[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

But then there was a lot of rubbish such as all that nonsense about Peugeot.

Originally Posted by issybird

This was the kind of thing that irritated me. Just because something is abstract rather than concrete doesn't mean it's not real, and calling it a shared fiction didn't increase my understanding. It was one of the many times I said to myself, "Get on with it!"

I think I would have enjoyed it more had I been able to read it; then I could have skimmed the repetitive bits instead of having to plod through them.

I think he made an excellent case using the Peugeot illustration. As a man, Peugeot certainly exists, but as a company, what physical attribute can you point to and say, "This is the company." Manufacturing plants come and go, but the company remains. Ultimately it is all on paper, just as any work of fiction. Moreover, the point he was making was not that Peugeot is a shared fiction, but that the creation of shared fictions is, as far as we can tell, a uniquely human endeavor that has allowed us to transcend our biology.

Spoiler:

[T]he truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled. Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution. Many animals and human species could previously say, ‘Careful! A lion!’ Thanks to the Cognitive Revolution, Homo sapiens acquired the ability to say, ‘The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.’ This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language.

Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings. Even today, a critical threshold in human organisations falls somewhere around this magic number.

How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.

Originally Posted by GtrsRGr8

Thirty to 40 percent of the world's human population has Neanderthal genomes in them. While that fact does not necessarily imply that there are some humans in the world with a majority of Neanderthal, rather than homo sapiens, in them, it comes mighty close to implying that. And I feel sure that there is some empirical data out there somewhere which would confirm that. So for some of us MobileReaders "our species" probably is, well, other than homo sapiens. Of course, I'm sure that I have no Neanderthal in me, however.

I don't think that's the way genes work. We also share 1% of genetic material with monkeys, but I don't think you're going to find humans who have a majority of chimp genes. Humans that do have neanderthal genes have around 1-2%.