Originally Posted by
tsujigiri15
I dont believe 'reason' can be called a human achievement. It seems logical that as homo sapiens, as opposed to homo erectus or anyone prior to that - reason is something of a defining trait. I mean concious reason (as I imagine you do) - of the sort 'because when I drop a pebble it falls, there must be something pulling it down' rather than 'I am hungry so I should eat'. I think this means that reason and rational thought tend to be the means by which humans can achieve things, rather than an achievement in itself. I mean, consider, we must have become able to reason deductively through evolution - which we didnt have to contribute to directly. To my mind this is like saying 'the greatest achievment of a frog was it gaining lungs which could function out of water'
Yes! I agree. Though there have been lots of good suggestions here, without writing, as humans are now, many of the subsiquent achievements/inventions - such as modern medicine, putting men on the moon etc. would have been impossible. This is simply because with the best will in the world, very few people are capable of accurately remembering/completely passing along knowledge without some sort of memory aid, as provided by written communication. I mean, maybe newton could have thought of his laws of motion, but would he then have been able to quantitativley predict planitary motion without written calculations to help?
I suppose you could use a similar argument for the taming of fire, in that without it very few human advances could have been made - we would still be much closer to apes etc. who can use tools and have a discernable social structure, wars (alas) - but nothing beyond that.
For me though, the whole 'man on the moon' thing is a truely awe inspiring feat - I mean, there are obviously others that contribute more to our lives, like the discovery of bacteria, genetics or even steam power - but for sheer scale I cant help but like it
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