree with you, just that you can have a deeper, more nuanced way of viewing things. It's like saying the New England Patriots and your local pee-wee football team are the same because they are both football teams. True, we are playing the same game of life that all the other animals are playing; we have to eat, breed, produce waste. But unlike other species, humans are likely to be the first to ditch this process. It is what I talked about earlier--transhumanism. When people and machines start to converge, you can't even make the argument that we are animals. There won't be a need for breeding or eating. We could become computers exploring the cosmos being fueled by solar energy. And what I wanted to elaborate on was the relationship between technology and nature. Humans naturally evolved certain features that made technology possible. Now technology is changing nature--i.e. manipulating the environment to bring changes that couldn't have naturally evolved otherwise. So, if you are upset that humans aren't evolving poisonous quills fast enough, genetic engineering can make sure that your kids can have them. Just recently scientists created the first ever artificial genome--a new branch of the evolutionary tree was made. So if technology is used to make me born with the genetics to have fangs, are those fangs naturally a part of me or not? So to just throw technology arbitrarily out the window and say we are no different from other animals doesn't make sense because the line between nature and technology is fading. Darth: We are no different than our ancestors from the trees. Reply: I don't know about you, but I am typing this in a house. Darth: Our only accomplishment is what we make, not who we are. Reply: But we can only make certain things because we are a certain way.