John Farley How would you describe a human to a person from Mars?

Physically, the human has very few advantages over its competitors. We are weak compared to the rest of the primates. We dont have any effective mechanism for keeping warm or cool in the Arctic or the tropics respectively. We dont have the advantage of large size to ward off predators and we cannot attain great speeds in order to catch prey. We dont have natural tools such as large teeth or functional claws to tear apart meat or grind down most vegetation to effectively release its nutrients. Most of us lack the killer instinct and ruthlessness it requires to hunt and kill for survival. However over the course of evolution humans have designed tools to help us not only compete with the other large species on our planet, but also to dominate. Only the Osprey, the Barn Owl and the Roseate Tern have colonised every continent apart from Antarctica as humans have, and they rely on specific habitats which do not hinder us. We can make clothes to shelter us from the sun or the cold if we need to. We have developed effective weapons over the years to catch our prey and defend ourselves from hungry predators. These have gone from the spear to the bow-and-arrow to the various hunting rifles we use nowadays. We have developed methods of grinding up food before we eat it, and we are the only animal to cook its food to enhance the flavour. We have domesticated large quantities of the animals that we find tastiest, making it easier to get them fatter, catch them and kill them when we need the meat. As obtaining food became easier (being an omnivore helped), less and less people were required to manage it and so the rest of the population could do other things with their lives, but things that would mean they could trade with those in control of the food supply (ie farmers) in exchange for food. The others became more specialised in what they did, becoming doctors, builders, bankers, butlers and many other things. This required a place to trade food for the commodities supplied by the other members of the population. This meant that in certain places, humans congregated and settled. They were probably already in large groups for protection but they were likely to be nomadic tribes. When they settled, it provided an opportunity for more people than ever to live together. On Earth, there are species such as the wildebeest, the starling or the locust living in great herds that give the individual member protection in numbers. Also there are animals such as the wolf, the lion or the killer whale that hunt in packs to give themselves the best chance of catching their goal, working by the theory that one member could not eat the whole animal by itself so they might as well work together to catch it. However humans have taken this to a whole new level. The largest city in the world at the moment has a population of over 17 million. This shows that the ability of humans to live together is much greater than any other animal, mainly due to our highly increased ability to obtain food resulting in the production of commodities other than food, mainly designed for comfort. Conversely, there are huge advantages to the size of our brains. It gives us imagination, a feature which enables us to conjure up metaphorical things to help us solve problems, or merely for entertainment. This is seen in other species, for example in chimpanzees, where they use tools to get food. They use their imagination to work out what shape would be desirable for getting ants out of their hole, and then find a suitable twig to do it with. They also exhibit synaesthesia which is the ability to make links between sensations experienced using different senses. This requires a certain amount of imagination to establish these links. However the human imagination has a much wider range than using tools to solve problems and cross-sensory associations. We have used our imagination to theorise about more complex things than can be dreamt of by other species. For

John Farley example, we conjecture about what things are made of (in terms of atoms and sub-atomic particles), how the universe began and other such problems well beyond the level of chimpanzees or any other animal. This requires a huge amount of imagination, when thinking what could possibly be the reason for a thing, and when designing experiments to test theories. A human is a creature that, through its elevated intelligence and creativity, has managed to become the dominant species on Earth. Its intelligence is such that its young is born dangerously early so that the head, accommodating the large brain, can fit through the cervix when being born. It is so premature that it is entirely dependent on its mother. However this enhanced intelligence has left us with a weakness. In no other species on Earth is there such psychological damage as can be sustained by a human. Trauma, especially in early life and associated with lack of attentive and caring parenting, can lead to psychological damage which can be expressed in many ways. There can be clinical signs; that is the damage can be diagnosed and treated with drugs or therapy. However there can also be damage that does not present itself so readily. There is a trend towards a lack of care for the feelings of others when a child has experienced separation of his or her parents, or when either one of the parents, or both of them, has been absent for most of their childhood. This, however, seems to go against one of the main principles that drives natural selection, that parents care for their young. This can be seen extensively in the wild; most birds of prey mate for life and raise their offspring together. Even in the insect realm, the mother cares for her young by in many cases giving them the best start possible, laying her eggs in another animal so that the young have a plentiful food source to live off as soon as they hatch. In many animals, the father will leave the pregnant mother to take care of itself, but humans have, over millennia, lived in couples for life and havent split apart unless in the direst of circumstances. This recent trend in the number of single parents is due to the increased desire for sex. The human is the only species on Earth in which the female enjoys sex as well as the male. This makes it easier for men to seduce women, and less likely that they will be rejected. Nonetheless, humans have lived for millennia without this large number of single parents and abandoned children. I believe it is because of the advent of contraception that sex is suddenly so commonplace. A man and a woman can now have sex and walk away from it with no visible consequences. However this contraception is not completely effective. When a child is conceived, the man has often left if the mother even knew who it was before the pregnancy had been discovered. Even if the man knows, he may leave the relationship because he doesnt want the responsibility of a child. Thus many people do not care about the fate of their genes. A human is a small, hairless creature which has no visible advantages over its competitors. However its considerable intelligence and imagination has allowed it to dominate over all other species on Earth by using other animals and materials to its advantage. There is no animal on Earth that is as widely spread as humans; we are the only creature to inhabit every habitat, including space, where some humans spend part of their lives. We are also the only animal to have internal conflict on a large scale. Our ability to manipulate materials to our advantage has led to the creation of weapons that can be used to kill on a massive scale those who we dont like or disagree with. This is a consequence of the intelligence that is the defining feature of a human being.