[Lestat]

Originally Posted by Chimaera182

Also, humans aren't the only ones who build cities. Beehives, anthills, rabbit burrows, they're all communities that they all build. Some of the "cities" these animals build are quite elaborate. Most animals are social creatures, and can construct grandiose projects, just as much as humans can.

But their buildings always follow the same patterns, repeating their hardwired behavioural patterns. And they would be hard put to adapt their building practices to other clearly distinct environments

Originally Posted by Chimaera182

I still don't see the justification of superiority by being masters of their environment. The environment is our enemy, yet many animals adapt to it. This proves them to be more resilient, stronger, better. We make the environment adapt to us, which proves us weaker and less capable of withstanding nature. I fail to see that as making us superior.

So if you master your enemy you're weaker then when you adapt to it? We can withstand nature better because we build to withstand nature.
How do you get from "we make the environment adapt to us" to "which proves us weaker and less capable of withstanding nature". Sorry I don't see any logical reasoning in that phrase? Certainly by adapting the environment we enhance our chances of withstanding nature? Does overcoming your physical weaknesses by ingenuity make you weak overall?

My benchmark is, amongst others, survival success of the species in a diversity of circumstances and environments for "superiority", which is more or less an amoral criterion. Which is also why I keep putting "superior" between quotation marks.

Magrus seems to judge superiority animals & humans a like by some kind of moral or ethical criterion. Which is bizarre since he himself said they will have another idea of right or wrong maybe wholy alien to us, and as for me I doubt that animals manifest any moral behaviour. In both cases applying "our" morals on their behaviour, to judge who is "superior" is in my opinion misguided, since you use something that is uniquely applicable to humans to judge other specieses.

However...in order to make me believe a species is better than all of the rest, I'm going to look into things other than sheer accomplishments. I can build stuff, and I can move and adapt, and I can wander down my street, break into people's houses, kill the occupents and take their stuff. Would that, in your eyes, make me superior to the people I kill?

Will society then afterwards, lock you up and condemn either to prison or not?
Would people who continue to do this stand a larger survival chance than those that organise themselves and have the behaviour between them regulated? I think not, basically because far more people live normal lives than people who go around murdering and robbing and when too large a portion of human society indulges in that type of behaviour it breaks down, of which I witnessed the aftermath. So that type of behaviour is in the end self destructive.

Moreover, I speak of the biological & evolutionary "superiority", not of moral "superiority". And species is again confounded with individual.

And it's not the extinction of tiger or the destruction of the tiger that determines it's "inferiority", but it's inability to cope with a changing environment, it's inability to change its behavioural patterns, again, as a species.