Dear Carl Safina, thank you SO much for this video. After this talk I've stopped eating fish and from a pescetarian became a full-time vegetarian. It's been five years now. The best decision in my life.
"What make us human is that of all the things that make up our mind and their minds, our is more extreme. We are more compassionate, more creative, more destructive" Well said, and great great passionate talk.
Thanks Carl. One of the most beautiful books I've ever read. Through beautiful and intriguing stories about animal's life, you highlight things that should be obvious and yet they aren't for the majority of us. This book is a rare and unique jem in the desert of today's ignorance.
The first thing I thought was: why should we rely on those kinds of stories? Aren't they probably misjudgements of the situation? But that brings us just back to his main point: we know too few things to make even the simplest of statements, because we do not care. And when someone finds out something about animal minds, we seem to still not care terribly much. On the other hand we live with them from birth to death.
+Nils Petras if you search for a bit, you will find amazing scientific proof of how capable animals actually are. a huge amount of experiments have been done; e.g. rats helping other rats who are in distress, with no personal gain www.livescience.com/17378-rats-show-empathy.html it's just that a scientific explanation to each of those animals, their feelings and thoughts would be long enough to fill an entire TED talk, while he focused on diversity and the morality behind it, so there wasn't really place to go that deep
Yeah after every human did to animals I think it too late for them to forgive us because forgive it will take a long time not a flick of a switch. Forgive is not easy for example, if someone did something very bad to you personally and that person just say "please forgive me" it not how it work.
Plants have life essence as well how do we justify our practice of killing life forms to sustain our hunger??? Please advise I want to become vegan but I feel like plants have souls.
It doesn't matter of it's conscious or not. If you're really smart, would you not help somebody that might not be as smart as you, its called empathy and we all have it (well maybe except fish)
@@wingsonthebus the question of personhood is immaterial to the question of morality. Neither are qualities like intelligence, size, strength, etc. Why is it wrong to beat someone? Is it because the beaten person is a person, intelligent or conscious of his own existence? No, it is wrong because it inflicts pain and suffering on him. On the other hand, to beat a stone would not be immoral. A stone cannot feel pain. So, the criterion that really matters is can they suffer?
Linguaphile I totally agree. I think my 3-years-ago self was defining a person as something like a self with an inner experience, but in any case I under-explained.
We ask "does our pet love us" because, at least in the most healthy of cases, we know as well as we can do that we ourselves love the pet. I keep pet snails and love them dearly, despite them being "simple slimy pests" to most people. A lot of the time I watch them go about their business, looking for food, exploring the terrarium, making love, digging holes, grooming and eating, I love to wonder what it's like to be one of them. Great talk!
+Amusix They are not as unstable/insane. We stopped being a working part of the ecosystem, when we acquired enough pathogenic traits to invade and spread through the whole organism ("Planet Earth's surface environment), metastatically. Exponentially growing cancer does what it does, as usual. We are cancer.
Amusix How so? Is it not exactly how it is? If you look up how cancer develops, it follows similar pathways. With similar end results. It learns how to invade tissue, blood vessels and travel through them, to settle new colonies in the organism... once growth is exponential and unending, the outcome is given.
I loved where he said " We create grief and a lot of it". It is completely true. It's no wonder that animals don't like us. They've done nothing to us yet we target and kill these amazing sentient beings. Just pathetic.
I have a problem with the way we hypothesize animals feel love and compassion. For example, we observe them behave in seemingly very dedicated ways toward their young - like the albatrosses toward the end of this video. But this is misguided, because often times animals don't think about these things. We as humans are cursed with thinking everything through, so of course it would be a bigger commitment to our lives if we did something similar to what the albatross does, but that's because we analyze and rationalize everything. The meaning of 'love' in its profound sense includes the *choice* of doing something of good value, and that excludes its attribution to lower-intelligence animals that do things simply by programmed instinct, however dedicated it is to another creatures' well being. Indeed most animals work like this; They do things for a reason, not by preference. So in my opinion it is more helpful to say: "the albatross flies 10,000 miles to feed its' young because it benefits the survival of the next generation of the species, and this fact has been imbedded into the conduct of the general population, and so if we observe a specimen *not* engaging in this behavior, we do *not* assume the bird has better things to do and it doesn't love its' offspring, but that there has been some sort of malfunction in its cognition." rather than to say: "the bird is equally, or close to equally, able to form loving relations with other birds as we are to our own kin, and we can see this in how it travels thousands of miles to feed its' young. If we analogize this to our own species, it would be a very, very loving gesture indeed." After all, we often see how animals like these mistake other nestlings for their own, and surely this is indicative of an inherent disconnect between mother and specific young which, in my opinion, also shows an emotional detachment, if not direct incapacity to hold such emotion. Of course the bird is an easy example of this, but the point is that the way we *read* emotional behavior in other species is often biased by how we have come to register emotion in our own kind through interconnection - which is more accurate by all measure, since we can validate our reasoning through communication. In fact I would argue that our entire definition of love and compassion is built on our own set of behavioral patterns, and so we often fall into the trap of mischaracterizing other animals by talking about them and describing them under these terms. Again, the whole point is that it comes down to how animals do things for *reasons* they cannot themselves account for, which is different from ourselves. However, the more intelligent the animal the more complex its' life seems to be, which opens up for deeper analysis into the study of why they do this and why they do that.. and I fully agree that brains still are tremendously complicated objects and so the only way we can look into the mind of an animal (that we cannot communicate with) is to observe the behavior of the animal
+Abe Grimm You obviously know how to write and you obviously have interesting things to say. Why then would you ignore basic paragraph structure? It is MUCH harder to read a giant square block of text than it is to read one with paragraphs. It is also much easier to understand what is being written, not simply to read it. You made the effort to write what you did, spend the extra fifteen seconds you would need to create paragraphs.
If you want to look at it that way, then I do all things "simply by programmed instinct" just as much as those albatrosses. So do you. It's called the result of natural selection.
+Peter Cohen yes, I realized this instantly just now when glancing back at it. I'm not at all used to composing long youtube comments, let alone ensure they're easy to follow... This is what happens when you ramble!
+WingsOnTheBus But then you could just as well say that a major human instinct *is* to reason, to philosophize, to doubt, to reconsider.. All these things that most animals can't achieve due to the restrictions on their own instincts
+writerconsidered Dopamine is not love. If a particular neurotransmitter was love, it would be oxytocin, but the neurochemistry responsible for love to occur is much too complex to be elicited by a single type of neurotransmitter.
Huge,amazing! It´s just awesome to listen to someone articulate so brilliantly what i´ve felt about this for so long and taking it a step further. I thank you as i feel humbled as a human being for our collective behavior towards the animal kingdom. Priceless!
Beautiful and Essential Conference about our sisters and brothers of our planet, the others species. Human is so destructive, if humans don't repair they must disappear. Animals are much better than humans some are more intelligent but all of them did not choose to dominate the others species and dd not destruct Biodiversity!
For a class I was asked to share my thoughts on this video. Since I found Safina's speech quite fascinating, I thought I'd copy-paste my response below. I agree with Safina’s main idea, and I think he argues it wonderfully. One point I found quite compelling was his initial claims regarding the material basis of human psychology. If it is the _physical_ structures in our brain and nervous system that enable us to think and feel, and other species contain similar (or even identical) brain structures, then is it not reasonable to infer that animals could experience things like emotions, thoughts, and consciousness just as do humans? Safina goes on to expose the hypocrisy among those who on one hand claim that _it is fallacious to extend the human experience to other species_ , while themselves recognizing responses among animals such as hunger, fear, or aggression. Ultimately, what I think Safina does best is break down the essentialist bias that colors many peoples’ grandiose attitude toward humans. He takes several of the alleged _defining features_ of humans, then demonstrates how these features are not so unique, as they are prevalent in many other species. Although Safina eventually concedes that humans are special, he posits that this distinction is not one of certain characteristics people have that animals do not, but rather the _magnitude_ with which humans display characteristics common to many species. In other words, humans feel and do the same things as animals, only to a greater degree.
I hate plastic waste. Politicians pat each other on the back for putting a price on plastic bags in supermarkets. What about the rest of it? It should ALL be recycled.
Yes, over a long, long time, but then it breaks down into little bits and chemicals and it's everywhere. Meanwhile, every sea bird studied now has plastic in it's belly, and I've read there's whole floating continents made entirely of plastic too. It's probably inside us. It ought to be stopped.
+Tremolo We are all products of the same process. To say that there's something inherently different about one species is not scientific. We see humans do something, we go inside see neurons at work and glands secreting hormones. Many other animals close to us on the evolutionary tree have the exact same things. To say that there's something inherently different here is unscientific.
+Tekin Beyoglu Inherent differences are what separate species. Tell me at what part in the video did he answer the question "What are animals thinking and feeling?", because what I saw was a narrative constructed by applying human emotions to other animals.
Tremolo No inherent differences cannot exist on a continuum. His answer to the question was that they have the same basic feelings. Don't know about thinking because I'm not sure what that means.
+Tekin Beyoglu But he only showed reaction to stimuli and memory. Then filled in the gaps with human emotions. There was no exploration of animal psychology here, just human psychology applied to animals.
I like this man, and am filled with sorrow when I see the unnecessary atrocities of mankind against sentient beings for things like ivory, fur and skins which we generally don’t need anymore. This video made me sad hearing about the pain mankind inflicts for no reason, I had to listen instead of watch the terrible imagery.
Can someone PLEASE make "The Dog Whisperer" (et al, soooo many dudes on TV that claim they're "experts" on dogs & dog behaviour that tell people their dogs have a 3-minute memory, UGH) watch this until they understand that YES dogs -- and other animals -- have their own thoughts AND feelings?? I seriously think this is one of the most important TED Talk of all time. We need to stop our addiction to plastic and we NEED to start understanding that we are NOT "allowed" to do this to our world.
I'm glad there's more people that think like this. Humans that are capable of saving the rest of this planet from humans. I see the natural fear of humans in allot of animals. Specially when you take notice of it. Kind of makes me sad being a human bean.
Amazingly intelligent and insightful talk by Carl Safina. Thank you Carl and TED Talks. Interestingly people were laughing at the beginning but when he got to the "boiling and frying" part the room went silent... and I hope they were shaken a little bit, enough to make them rethink their eating habits.
what a great lecture! heart touching one ,its not love that make us human its so sad that its true ,we don't have love in our heart even for our own race :( .
Number of neurons is also a factor for intelligence. Not just the number of folds or the size of a brain. Neuron sizes differ very much in size among species. And as you may expect, humams have a lot of neurons for their size. Ours are way smaller than those of mice. That said, no clue where dolphins sit on the neuron size scale.
+HexerPsy I think it's the nerve connections that count the most. Also, it's hard to determine the intelligence of animals on a human perspective. Of course we are superior over other animals in language skills(as what the consensus is), but we can't echolocate, but our eyes function a lot better than the bats', yet eagles' eyes are a lot better, but eagles wouldn't fly around and think about gravity and understanding the universe, perceivably not.
Kun Lin I think you are mixing up skill with intelligence. Plenty of animals have skills, organs or otherwise that are physically impossible for humans. Likewise, we have opposable thumbs, which allows us to grasp things and use objects beyond what most animals can ever do. Of course, no measure is ever going to fully balance or capture of what we call intelligence. Every scale will have limitations. Before, we used to consider brain size compared to body size. Turns out, number of neurons is a better measure. But then again - that number says nothing yet about the location or distribution of the neurons in the brain. However, I havent heard anything about research for the influence of the number of connections. Thinking about it, i dont think it matters. Having very few connections is going to make a simple system which is dumb. But having very large connections makes one signal spread almost everywhere, creating a general network that may have issues with specializing or keeping signals within compartments. Its influence probably is a bell curve, while a brain with more neurons, requires a slight bit more connections - but its benefit should be fairly linear.
While I agree entirely with the point he's making, that anecdote about the dolphins 14:51 was a bit woowoo. "how could the dolphins know that one of the human hearts stopped?" (or maybe it was that they simply didn't see that one crew member so didn't respond the same, or maybe it was something completely unrelated to the humans? rather than invoking some sort of dolphin-energy-life-force-sense bs)
Video title immediately reminded me of the book "Kinds Of Minds: Toward An Understanding Of Consciousness" by Daniel Dennett which is about minds of all kinds of animals. I love that book! xD He also did a TED talk.
But ethics and empathy are innate and can be observed in the animal kingdom (when concerns such as hunger and territory not an issue). Imho it was the concept of money rather than technology that ruined our empathy. It creates a very clear and quantifiable value of a person that has nothing to do with their usefulness in society, and once you reach the upper echelons you lose sympathy for those who have less. As they said in the "lucky losers" episode of QI, winning the lottery can make turn you conservative.
his book on the same topic is wonderful. so is deep blue sea. i read it a while back although it was published late 90s. i remember one part where he laments the loss of the blue-finned tuna. he says 'will the last one be killed by spear-gun & sold for a million dollars?' Highly likely. the first one of the season is always sold for the price of a house. apparently the tuna migration is as majestic as anything of that seen in the Serengeti.
Great video! We should all stop for a moment to really think about what we are doing to our home (the planet) and to our room mates (other living beings). There has to be a limit for our selfishness.
Wow, I think about this all the time an believe consciousness and life are synonymous. Consciousness is just the ability to have a model, however crude or detailed of your environment, and even bacteria have this internal model of what surrounds them and make choices accordingly.
+VeganRevolution It's probably better than vitamin deficiencies, and all the other issues of a vegan diet. I respect your life choices and I have no problem with vegans/vegetarians, but that is not exactly a healthy diet. Your dog meat statement was pretty childish, or a fallout 4 reference.
+Justin Fivash It is pretty childish to think oneself an expert, when it is obviously not the case. Your silly claims about the shortcomings of a balanced plant based diet are plain dumb, in the light of what we know through the use of science, these days. People lacking medical degrees, and many who do have them as well and similarly relevant educations for that matter, seem to think a lack of facts and confirmation bias is the best kind of material on which to base ones uninformed opinions.
Justin Fivash I am an ape doctor (veterinarian) among other species, so I know a little about metabolism in different species, and such. I as a human also have a special interest in the human ape. The vitamin regime you describe is not even something a person undergone "bariatric surgery" has to be on. A vegan need one supplement only, and no more. B12. The rest is available in abundance in a plant based diet, including iron and when it comes to calcium, as has been shown, a plant based diet is superior.... etc.
I fully support the cause. Humans cause a lot of pain. I am not going to say they are the worst things in the world because everyone I know cares as much as I do and some people I know care even more but I am always going to work hard to make the world better for our fellow species.
+Hooded Violin Well, if species are judged good or bad on human-perceived cruelties, look up how hyenas hunt and consume their preys. Word search recommended, the scene is quite graphic.
I honestly don't know what I'm feeling after watching this video. Emotionally tangled seems appropriate but is that accurate? I don't know. Carl's measured speaking cadence is somewhat annoying but his presentation and evolution of his message is emotionally astonishing. Tears well up in my eyes but why? Why are we taught and why do we believe humans are unique something we internally know to be false but still easily forget so that here must be shown how primitive our species truly is: We are far from evolved--except for our innate ability to destroy all things that intersect our path, usually without a seconds thought because manifest destiny is obviously ours. Isn't it? Why are we not ashamed? We aren't alone but I wish we were--right now in this reminded moment that shamefully I'll forget in the next, I know we are not what we pretend we want to be--we are what we are in actuality...Not worthy! We should be alone. It appears to be the destiny manifest and encoded within our DNA. True to our form unfortunatley we'll destroy everything worth searching for without a second thought.
In our defense, having articulated those characteristics for ourselves led to the realization of the continuum. Also, the observational data collected on other species. What makes us 'human' or differentiates us is language and cooperation, the outage of those thoughts; Not that we are more 'extreme at out shared/ inherited characteristics. A new paradigm is in the horizon, it must be, this was filmed 3 years ago and here i am, today looking for this, having reached the same conclusions he did, before hearing his facts.
This was one of the best talks i seen in a long time.
Pedro Santos I seen it too
Dear Carl Safina, thank you SO much for this video. After this talk I've stopped eating fish and from a pescetarian became a full-time vegetarian. It's been five years now. The best decision in my life.
"What make us human is that of all the things that make up our mind and their minds, our is more extreme. We are more compassionate, more creative, more destructive" Well said, and great great passionate talk.
Thanks Carl. One of the most beautiful books I've ever read.
Through beautiful and intriguing stories about animal's life, you highlight things that should be obvious and yet they aren't for the majority of us.
This book is a rare and unique jem in the desert of today's ignorance.
The first thing I thought was: why should we rely on those kinds of stories? Aren't they probably misjudgements of the situation? But that brings us just back to his main point: we know too few things to make even the simplest of statements, because we do not care. And when someone finds out something about animal minds, we seem to still not care terribly much. On the other hand we live with them from birth to death.
+Nils Petras if you search for a bit, you will find amazing scientific proof of how capable animals actually are.
a huge amount of experiments have been done; e.g. rats helping other rats who are in distress, with no personal gain www.livescience.com/17378-rats-show-empathy.html
it's just that a scientific explanation to each of those animals, their feelings and thoughts would be long enough to fill an entire TED talk, while he focused on diversity and the morality behind it, so there wasn't really place to go that deep
Hopefully, one day, they may forgive us.
*Edit - They shouldn't
You're right. They shouldn't. They feel everything we do.
@@scottcupp8129 Especially whales, dolphins, elephants and rhinos.
@@zappawench6048 Yes sir. They are extremely intelligent beings!
Yeah after every human did to animals I think it too late for them to forgive us because forgive it will take a long time not a flick of a switch. Forgive is not easy for example, if someone did something very bad to you personally and that person just say "please forgive me" it not how it work.
One of the greatest TED talks ever..
Stephen, I am with you.
I watched this so many times. And I cry every time.
Amazing. Thoughtful. Thought-provoking. Intelligent. Wonderful.
Plants have life essence as well how do we justify our practice of killing life forms to sustain our hunger??? Please advise I want to become vegan but I feel like plants have souls.
I'd rather not starve to death F.N.
F.N. Bartleby
Well, don’t you know for CERTAIN that animals have a soul? think about that
if we don't know if an animal experiences consciousness like we do we should still treat them with respect. I mean, why not?
Yes! If it looks like a person, it should be considered a person until proven not a person.
Yes, you know, the other sentient beings we share this planet with.
It doesn't matter of it's conscious or not. If you're really smart, would you not help somebody that might not be as smart as you, its called empathy and we all have it (well maybe except fish)
@@wingsonthebus the question of personhood is immaterial to the question of morality. Neither are qualities like intelligence, size, strength, etc. Why is it wrong to beat someone? Is it because the beaten person is a person, intelligent or conscious of his own existence? No, it is wrong because it inflicts pain and suffering on him. On the other hand, to beat a stone would not be immoral. A stone cannot feel pain. So, the criterion that really matters is can they suffer?
Linguaphile I totally agree. I think my 3-years-ago self was defining a person as something like a self with an inner experience, but in any case I under-explained.
Enlightening talk... Pushed my boundaries. Thank you Mr.Safina.
By far my favorite TED talk for a long, long time. Very refreshing - absolutely loved it!!!
Incredible.
We are monsters
We ask "does our pet love us" because, at least in the most healthy of cases, we know as well as we can do that we ourselves love the pet. I keep pet snails and love them dearly, despite them being "simple slimy pests" to most people. A lot of the time I watch them go about their business, looking for food, exploring the terrarium, making love, digging holes, grooming and eating, I love to wonder what it's like to be one of them.
Great talk!
One of the best talks I have ever listened to. Deeply moved.
It shows how much more empathetic the majority of animals are to us.
+Amusix They are not as unstable/insane. We stopped being a working part of the ecosystem, when we acquired enough pathogenic traits to invade and spread through the whole organism ("Planet Earth's surface environment), metastatically. Exponentially growing cancer does what it does, as usual. We are cancer.
Maxander2001 That's a negative way of seeing things.
Amusix How so? Is it not exactly how it is? If you look up how cancer develops, it follows similar pathways. With similar end results. It learns how to invade tissue, blood vessels and travel through them, to settle new colonies in the organism... once growth is exponential and unending, the outcome is given.
👧🏼
I loved where he said " We create grief and a lot of it". It is completely true. It's no wonder that animals don't like us. They've done nothing to us yet we target and kill these amazing sentient beings. Just pathetic.
Very strong and sensible speech. Thanks to TED
I have a problem with the way we hypothesize animals feel love and compassion. For example, we observe them behave in seemingly very dedicated ways toward their young - like the albatrosses toward the end of this video. But this is misguided, because often times animals don't think about these things.
We as humans are cursed with thinking everything through, so of course it would be a bigger commitment to our lives if we did something similar to what the albatross does, but that's because we analyze and rationalize everything. The meaning of 'love' in its profound sense includes the *choice* of doing something of good value, and that excludes its attribution to lower-intelligence animals that do things simply by programmed instinct, however dedicated it is to another creatures' well being. Indeed most animals work like this; They do things for a reason, not by preference.
So in my opinion it is more helpful to say:
"the albatross flies 10,000 miles to feed its' young because it benefits the survival of the next generation of the species, and this fact has been imbedded into the conduct of the general population, and so if we observe a specimen *not* engaging in this behavior, we do *not* assume the bird has better things to do and it doesn't love its' offspring, but that there has been some sort of malfunction in its cognition."
rather than to say:
"the bird is equally, or close to equally, able to form loving relations with other birds as we are to our own kin, and we can see this in how it travels thousands of miles to feed its' young. If we analogize this to our own species, it would be a very, very loving gesture indeed."
After all, we often see how animals like these mistake other nestlings for their own, and surely this is indicative of an inherent disconnect between mother and specific young which, in my opinion, also shows an emotional detachment, if not direct incapacity to hold such emotion.
Of course the bird is an easy example of this, but the point is that the way we *read* emotional behavior in other species is often biased by how we have come to register emotion in our own kind through interconnection - which is more accurate by all measure, since we can validate our reasoning through communication. In fact I would argue that our entire definition of love and compassion is built on our own set of behavioral patterns, and so we often fall into the trap of mischaracterizing other animals by talking about them and describing them under these terms. Again, the whole point is that it comes down to how animals do things for *reasons* they cannot themselves account for, which is different from ourselves.
However, the more intelligent the animal the more complex its' life seems to be, which opens up for deeper analysis into the study of why they do this and why they do that.. and I fully agree that brains still are tremendously complicated objects and so the only way we can look into the mind of an animal (that we cannot communicate with) is to observe the behavior of the animal
Well said
+Abe Grimm You obviously know how to write and you obviously have interesting things to say. Why then would you ignore basic paragraph structure? It is MUCH harder to read a giant square block of text than it is to read one with paragraphs. It is also much easier to understand what is being written, not simply to read it. You made the effort to write what you did, spend the extra fifteen seconds you would need to create paragraphs.
If you want to look at it that way, then I do all things "simply by programmed instinct" just as much as those albatrosses. So do you. It's called the result of natural selection.
+Peter Cohen yes, I realized this instantly just now when glancing back at it. I'm not at all used to composing long youtube comments, let alone ensure they're easy to follow... This is what happens when you ramble!
+WingsOnTheBus But then you could just as well say that a major human instinct *is* to reason, to philosophize, to doubt, to reconsider.. All these things that most animals can't achieve due to the restrictions on their own instincts
I don't think the question "Does my dog love me" as necessarily narcissistic. I love my dog and I want to know if the my dog reciprocates that love.
I think he was trying to introduce his point by having a lot of people relate.
+Myles Bishop He introduced his point wrong.
+Overonator you have dopamine, dopamine is love. dogs have dopamine, dopamine is love. you love your dog and your dog loves you.
+writerconsidered Dopamine is not love. If a particular neurotransmitter was love, it would be oxytocin, but the neurochemistry responsible for love to occur is much too complex to be elicited by a single type of neurotransmitter.
You're funny God. Only you would know how to introduce his point correctly.
Huge,amazing!
It´s just awesome to listen to someone articulate so brilliantly what i´ve felt about this for so long and taking it a step further.
I thank you as i feel humbled as a human being for our collective behavior towards the animal kingdom.
Priceless!
Beautiful and Essential Conference about our sisters and brothers of our planet, the others species. Human is so destructive, if humans don't repair they must disappear. Animals are much better than humans some are more intelligent but all of them did not choose to dominate the others species and dd not destruct Biodiversity!
He missed the obvious:
Why _should_ they love us?
Wow. I am truly moved and maybe forever changed.
For a class I was asked to share my thoughts on this video. Since I found Safina's speech quite fascinating, I thought I'd copy-paste my response below.
I agree with Safina’s main idea, and I think he argues it wonderfully. One point I found quite compelling was his initial claims regarding the material basis of human psychology. If it is the _physical_ structures in our brain and nervous system that enable us to think and feel, and other species contain similar (or even identical) brain structures, then is it not reasonable to infer that animals could experience things like emotions, thoughts, and consciousness just as do humans?
Safina goes on to expose the hypocrisy among those who on one hand claim that _it is fallacious to extend the human experience to other species_ , while themselves recognizing responses among animals such as hunger, fear, or aggression.
Ultimately, what I think Safina does best is break down the essentialist bias that colors many peoples’ grandiose attitude toward humans. He takes several of the alleged _defining features_ of humans, then demonstrates how these features are not so unique, as they are prevalent in many other species.
Although Safina eventually concedes that humans are special, he posits that this distinction is not one of certain characteristics people have that animals do not, but rather the _magnitude_ with which humans display characteristics common to many species. In other words, humans feel and do the same things as animals, only to a greater degree.
Everyone needs to watch this.
We are all kin under the skin. Beautiful, insightful talk. Thank you, Mr. Carl Safina.
i was never aware of the horrible things we did to animals. thx for helping me realize
I always had a feeling that we've been underestimating animals.
I hate plastic waste. Politicians pat each other on the back for putting a price on plastic bags in supermarkets. What about the rest of it? It should ALL be recycled.
Yes, over a long, long time, but then it breaks down into little bits and chemicals and it's everywhere. Meanwhile, every sea bird studied now has plastic in it's belly, and I've read there's whole floating continents made entirely of plastic too. It's probably inside us. It ought to be stopped.
Lol, you too, Minty.
Why do you think that?
Im not being mean im just asking
One of the best and saddest TED talks I've seen in a long while :'(
Carl Safina, you're a fantastic human being. Thank you for this talk.
Anthropomorphic personification of only the cute animals with his own morality imposed on top. No science here.
+Tremolo We are all products of the same process. To say that there's something inherently different about one species is not scientific. We see humans do something, we go inside see neurons at work and glands secreting hormones. Many other animals close to us on the evolutionary tree have the exact same things. To say that there's something inherently different here is unscientific.
+Tekin Beyoglu Inherent differences are what separate species. Tell me at what part in the video did he answer the question "What are animals thinking and feeling?", because what I saw was a narrative constructed by applying human emotions to other animals.
Tremolo No inherent differences cannot exist on a continuum. His answer to the question was that they have the same basic feelings. Don't know about thinking because I'm not sure what that means.
+Tekin Beyoglu But he only showed reaction to stimuli and memory. Then filled in the gaps with human emotions. There was no exploration of animal psychology here, just human psychology applied to animals.
Tremolo I think he was actually arguing for anthropomorphic personification as a valid point.
I like this man, and am filled with sorrow when I see the unnecessary atrocities of mankind against sentient beings for things like ivory, fur and skins which we generally don’t need anymore. This video made me sad hearing about the pain mankind inflicts for no reason, I had to listen instead of watch the terrible imagery.
Can someone PLEASE make "The Dog Whisperer" (et al, soooo many dudes on TV that claim they're "experts" on dogs & dog behaviour that tell people their dogs have a 3-minute memory, UGH) watch this until they understand that YES dogs -- and other animals -- have their own thoughts AND feelings?? I seriously think this is one of the most important TED Talk of all time. We need to stop our addiction to plastic and we NEED to start understanding that we are NOT "allowed" to do this to our world.
This made me cry
So touching and very sad
I'm glad there's more people that think like this. Humans that are capable of saving the rest of this planet from humans.
I see the natural fear of humans in allot of animals. Specially when you take notice of it. Kind of makes me sad being a human bean.
This makes me cry
Thank u for showing the human mind that there's more lives out just as important as ours.
Thank you for everything you shared. People, we must save the earth
Amazingly intelligent and insightful talk by Carl Safina. Thank you Carl and TED Talks. Interestingly people were laughing at the beginning but when he got to the "boiling and frying" part the room went silent... and I hope they were shaken a little bit, enough to make them rethink their eating habits.
One of the best speech ever! 💛💛💛💛💛💛💛💛
Beautiful speech and video.
Thank you for the share.
what a great lecture! heart touching one ,its not love that make us human its so sad that its true ,we don't have love in our heart even for our own race :( .
The best and only video one needs to watch
Number of neurons is also a factor for intelligence. Not just the number of folds or the size of a brain. Neuron sizes differ very much in size among species. And as you may expect, humams have a lot of neurons for their size. Ours are way smaller than those of mice.
That said, no clue where dolphins sit on the neuron size scale.
+HexerPsy You have many neurons, but no synapses.
+ArticulatedHypernova Nice xD
+HexerPsy humans have the largest cortical neuron count by far
+HexerPsy I think it's the nerve connections that count the most. Also, it's hard to determine the intelligence of animals on a human perspective. Of course we are superior over other animals in language skills(as what the consensus is), but we can't echolocate, but our eyes function a lot better than the bats', yet eagles' eyes are a lot better, but eagles wouldn't fly around and think about gravity and understanding the universe, perceivably not.
Kun Lin
I think you are mixing up skill with intelligence. Plenty of animals have skills, organs or otherwise that are physically impossible for humans. Likewise, we have opposable thumbs, which allows us to grasp things and use objects beyond what most animals can ever do.
Of course, no measure is ever going to fully balance or capture of what we call intelligence. Every scale will have limitations.
Before, we used to consider brain size compared to body size. Turns out, number of neurons is a better measure.
But then again - that number says nothing yet about the location or distribution of the neurons in the brain.
However, I havent heard anything about research for the influence of the number of connections.
Thinking about it, i dont think it matters. Having very few connections is going to make a simple system which is dumb. But having very large connections makes one signal spread almost everywhere, creating a general network that may have issues with specializing or keeping signals within compartments.
Its influence probably is a bell curve, while a brain with more neurons, requires a slight bit more connections - but its benefit should be fairly linear.
While I agree entirely with the point he's making, that anecdote about the dolphins 14:51 was a bit woowoo. "how could the dolphins know that one of the human hearts stopped?" (or maybe it was that they simply didn't see that one crew member so didn't respond the same, or maybe it was something completely unrelated to the humans? rather than invoking some sort of dolphin-energy-life-force-sense bs)
Yup, doesn't even explain it, just kept going like he's feeding into his argument.
... I care ... I care deeply ... i am human ... i am very human ... i will do ... i will help ... i will let them be.
One of the best lectures on this channel
Greatest night
made me cry
Video title immediately reminded me of the book "Kinds Of Minds: Toward An Understanding Of Consciousness" by Daniel Dennett which is about minds of all kinds of animals. I love that book! xD
He also did a TED talk.
very true
This man's definitions are exceptional.
Thank you
amazing talk..so sad that they die 😢what can we do though?
Brilliant and moving and the best thing I've watched all week. I hope it inspires us all to do something about it.
wow!! what a powerful words of truth
I think we lost something when we aquired language.
+spidaminida I agree.
+spidaminida
The problem is that we are a species that learned technology before learning ethics and empathy.
But ethics and empathy are innate and can be observed in the animal kingdom (when concerns such as hunger and territory not an issue).
Imho it was the concept of money rather than technology that ruined our empathy. It creates a very clear and quantifiable value of a person that has nothing to do with their usefulness in society, and once you reach the upper echelons you lose sympathy for those who have less.
As they said in the "lucky losers" episode of QI, winning the lottery can make turn you conservative.
+spidaminida & We lost everything when we acquired currency. ;)
osiris Blanche
Boom. Truth bomb.
Heart and eye opening, truly powerful message!
that was beautiful!
his book on the same topic is wonderful. so is deep blue sea. i read it a while back although it was published late 90s. i remember one part where he laments the loss of the blue-finned tuna. he says 'will the last one be killed by spear-gun & sold for a million dollars?' Highly likely. the first one of the season is always sold for the price of a house. apparently the tuna migration is as majestic as anything of that seen in the Serengeti.
Love is not makes us human - reason is what makes us human. I wouldn't have it any other way.
thanks guy your awesome.
I'm so glad other people share my feelings about animals!!!! Thank you for this awesome presentation :-)
PS: I'm a vegetarian hhhhh
great talk. every human needs to hear this and understand this!
This was eye opening
Great video! We should all stop for a moment to really think about what we are doing to our home (the planet) and to our room mates (other living beings). There has to be a limit for our selfishness.
Wow, I think about this all the time an believe consciousness and life are synonymous. Consciousness is just the ability to have a model, however crude or detailed of your environment, and even bacteria have this internal model of what surrounds them and make choices accordingly.
respect animals, respect the Earth, respect each other
I hope you are vegan
I would like to hug Carl's dog
GENIAL UN MAESTRO GRACIAS
“Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.” - Mark Twain
thanks - this film and message is awesome and needed
That was a very powerful Ted Talk. Thank you Mr. Safina and thank you Ted for enlightening my day.
I were wondering since the correlation of brain activity of animals (domesticated) with those of their owners.....Wow!
Be Vegan ^__^
***** eating corpses is not a way to go about that.
***** dog meat?
+VeganRevolution It's probably better than vitamin deficiencies, and all the other issues of a vegan diet. I respect your life choices and I have no problem with vegans/vegetarians, but that is not exactly a healthy diet. Your dog meat statement was pretty childish, or a fallout 4 reference.
+Justin Fivash It is pretty childish to think oneself an expert, when it is obviously not the case. Your silly claims about the shortcomings of a balanced plant based diet are plain dumb, in the light of what we know through the use of science, these days. People lacking medical degrees, and many who do have them as well and similarly relevant educations for that matter, seem to think a lack of facts and confirmation bias is the best kind of material on which to base ones uninformed opinions.
Justin Fivash I am an ape doctor (veterinarian) among other species, so I know a little about metabolism in different species, and such. I as a human also have a special interest in the human ape. The vitamin regime you describe is not even something a person undergone "bariatric surgery" has to be on. A vegan need one supplement only, and no more. B12. The rest is available in abundance in a plant based diet, including iron and when it comes to calcium, as has been shown, a plant based diet is superior.... etc.
This reminds me of Lyall Watson's writing!
absolutely brilliant! i just shared with friends. continue to educate and inspire!
Absolutely beautiful
I fully support the cause. Humans cause a lot of pain. I am not going to say they are the worst things in the world because everyone I know cares as much as I do and some people I know care even more but I am always going to work hard to make the world better for our fellow species.
+Hooded Violin Well, if species are judged good or bad on human-perceived cruelties, look up how hyenas hunt and consume their preys. Word search recommended, the scene is quite graphic.
This is amazing.. this is why I am vegan and I hope everyone understand that all life is sacred.
yes, man is the climax of animals behaviour, difficult to understand by animals. I am bit nascist about the future of this beautiful comapny.
This is a really interesting video.
thank you!!!
Fascinating! Many thanks.
Perfect. That is a good question for human.
Absolutely awesome! Love it.
Gracias Carl!!!
Espectacular!!!
That was outstanding, thank you Carl!
very good talk
Making this required viewing for my kid.
Somos nós o dilúvio para os animais, simplesmente impactante
Finally a good Ted talk!
Maybe I should have searched. Are animals self aware? Are they able to make intelligent decisions?
this was beautiful disturbing brilliant & powerful. thank you!
I honestly don't know what I'm feeling after watching this video. Emotionally tangled seems appropriate but is that accurate? I don't know. Carl's measured speaking cadence is somewhat annoying but his presentation and evolution of his message is emotionally astonishing. Tears well up in my eyes but why? Why are we taught and why do we believe humans are unique something we internally know to be false but still easily forget so that here must be shown how primitive our species truly is: We are far from evolved--except for our innate ability to destroy all things that intersect our path, usually without a seconds thought because manifest destiny is obviously ours. Isn't it? Why are we not ashamed?
We aren't alone but I wish we were--right now in this reminded moment that shamefully I'll forget in the next, I know we are not what we pretend we want to be--we are what we are in actuality...Not worthy!
We should be alone. It appears to be the destiny manifest and encoded within our DNA. True to our form unfortunatley we'll destroy everything worth searching for without a second thought.
In our defense, having articulated those characteristics for ourselves led to the realization of the continuum. Also, the observational data collected on other species.
What makes us 'human' or differentiates us is language and cooperation, the outage of those thoughts; Not that we are more 'extreme at out shared/ inherited characteristics.
A new paradigm is in the horizon, it must be, this was filmed 3 years ago and here i am, today looking for this, having reached the same conclusions he did, before hearing his facts.