Homo sapiens are best described as:
(Deliberately forcing the choice on this because it's NOT an easy or obvious question. I know it's tempting to waffle, but I want to see what people think if they are cornered on this one. )
This question is just as annoying if you ask it about "ants" as if a category as wild and diverse as ants could be analyzed in this way.
But, I see some parallels in the reasons why it's confounding.
@futurebird I answered before I read this comment, so I was not thinking of ants more than usual.
I think that overall, humans are specialists and that our specialty is „smart tool-user“, but we‘re pretty good at changing environments to be more amenable to our specialty niche.
This might be biological nonsense though, I’ll have to read up on the biological definitions.
@futurebird I answered "generalist" because humans as a species live in a wide variety of environments, consume a wide variety of foods, and have done so since the era of stone tools. As individuals, humans are probably more prone to specialization, because we live in large groups, in which different humans have different roles.
@futurebird I find myself conflicted about the comparison to ants. On one level, there's a serious problem in that there are many (22?) thousands of species of ants, some of which are probably generalists, but I guess maybe the specialists make up the majority of species. On another level, ants, somewhat like humans, are social organisms (but eusocial), and different ants in a colony take up specialist roles within it, etc.
What's similar is the ability to coordinate thousands of individuals. But many things are very very different.
But, I think that "mass coordination" is a big point of success either way.
@futurebird oh, great point. But in humans, mass coordination seems to be a relatively recent thing; from my (amatuer) understanding of anthropology, for most of human history, probably all humans lived in smaller groups, maybe a few dozen to a few hundred at most. Groups of thousands practically didn't exist until 6000 years ago. Even then, they remained a minority of humans until about 1000 years ago. Ants, on the other hand, depending on linage, have had mass coordination much longer.
Well the way that I look at it humans were just another languishing primate with fewer than a million individuals until the mass cooperation got going.
It's what I see as the source of all the madness and wonder.
@futurebird true. If aliens had investigated earth prior to about 6000 years ago, and been asked which mammals were the best mass coordinators, they surely would not have picked humans. Even 2000 years ago, maybe not. (Had to limit it to mammals, because there are a lot of invertebrates that occur in large numbers, but how coordinated? Few compare with ants. )
2000 years ago; there were cities with a million people in them.
Even 4000 years ago; there were cities with 100,000 people.
@michael_w_busch @futurebird true, but they were very much the exception, and not how most humans at those times lived.
@llewelly @futurebird This is highly debatable. Which mammals would you have picked?
@khleedril @futurebird well, there are plenty of unglates, such as bison, which group together in larger groups. Also, some rodents. The "coordination" of said groups could be debated, but the same is true of human civilizations.
@futurebird This question is mean. I don't know what the "official" answer is, but I could make a strong argument for either.
@futurebird The belief that we are generalists has caused so much harm in the world. It is not supported by the evidence, but seems to be quite the item of faith for most folks.
@GeePawHill
I suppose that depends on what you mean by 'specialist', & what evidence you apply to support a claim that we're specialists.
Also I'm curious what examples you would give for the harm the belief causes.
@futurebird
May 29, 2025, 6:05 PM@futurebird As a species, we mostly have advantages through tool making and use, so one could say we're generalists that are highly adapted to specialize.
But being so adapted to tool making and use would mean we're a specialist, specifically one that can generalise well.
I'm not even going to look for other ways to respond to this now.
May 29, 2025, 7:48 PM@jens @futurebird I'd argue that our special ability is our ability to communicate and coordinate as a group which prevents wheel reinvention. This dovetails with the oxygen comment: An individual human can't survive the challenger deep, but human society can get someone there. The people in the sub don't have to be the same people that know about turning screws or measuring crush depths or wiring switches or debugging sonar.
May 29, 2025, 7:58 PM@EMR @futurebird IMHO other animals communicate and coordinate just fine.
What's special about us is written language, which is tool use. That preserves and distributes knowledge better.
But word of mouth? Hmm. I'm less convinced.
May 29, 2025, 8:11 PM@jens @futurebird human societies with no or little written language are still able to deal with any environment (and indeed, had most of the globe in-hand before recorded history began.) It's certainly nice but not essential.
May 29, 2025, 8:22 PM@EMR @futurebird I thought we were talking about what we are, not what's essential
May 29, 2025, 6:09 PM@futurebird anything that can't survive without oxygen is a specialist.
May 29, 2025, 6:18 PM@futurebird generalist species made up of specialist individuals and groups. No problem is insurmountable (and no ecosystem cannot be flattened) if you throw enough humans at it, but you can't just drop a random lone human into a random ecosystem and expect them to be successful every time.
@futurebird
Oh, definitely generalists. We've got more generals than any other species afaik.
More seriously though, in biology this distinction is about niche, not behavior, so "tool-use" isn't really a valid specialization. And we've got humans everywhere including both the Sahara and the Antarctic, so it's a little hard to argue that we're specialists.
Likewise for "ants" as a collective group.
Most of us become specialists., Most of us start out as generalists who can become almost any kind of specialist.
<lawyer-in-drug-commercial-voice>
Your mileage may vary, subject to terms, conditions, circumstances, and I'm afraid to say genetics, but maybe that as well.
Do not taunt Happy Fun mindsets.
</lawyer-in-drug-commercial-voice>
@futurebird
as a species, generalist. But peculiarly, it arises I think from rapidly changing environments, each in turn applying pressure to specialize: the specialization often needed to happen in time frames that evolution couldn't address, so the repetition of the meta-pattern over time drove us toward the ABILITY to specialize.
As inidividuals we also face pressure to specialize, & forget our innate talent for general application.
@futurebird Put another way: The ability to specialize is a general ability.
I voted for "specialists"
Humans specialize in pretty much three things
- pursuit-to-exhaustion predation
- eating pretty much anything
- pack-level problem-solving with story-telling
All three of those specialist skills are responsible for the (generalist) widespread expansion of humans into almost every biome available
It's bigger than "pack-level" humans can co-ordinate thousands of people and people don't always need to know each other to cooperate.
Ask me why I notice that in particular. ;)
Our coordination *above* the pack level is something we're …working on.
calling out "pack/band" co-op bc H sapiens really *is* specialized on understanding the motivation of a small group of conspecifics
We can read mental state off another person *that we know well*, using v v low-SNR channels (consider: the "meaningful glance", "finishing your sentences")
But we keep hitting these nasty externalities/singularities when we try to scale beyond Dunbar's Number
@trochee @futurebird
Right but 2 & 3 are specializations to improve generalization.
I think this dialectic is exactly why @futurebird posted the poll
@futurebird
Specialists with some variability to live and operate in a narrow permutation of variables:
- Operating temperature: 37.5 degrees Centigrade
- Require atmospheric oxygen + internal (hemoglobin, mitochondria, etc) to produce energy to live & function
- Bi-brachial and bi-crusal, have fingers and toes
- Usually detect light via eyes between 400nm(red)-700nm(blue).
However the “amount of stuff” (permutations) available amongst that specialization is incredible.
@futurebird
Homo sapiens - Genus and species are always written like that, capital then lowercase, usually in Italics bc Latin (or Latin-ish, depending)
And Homo sapiens isn't a plural, not specifically to what you said (which works) but generally, sometimes people think so bc of the S but 'sapiens' is just Latin for 'wise'
Because the naming dudes were so modest.
@futurebird Sorry, but I refuse to be cornered. Maybe I could answer if I knew more.
@futurebird I'm not sure I even see the argument for specialists. Please explain, if you feel like it.
Without a network of technology, people and other kinds of support individual people are kind of ineffective and could die easily.
@futurebird For sure! Perhaps community requires specialists? Or perhaps it naturally develops specialists—individuals born as generalists with the capability of specializing.
@futurebird @gleick yes -- we specialize pretty heavily on biological "technologies" for social interaction, like language.
So an interesting uneasiness about the question: to us, it feels like what we can do is a generalist ability; is the specialist infrastructure that enables what we can do as it were universal (so any generalist will have it), or is it just a specialization we got?
@futurebird I think that humans are specialists, and another point is a lot of the technology is not really homo sapien but is invented by previous "species" maybe not to the point of total speciation but still things like obligated need for clothing and cooking, and devolved to need them, even today millions would die without the Haber-Bosch process, and that is some extreme specialization. Our ability to generalize is purely because it is not homo sapien, and can evolve without genetics.
May 30, 2025, 5:45 AM