Adapted from The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us From Other Animals by Thomas Suddendorf, out now from Basic Books. Like many a scholar before and since, Bertrand Russell confidently asserts that certain traits—“speech, fire, agriculture, writing, tools, and large-scale cooperation”—set humans apart from animals.

It’s true that humans, and humans alone, evolved the complex set of voice, hearing and brain-processing skills enabling full-scale sophisticated vocal communication. Siegfried is right that many non-human animals have the physiological apparatus needed to form words. Yet they have no language.

Features of language

• Displacement.
• Arbitrariness.
• Productivity (also: ‚creativity’ or ‚open-endedness’)
• Cultural transmission.
• Duality.
• Prevarication : the ability to make sentences knowing that they are false and with the purpose of misleading the receiver of the information.

“What separates us from the animals, what separates us from the chaos, is our ability to mourn people we’ve never met.”

Since the ability to reason (deliberate over courses of action and choose on the basis of those deliberations) is the one capacity or function which separates humans from other animals, being rational is our defining quality, our “final cause,” our “telos.” The excellent human is the one who in actuality does reason …

Abstract. According to a philosophical commonplace, Aristotle defined human beings as rational animals. Of course, Aristotle repeatedly stresses that he regards rationality as the crucial differentiating characteristic of human beings, but he nowhere defines the essence of what it is to be human in these terms.

In addition to having more neurons in the association cortex, brain imaging studies comparing the brains of humans to other primates show humans have a greater number of fibers connecting the brain regions involved in such human-specialized functions as language, tool making, reasoning, and social cognition.

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