h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

So does this show the Human Being is an animal or that it can learn well and develops according to its environment? I believe the human being is an evolved animal (as in changed, not particularly better). With such similar tendancies to animals and such close genetic make-up to apes, does it really make sense that these similarities only have a common designer to blame?

I think it just proves that social animals starved of contact with their own kind become very strange individuals. It's certainly wrong to compare them with early humans or even primates, since they too had/have their own social structures and depended on each other for survival. Remove an individual from that group at an early age, and (provided it survived to reintegrate with them) would have a tough time fitting in. Case in point: the attempts in Borneo to teach orphaned or liberated Orangutans how to be Orangutans so they can go back into the wild to their own kind.

BTW I'm giving this Entry a link at the h2g2 Historical Society, which can be found here:

http://www.h2g2.com/A240058

I didn't mean to say they were primitive or anything. I just wondered if the way they act animal-like proves that creationism is false.

Sorry if you got the impression I was singling you out there, I was more or less responding to some ideas in the Entry.

I think the only question raised by so-called feral children is "What is Man's natural state?" The evidence of cultural and societal activity over several hundred thousand years leads one to believe that a feral state without any ability to relate to one's own kind *isn't* natural. But this doesn't really prove anything in the Creation vs Evolution debate ie it doesn't answer the question of whether a societal state of Man is the will of a divine creator or survival of the fittest, if you get my drift.

Ok, in accepting that humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, I've already sort of capitulated to the idea of evolution. But since both are equally difficult to prove empirically (evolution is certainly an incomplete jigsaw, eg Archaeopteryx, the so-called dinosaur-bird has recently been proven to be a case of mistaken identity), it ends up being like Schroedinger's Cat, you don't know whether the cat (or God) is alive or dead until you open the box and look, only this time you can't open the box.

I think the rationale for me writing the article was to try to understand how close we are to our animal neighbours, and what are the essential properties of mankind that make us different.

I agree that the stories shown above provide, at best, an incomplete picture, but because our "civilised" society has such a huge effect on the shaping of us humans from day one, it is very difficult for us to judge how far we really have gone.

CR

Actually your Entry reminded of a book I read. I think it was about the social anthropology of food, and ashamedly I can remember neither the title nor the author, but there was a chapter on feral children, who because of their growing up outside of any culture system, are of obvious interest to anthropologists.

It's funny that this article reminds you of a non-fiction book on the social anthropology of food, because this entry reminds me of a work of fiction by Paul Auster titled "City of Glass." In fact, the entire feral children article is written almost verbatim to a section in the previously mentioned book. I might add that "City of Glass" is a wonderful read and I recommend it highly. It actually addresses the idea of feral children in an interesting way, and also the tower of Babel, Detective work, and other such interests.

Come to think of it, it is as good a detective book as any written about Dirk Gently.