what makes me human essay

What Makes Us Human?

• Philosophical Theories & Ideas
• Major Philosophers

There are multiple theories about what makes us human—several that are related or interconnected. The topic of human existence has been pondered for thousands of years. Ancient Greek philosophers Socrates , Plato , and Aristotle all theorized about the nature of human existence as have countless philosophers since. With the discovery of fossils and scientific evidence, scientists have developed theories as well. While there may be no single conclusion, there is no doubt that humans are, indeed, unique. In fact, the very act of contemplating what makes us human is unique among animal species. 

Most species that have existed on planet Earth are extinct, including a number of early human species. Evolutionary biology and scientific evidence tell us that all humans evolved from apelike ancestors more than 6 million years ago in Africa. Information obtained from early-human fossils and archaeological remains suggests that there were 15 to 20 different species of early humans several million years ago. These species, called hominins , migrated into Asia around 2 million years ago, then into Europe and the rest of the world much later. Although different branches of humans died out, the branch leading to the modern human, Homo sapiens , continued to evolve.

Humans have much in common with other mammals on Earth in terms of physiology but are most like two other living primate species in terms of genetics and morphology: the chimpanzee and bonobo, with whom we spent the most time on the phylogenetic tree. However, as much like the chimpanzee and bonobo as we are, the differences are vast.

Apart from our obvious intellectual capabilities that distinguish us as a species, humans have several unique physical, social, biological, and emotional traits. Although we can't know precisely what is in the minds of other animals, scientists can make inferences through studies of animal behavior that inform our understanding.

Thomas Suddendorf, professor of psychology at the University of Queensland, Australia, and author of " The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us From Other Animals ," says that "by establishing the presence and absence of mental traits in various animals, we can create a better understanding of the evolution of mind. The distribution of a trait across related species can shed light on when and on what branch or branches of the family tree the trait is most likely to have evolved." 

As close as humans are to other primates, theories from different fields of study, including biology, psychology, and paleoanthropology, postulate that certain traits are uniquely human. It is particularly challenging to name all of the distinctly human traits or reach an absolute definition of "what makes us human" for a species as complex as ours.

The Larynx (Voice Box)

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Dr. Philip Lieberman of Brown University explained on NPR's "The Human Edge" that after humans diverged from an early-ape ancestor more than 100,000 years ago, the shape of the mouth and vocal tract changed, with the tongue and larynx, or voice box, moving further down the tract.

The tongue became more flexible and independent and was able to be controlled more precisely. The tongue is attached to the hyoid bone, which is not attached to any other bones in the body. Meanwhile, the human neck grew longer to accommodate the tongue and larynx, and the human mouth grew smaller.

The larynx is lower in the throats of humans than it is in chimpanzees, which, along with the increased flexibility of the mouth, tongue, and lips, is what enables humans to speak as well as to change pitch and sing. The ability to speak and develop language was an enormous advantage for humans. The disadvantage of this evolutionary development is that this flexibility comes with an increased risk of food going down the wrong tract and causing choking. 

The Shoulder

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Human shoulders have evolved in such a way that, according to David Green, an anthropologist at George Washington University, "the whole joint angles out horizontally from the neck, like a coat hanger." This is in contrast to the ape shoulder, which is pointed more vertically. The ape shoulder is better suited for hanging from trees, whereas the human shoulder is better for throwing and hunting, giving humans invaluable survival skills. The human shoulder joint has a wide range of motion and is very mobile, affording the potential for great leverage and accuracy in throwing.

The Hand and Opposable Thumbs

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Although other primates also have opposable thumbs, meaning they can be moved around to touch the other fingers, imparting the ability to grasp, the human thumb differs from that of other primates in terms of exact location and size. According to the Center for Academic Research & Training in Anthropogeny, humans have "a relatively longer and more distally placed thumb " and "larger thumb muscles." The human hand has also evolved to be smaller and the fingers straighter. This has given us better fine motor skills and the ability to engage in detailed precision work such as writing with a pencil. 

Naked, Hairless Skin

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Although there are other mammals that are hairless—the whale, elephant, and rhinoceros, to name a few—humans are the only primates to have mostly naked skin . Humans evolved that way because changes in the climate 200,000 years ago that demanded that they travel long distances for food and water. Humans also have an abundance of sweat glands, called eccrine glands. To make these glands more efficient, human bodies had to lose their hair to better dissipate heat. This enabled them to obtain the food they needed to nourish their bodies and brains, while keeping them at the right temperature and allowing them to grow.

Standing Upright and Bipedalism

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One of the most significant traits that make humans unique preceded and possibly led to the development of other notable characteristics: bipedalism —that is, using only two legs for walking. This trait emerged in humans millions of years ago, early in human evolutionary development and gave humans the advantage of being able to hold, carry, pick up, throw, touch, and see from a higher vantage point, with vision as the dominant sense. As human legs evolved to become longer about 1.6 million years ago and humans became more upright, they were able to travel great distances as well, expending relatively little energy in the process.

Blushing Response

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In his book "The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals," Charles Darwin said that " blushing is the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions." It is part of the "fight or flight response" of the sympathetic nervous system that causes the capillaries in human cheeks to dilate involuntarily in response to feeling embarrassment. No other mammal has this trait, and psychologists theorize that it has social benefits as well. Given that it is involuntary, blushing is considered to be an authentic expression of emotion.

The Human Brain

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The human feature that is most extraordinary is the brain. The relative size, scale, and capacity of the human brain are greater than those of any other species. The size of the human brain relative to the total weight of the average human is 1-to-50. Most other mammals have a ratio of only 1-to-180. 

The human brain is three times the size of a gorilla brain. Although it is the same size as a chimpanzee brain at birth, the human brain grows more during the lifespan of a human to become three times the size of the chimpanzee brain. In particular, the prefrontal cortex grows to encompass 33 percent of the human brain compared to 17 percent of the chimpanzee brain. The adult human brain has about 86 billion neurons, of which the cerebral cortex comprises 16 billion. In comparison, the chimpanzee cerebral cortex has 6.2 billion neurons.

It is theorized that childhood is much longer for humans, with offspring remaining with their parents for a longer period of time because it takes longer for the larger, more complex human brain to fully develop. Studies suggest that the brain is not fully developed until the ages of 25 to 30.

The Mind: Imagination, Creativity, and Forethought

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The human brain and the activity of its countless neurons and synaptic possibilities contribute to the human mind. The human mind is different from the brain: The brain is the tangible, visible part of the physical body whereas the mind consists of the intangible realm of thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and consciousness.

In his book "The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us From Other Animals," Thomas Suddendorf suggests:

"Mind is a tricky concept. I think I know what a mind is because I have one—or because I am one. You might feel the same. But the minds of others are not directly observable. We assume that others have minds somewhat like ours—filled with beliefs and desires—but we can only infer those mental states. We cannot see, feel, or touch them. We largely rely on language to inform each other about what is on our minds." (p. 39)

As far as we know, humans have the unique power of forethought: the ability to imagine the future in many possible iterations and then to actually create the future we imagine. Forethought also allows humans generative and creative abilities unlike those of any other species.

Religion and Awareness of Death

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One of the things that forethought also gives humans is the awareness of mortality. Unitarian Universalist minister Forrest Church (1948-2009) explained his understanding of religion as "our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. Knowing we are going to die not only places an acknowledged limit upon our lives, it also gives a special intensity and poignancy to the time we are given to live and love."

Regardless of one's religious beliefs and thoughts about what happens after death, the truth is that, unlike other species who live blissfully unaware of their impending demise, most humans are conscious of the fact that someday they will die. Although some species react when one of their own has died, it is unlikely that they actually think about death—that of others or their own. 

The knowledge of mortality also spurs humans on to great achievements, to making the most out of the lives they have. Some social psychologists maintain that without the knowledge of death, the birth of civilization and the accomplishments it has spawned might never have occurred. 

Storytelling Animals

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Humans also have a unique type of memory, which Suddendorf calls "episodic memory." He says, "Episodic memory is probably closest to what we typically mean when we use the word 'remember' rather than 'know.'" Memory allows human beings to make sense of their existence and to prepare for the future, increasing their chances of survival, not only individually but also as a species.  

Memories are passed on through human communication in the form of storytelling, which is also how knowledge is passed from generation to generation, allowing human culture to evolve. Because human beings are highly social animals, they strive to understand one another and to contribute their individual knowledge to a joint pool, which promotes more rapid cultural evolution. In this way, unlike other animals, each human generation is more culturally developed than preceding generations.

Drawing on research in neuroscience, psychology, and evolutionary biology, in his book, "The Storytelling Animal," Jonathon Gottschall delves into what it means to be an animal that relies so uniquely on storytelling. He explains what makes stories so important: They help us to explore and simulate the future and test different outcomes without having to take real physical risks; they help to impart knowledge in a way that is personal and relatable to another person; and they encourage pro-social behavior, since "the urge to produce and consume moralistic stories is hard-wired into us."

Suddendorf writes this about stories: 

"Even our young offspring are driven to understand others' minds, and we are compelled to pass on what we have learned to the next generation. As an infant starts on the journey of life, almost everything is a first. Young children have a ravenous appetite for the stories of their elders, and in play they reenact scenarios and repeat them until they have them down pat. Stories, whether real or fantastical, teach not only specific situations but also the general ways in which narrative works. How parents talk to their children about past and future events influences children's memory and reasoning about the future: the more parents elaborate, the more their children do."

Thanks to their unique memory and ability to acquire language skills and write, humans around the world, from the very young to the very old, have been communicating and transmitting their ideas through stories for thousands of years, and storytelling remains integral to being human and to human culture.

Biochemical Factors

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Defining what makes humans human can be tricky as more is learned about the behavior of other animals and fossils are uncovered that revise the evolutionary timeline, but scientists have discovered certain biochemical markers that are specific to humans. 

One factor that may account for human language acquisition and rapid cultural development is a gene mutation that only humans have on the  FOXP2 gene , a gene we share with Neanderthals and chimpanzees, that is critical for the development of normal speech and language. 

A study by Dr. Ajit Varki of the University of California, San Diego, found another mutation unique to humans in the polysaccharide covering of the human cell surface. Dr. Varki found that the addition of just one oxygen molecule in the polysaccharide that covers the cell surface differentiates humans from all other animals. 

The Future of the Species

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Humans are both unique and paradoxical. While they are the most advanced species intellectually, technologically, and emotionally—extending human lifespans, creating artificial intelligence, traveling to outer space, showing great acts of heroism, altruism and compassion—they also have the capacity to engage in primitive, violent, cruel, and self-destructive behavior. 

• Arain, Mariam, et al. “Maturation of the Adolescent Brain.” Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment, Dove Medical Press, 2013, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3621648/.

• “Brains.” The Smithsonian Institution's Human Origins Program, 16 Jan. 2019, humanorigins.si.edu/human-characteristics/brains.

• Gottschall, Jonathan. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Mariner Books, 2013.

• Gray, Richard. “Earth - The Real Reasons Why We Walk on Two Legs, and Not Four.” BBC, BBC, 12 Dec. 2016, www.bbc.com/earth/story/20161209-the-real-reasons-why-we-walk-on-two-legs-and-not-four.

• “Introduction to Human Evolution.” The Smithsonian Institution's Human Origins Program, 16 Jan. 2019, humanorigins.si.edu/education/introduction-human-evolution.

• Laberge, Maxine. “Chimps, Humans and Monkeys: What's the Difference?” Jane Goodall's Good for All News, 11 Sept. 2018, news.janegoodall.org/2018/06/27/chimps-humans-monkeys-whats-difference/.

• Masterson, Kathleen. “From Grunting to Gabbing: Why Humans Can Talk.” NPR, NPR, 11 Aug. 2010, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129083762.

• “Mead Project Source Page, A.” Charles Darwin: The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals: Chapter 13, brocku.ca/MeadProject/Darwin/Darwin_1872_13.html.

• “Naked Truth, The.” Scientific American, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-naked-truth/.

• Suddendorf, Thomas. "The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals." Basic Books, 2013.

• “Thumb Opposability.” Thumb Opposability | Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny (CARTA), carta.anthropogeny.org/moca/topics/thumb-opposability.

• The Nature-Culture Divide
• Hard Determinism Explained
• What Does It Mean to Live the Good Life?
• Early Modern Philosophy
• Three Basic Principles of Utilitarianism, Briefly Explained
• Philosophy of Culture
• Nietzsche's "The Use And Abuse Of History"
• The Slave Boy Experiment in Plato's 'Meno'
• Hypostatization Fallacy: Ascribing Reality to Abstractions
• An Introduction to Virtue Ethics
• Arguments Against Relativism
• Summary and Analysis of Meno by Plato
• Summary and Analysis of Plato's 'Euthyphro'
• What Is Liberalism in Politics?
• The Idea of Nature

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Essay: What really makes us human?

By Michael Corballis

29 August 2007

WHAT is it that makes humans so dominant on Planet Earth? Clearly, the answer does not lie in our physical attributes, for other species are stronger, faster or capable of such superhuman feats as flight or long-distance travel under water. The answer surely lies in our mental capacities.

According to evolutionary psychologists, we acquired our mental superiority during the Pleistocene, that period from around 1.8 million years ago when our forebears were forced to adapt to a perilous hunter-gatherer existence on the African savannah. Rather than compete directly with the killer cats that roamed the plains, the Pleistocene hominins adapted…

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Introductory essay

Written by the educator who created What Makes Us Human?, a brief look at the key facts, tough questions and big ideas in his field. Begin this TED Study with a fascinating read that gives context and clarity to the material.

As a biological anthropologist, I never liked drawing sharp distinctions between human and non-human. Such boundaries make little evolutionary sense, as they ignore or grossly underestimate what we humans have in common with our ancestors and other primates. What's more, it's impossible to make sharp distinctions between human and non-human in the paleoanthropological record. Even with a time machine, we couldn't go back to identify one generation of humans and say that the previous generation contained none: one's biological parents, by definition, must be in the same species as their offspring. This notion of continuity is inherent to most evolutionary perspectives and it's reflected in the similarities (homologies) shared among very different species. As a result, I've always been more interested in what makes us similar to, not different from, non-humans.

Evolutionary research has clearly revealed that we share great biological continuity with others in the animal kingdom. Yet humans are truly unique in ways that have not only shaped our own evolution, but have altered the entire planet. Despite great continuity and similarity with our fellow primates, our biocultural evolution has produced significant, profound discontinuities in how we interact with each other and in our environment, where no precedent exists in other animals. Although we share similar underlying evolved traits with other species, we also display uses of those traits that are so novel and extraordinary that they often make us forget about our commonalities. Preparing a twig to fish for termites may seem comparable to preparing a stone to produce a sharp flake—but landing on the moon and being able to return to tell the story is truly out of this non-human world.

Humans are the sole hominin species in existence today. Thus, it's easier than it would have been in the ancient past to distinguish ourselves from our closest living relatives in the animal kingdom. Primatologists such as Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal, however, continue to clarify why the lines dividing human from non-human aren't as distinct as we might think. Goodall's classic observations of chimpanzee behaviors like tool use, warfare and even cannibalism demolished once-cherished views of what separates us from other primates. de Waal has done exceptional work illustrating some continuity in reciprocity and fairness, and in empathy and compassion, with other species. With evolution, it seems, we are always standing on the shoulders of others, our common ancestors.

Primatology—the study of living primates—is only one of several approaches that biological anthropologists use to understand what makes us human. Two others, paleoanthropology (which studies human origins through the fossil record) and molecular anthropology (which studies human origins through genetic analysis), also yield some surprising insights about our hominin relatives. For example, Zeresenay Alemsegad's painstaking field work and analysis of Selam, a 3.3 million-year old fossil of a 3-year-old australopithecine infant from Ethiopia, exemplifies how paleoanthropologists can blur boundaries between living humans and apes.

Selam, if alive today, would not be confused with a three-year-old human—but neither would we mistake her for a living ape. Selam's chimpanzee-like hyoid bone suggests a more ape-like form of vocal communication, rather than human language capability. Overall, she would look chimp-like in many respects—until she walked past you on two feet. In addition, based on Selam's brain development, Alemseged theorizes that Selam and her contemporaries experienced a human-like extended childhood with a complex social organization.

Fast-forward to the time when Neanderthals lived, about 130,000 – 30,000 years ago, and most paleoanthropologists would agree that language capacity among the Neanderthals was far more human-like than ape-like; in the Neanderthal fossil record, hyoids and other possible evidence of language can be found. Moreover, paleogeneticist Svante Pääbo's groundbreaking research in molecular anthropology strongly suggests that Neanderthals interbred with modern humans. Paabo's work informs our genetic understanding of relationships to ancient hominins in ways that one could hardly imagine not long ago—by extracting and comparing DNA from fossils comprised largely of rock in the shape of bones and teeth—and emphasizes the great biological continuity we see, not only within our own species, but with other hominins sometimes classified as different species.

Though genetics has made truly astounding and vital contributions toward biological anthropology by this work, it's important to acknowledge the equally pivotal role paleoanthropology continues to play in its tandem effort to flesh out humanity's roots. Paleoanthropologists like Alemsegad draw on every available source of information to both physically reconstruct hominin bodies and, perhaps more importantly, develop our understanding of how they may have lived, communicated, sustained themselves, and interacted with their environment and with each other. The work of Pääbo and others in his field offers powerful affirmations of paleoanthropological studies that have long investigated the contributions of Neanderthals and other hominins to the lineage of modern humans. Importantly, without paleoanthropology, the continued discovery and recovery of fossil specimens to later undergo genetic analysis would be greatly diminished.

Molecular anthropology and paleoanthropology, though often at odds with each other in the past regarding modern human evolution, now seem to be working together to chip away at theories that portray Neanderthals as inferior offshoots of humanity. Molecular anthropologists and paleoanthropologists also concur that that human evolution did not occur in ladder-like form, with one species leading to the next. Instead, the fossil evidence clearly reveals an evolutionary bush, with numerous hominin species existing at the same time and interacting through migration, some leading to modern humans and others going extinct.

Molecular anthropologist Spencer Wells uses DNA analysis to understand how our biological diversity correlates with ancient migration patterns from Africa into other continents. The study of our genetic evolution reveals that as humans migrated from Africa to all continents of the globe, they developed biological and cultural adaptations that allowed for survival in a variety of new environments. One example is skin color. Biological anthropologist Nina Jablonski uses satellite data to investigate the evolution of skin color, an aspect of human biological variation carrying tremendous social consequences. Jablonski underscores the importance of trying to understand skin color as a single trait affected by natural selection with its own evolutionary history and pressures, not as a tool to grouping humans into artificial races.

For Pääbo, Wells, Jablonski and others, technology affords the chance to investigate our origins in exciting new ways, adding pieces into the human puzzle at a record pace. At the same time, our technologies may well be changing who we are as a species and propelling us into an era of "neo-evolution."

Increasingly over time, human adaptations have been less related to predators, resources, or natural disasters, and more related to environmental and social pressures produced by other humans. Indeed, biological anthropologists have no choice but to consider the cultural components related to human evolutionary changes over time. Hominins have been constructing their own niches for a very long time, and when we make significant changes (such as agricultural subsistence), we must adapt to those changes. Classic examples of this include increases in sickle-cell anemia in new malarial environments, and greater lactose tolerance in regions with a long history of dairy farming.

Today we can, in some ways, evolve ourselves. We can enact biological change through genetic engineering, which operates at an astonishing pace in comparison to natural selection. Medical ethicist Harvey Fineberg calls this "neo-evolution". Fineberg goes beyond asking who we are as a species, to ask who we want to become and what genes we want our offspring to inherit. Depending on one's point of view, the future he envisions is both tantalizing and frightening: to some, it shows the promise of science to eradicate genetic abnormalities, while for others it raises the specter of eugenics. It's also worth remembering that while we may have the potential to influence certain genetic predispositions, changes in genotypes do not guarantee the desired results. Environmental and social pressures like pollution, nutrition or discrimination can trigger "epigenetic" changes which can turn genes on or off, or make them less or more active. This is important to factor in as we consider possible medical benefits from efforts in self-directed evolution. We must also ask: In an era of human-engineered, rapid-rate neo-evolution, who decides what the new human blueprints should be?

Technology figures in our evolutionary future in other ways as well. According to anthropologist Amber Case, many of our modern technologies are changing us into cyborgs: our smart phones, tablets and other tools are "exogenous components" that afford us astonishing and unsettling capabilities. They allow us to travel instantly through time and space and to create second, "digital selves" that represent our "analog selves" and interact with others in virtual environments. This has psychological implications for our analog selves that worry Case: a loss of mental reflection, the "ambient intimacy" of knowing that we can connect to anyone we want to at any time, and the "panic architecture" of managing endless information across multiple devices in virtual and real-world environments.

Despite her concerns, Case believes that our technological future is essentially positive. She suggests that at a fundamental level, much of this technology is focused on the basic concerns all humans share: who am I, where and how do I fit in, what do others think of me, who can I trust, who should I fear? Indeed, I would argue that we've evolved to be obsessed with what other humans are thinking—to be mind-readers in a sense—in a way that most would agree is uniquely human. For even though a baboon can assess those baboons it fears and those it can dominate, it cannot say something to a second baboon about a third baboon in order to trick that baboon into telling a fourth baboon to gang up on a fifth baboon. I think Facebook is a brilliant example of tapping into our evolved human psychology. We can have friends we've never met and let them know who we think we are—while we hope they like us and we try to assess what they're actually thinking and if they can be trusted. It's as if technology has provided an online supply of an addictive drug for a social mind evolved to crave that specific stimulant!

Yet our heightened concern for fairness in reciprocal relationships, in combination with our elevated sense of empathy and compassion, have led to something far greater than online chats: humanism itself. As Jane Goodall notes, chimps and baboons cannot rally together to save themselves from extinction; instead, they must rely on what she references as the "indomitable human spirit" to lessen harm done to the planet and all the living things that share it. As Goodall and other TED speakers in this course ask: will we use our highly evolved capabilities to secure a better future for ourselves and other species?

I hope those reading this essay, watching the TED Talks, and further exploring evolutionary perspectives on what makes us human, will view the continuities and discontinuities of our species as cause for celebration and less discrimination. Our social dependency and our prosocial need to identify ourselves, our friends, and our foes make us human. As a species, we clearly have major relationship problems, ranging from personal to global scales. Yet whenever we expand our levels of compassion and understanding, whenever we increase our feelings of empathy across cultural and even species boundaries, we benefit individually and as a species.

Get started

Zeresenay Alemseged

The search for humanity's roots, relevant talks.

Spencer Wells

A family tree for humanity.

Svante Pääbo

Dna clues to our inner neanderthal.

Nina Jablonski

Skin color is an illusion.

We are all cyborgs now

Harvey Fineberg

Are we ready for neo-evolution.

Frans de Waal

Moral behavior in animals.

Jane Goodall

What separates us from chimpanzees.

May 1, 2009

12 min read

What Makes Us Human?

Comparisons of the genomes of humans and chimpanzees are revealing those rare stretches of DNA that are ours alone

By Katherine S. Pollard

Six years ago I jumped at an opportunity to join the international team that was identifying the sequence of DNA bases, or “letters,” in the genome of the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes). As a biostatistician with a long-standing interest in human origins, I was eager to line up the human DNA sequence next to that of our closest living relative and take stock. A humbling truth emerged: our DNA blueprints are nearly 99 percent identical to theirs. That is, of the three billion letters that make up the human genome, only 15 million of them—less than 1 percent—have changed in the six million years or so since the human and chimp lineages diverged.

Evolutionary theory holds that the vast majority of these changes had little or no effect on our biology. But somewhere among those roughly 15 million bases lay the differences that made us human. I was determined to find them. Since then, I and others have made tantalizing progress in identifying a number of DNA sequences that set us apart from chimps.

An Early Surprise Despite accounting for just a small percentage of the human genome, millions of bases are still a vast territory to search. To facilitate the hunt, I wrote a computer program that would scan the human genome for the pieces of DNA that have changed the most since humans and chimps split from a common ancestor. Because most random genetic mutations neither benefit nor harm an organism, they accumulate at a steady rate that reflects the amount of time that has passed since two living species had a common forebear (this rate of change is often spoken of as the “ticking of the molecular clock”). Acceleration in that rate of change in some part of the genome, in contrast, is a hallmark of positive selection, in which mutations that help an organism survive and reproduce are more likely to be passed on to future generations. In other words, those parts of the code that have undergone the most modification since the chimp-human split are the sequences that most likely shaped humankind.

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In November 2004, after months of debugging and optimizing my program to run on a massive computer cluster at the University of California, Santa Cruz, I finally ended up with a file that contained a ranked list of these rapidly evolving sequences. With my mentor David Haussler leaning over my shoulder, I looked at the top hit, a stretch of 118 bases that together became known as human accelerated region 1 (HAR1). Using the U.C. Santa Cruz genome browser, a visualization tool that annotates the human genome with information from public databases, I zoomed in on HAR1. The browser showed the HAR1 sequences of a human, chimp, mouse, rat and chicken—all of the vertebrate species whose genomes had been decoded by then. It also revealed that previous large-scale screening experiments had detected HAR1 activity in two samples of human brain cells, although no scientist had named or studied the sequence yet. We yelled, “Awesome!” in unison when we saw that HAR1 might be part of a gene new to science that is active in the brain.

We had hit the jackpot. The human brain is well known to differ considerably from the chimpanzee brain in terms of size, organization and complexity, among other traits. Yet the developmental and evolutionary mechanisms underlying the characteristics that set the human brain apart are poorly understood. HAR1 had the potential to illuminate this most mysterious aspect of human biology.

We spent the next year finding out all we could about the evolutionary history of HAR1 by comparing this region of the genome in various species, including 12 more vertebrates that were sequenced during that time. It turns out that until humans came along, HAR1 evolved extremely slowly. In chickens and chimps—whose lineages diverged some 300 million years ago—only two of the 118 bases differ, compared with 18 differences between humans and chimps, whose lineages diverged far more recently. The fact that HAR1 was essentially frozen in time through hundreds of millions of years indicates that it does something very important; that it then underwent abrupt revision in humans suggests that this function was significantly modified in our lineage.

A critical clue to the function of HAR1 in the brain emerged in 2005, after my collaborator Pierre Vanderhaeghen of the Free University of Brussels obtained a vial of HAR1 copies from our laboratory during a visit to Santa Cruz. He used these DNA sequences to design a fluorescent molecular tag that would light up when HAR1 was activated in living cells—that is, copied from DNA into RNA. When typical genes are switched on in a cell, the cell first makes a mobile messenger RNA copy and then uses the RNA as a template for synthesizing some needed protein. The labeling revealed that HAR1 is active in a type of neuron that plays a key role in the pattern and layout of the developing cerebral cortex, the wrinkled outermost brain layer. When things go wrong in these neurons, the result may be a severe, often deadly, congenital disorder known as lissencephaly (“smooth brain”), in which the cortex lacks its characteristic folds and exhibits a markedly reduced surface area. Malfunctions in these same neurons are also linked to the onset of schizophrenia in adulthood.

HAR1 is thus active at the right time and place to be instrumental in the formation of a healthy cortex. (Other evidence suggests that it may additionally play a role in sperm production.) But exactly how this piece of the genetic code affects cortex development is a mystery my colleagues and I are still trying to solve. We are eager to do so: HAR1’s recent burst of substitutions may have altered our brains significantly.

Beyond having a remarkable evolutionary history, HAR1 is special because it does not encode a protein. For decades, molecular biology research focused almost exclusively on genes that specify proteins, the basic building blocks of cells. But thanks to the Human Genome Project, which sequenced our own genome, scientists now know that protein-coding genes make up just 1.5 percent of our DNA. The other 98.5 percent—sometimes referred to as junk DNA—contains regulatory sequences that tell other genes when to turn on and off and genes encoding RNA that does not get translated into a protein, as well as a lot of DNA having purposes scientists are only beginning to understand.

Based on patterns in the HAR1 sequence, we predicted that HAR1 encodes RNA—a hunch that Sofie Salama, Haller Igel and Manuel Ares, all at U.C. Santa Cruz, subsequently confirmed in 2006 through lab experiments. In fact, it turns out that human HAR1 resides in two overlapping genes. The shared HAR1 sequence gives rise to an entirely new type of RNA structure, adding to the six known classes of RNA genes. These six major groups encompass more than 1,000 different families of RNA genes, each one distinguished by the structure and function of the encoded RNA in the cell. HAR1 is also the first documented example of an RNA-encoding sequence that appears to have undergone positive selection.

It might seem surprising that no one paid attention to these amazing 118 bases of the human genome earlier. But in the absence of technology for readily comparing whole genomes, researchers had no way of knowing that HAR1 was more than just another piece of junk DNA.

Language Clues Whole-genome comparisons in other species have also provided another crucial insight into why humans and chimps can be so different despite being much alike in their genomes. In recent years the genomes of thousands of species (mostly microbes) have been sequenced. It turns out that where DNA substitutions occur in the genome—rather than how many changes arise overall—can matter a great deal. In other words, you do not need to change very much of the genome to make a new species. The way to evolve a human from a chimp-human ancestor is not to speed the ticking of the molecular clock as a whole. Rather the secret is to have rapid change occur in sites where those changes make an important difference in an organism’s functioning.

HAR1 is certainly such a place. So, too, is the FOXP2 gene, which contains another of the fast-changing sequences I identified and is known to be involved in speech. Its role in speech was discovered by researchers at the University of Oxford in England, who reported in 2001 that people with mutations in the gene are unable to make certain subtle, high-speed facial movements needed for normal human speech, even though they possess the cognitive ability to process language. The typical human sequence displays several differences from the chimp’s: two base substitutions that altered its protein product and many other substitutions that may have led to shifts affecting how, when and where the protein is used in the human body.

A recent finding has shed some light on when the speech-enabling version of FOXP2 appeared in hominids: in 2007 scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, sequenced FOXP2 extracted from a Neandertal fossil and found that these extinct humans had the modern human version of the gene, perhaps permitting them to enunciate as we do. Current estimates for when the Neandertal and modern human lineages split suggest that the new form of FOXP2 must have emerged at least half a million years ago. Most of what distinguishes human language from vocal communication in other species, however, comes not from physical means but cognitive ability, which is often correlated with brain size. Primates generally have a larger brain than would be expected from their body size. But human brain volume has more than tripled since the chimp-human ancestor—a growth spurt that genetics researchers have only begun to unravel.

One of the best-studied examples of a gene linked to brain size in humans and other animals is ASPM. Genetic studies of people with a condition known as microcephaly, in which the brain is reduced by up to 70 percent, uncovered the role of ASPM and three other genes—MCPH1, CDK5RAP2 and CENPJ—in controlling brain size. More recently, researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor have shown that ASPM experienced several bursts of change over the course of primate evolution, a pattern indicative of positive selection. At least one of these bursts occurred in the human lineage since it diverged from that of chimps and thus was potentially instrumental in the evolution of our large brains.

Other parts of the genome may have influenced the metamorphosis of the human brain less directly. The computer scan that identified HAR1 also found 201 other human accelerated regions, most of which do not encode proteins or even RNA. (A related study conducted at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, England, detected many of the same HARs.) Instead they appear to be regulatory sequences that tell nearby genes when to turn on and off. Amazingly, more than half of the genes located near HARs are involved in brain development and function. And, as is true of FOXP2, the products of many of these genes go on to regulate other genes. Thus, even though HARs make up a minute portion of the genome, changes in these regions could have profoundly altered the human brain by influencing the activity of whole networks of genes.

Beyond the Brain Although much genetic research has focused on elucidating the evolution of our sophisticated brain, investigators have also been piecing together how other unique aspects of the human body came to be. HAR2, a gene regulatory region and the second most accelerated site on my list, is a case in point. In 2008 researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory showed that specific base differences in the human version of HAR2 (also known as HACNS1), relative to the version in nonhuman primates, allow this DNA sequence to drive gene activity in the wrist and thumb during fetal development, whereas the ancestral version in other primates cannot. This finding is particularly provocative because it could underpin morphological changes in the human hand that permitted the dexterity needed to manufacture and use complex tools.

Aside from undergoing changes in form, our ancestors also underwent behavioral and physiological shifts that helped them adapt to altered circumstances and migrate into new environments. For example, the conquest of fire more than a million years ago and the agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago made foods high in starch more accessible. But cultural shifts alone were not sufficient to exploit these calorie-rich comestibles. Our predecessors had to adapt genetically to them.

Changes in the gene AMY1, which encodes salivary amylase, an enzyme involved in digesting starch, constitute one well-known adaptation of this kind. The mammalian genome contains multiple copies of this gene, with the number of copies varying between species and even between individual humans. But overall, compared with other primates, humans have an especially large number of AMY1 copies. In 2007 geneticists at Arizona State University showed that individuals carrying more copies of AMY1 have more amylase in their saliva, thereby allowing them to digest more starch. The evolution of AMY1 thus appears to involve both the number of copies of the gene and the specific changes in its DNA sequence.

Another famous example of dietary adaptation involves the gene for lactase (LCT), an enzyme that allows mammals to digest the carbohydrate lactose, also known as milk sugar. In most species, only nursing infants can process lactose. But around 9,000 years ago—very recently, in evolutionary terms—changes in the human genome produced versions of LCT that allowed adults to digest lactose. Modified LCT evolved independently in European and African populations, enabling carriers to digest milk from domesticated animals. Today adult descendants of these ancient herders are much more likely to tolerate lactose in their diets than are adults from other parts of the world, including Asia and Latin America, many of whom are lactose-intolerant as a result of having the ancestral primate version of the gene.

LCT is not the only gene known to be evolving in humans right now. The chimp genome project identified 15 others in the process of shifting away from a version that was perfectly normal in our ape ancestors and that works fine in other mammals but, in that old form, is associated with diseases such as Alzheimer’s and cancer in modern humans. Several of these disorders afflict humans alone or occur at higher rates in humans than in other primates. Scientists are currently researching the functions of the genes involved and are attempting to establish why the ancestral versions of these genes became maladaptive in us. These studies could help medical practitioners identify those patients who have a higher chance of getting one of these life-threatening diseases, in hopes of helping them stave off illness. The studies may also help researchers identify and develop new treatments.

With the Good Comes the Bad Battling disease so we can pass our genes along to future generations has been a constant refrain in the evolution of humans, as in all species. Nowhere is this struggle more evident than in the immune system. When researchers examine the human genome for evidence of positive selection, the top candidates are frequently involved in immunity. It is not surprising that evolution tinkers so much with these genes: in the absence of antibiotics and vaccines, the most likely obstacle to individuals passing along their genes would probably be a life-threatening infection that strikes before the end of their childbearing years. Further accelerating the evolution of the immune system is the constant adaptation of pathogens to our defenses, leading to an evolutionary arms race between microbes and hosts.

Records of these struggles are left in our DNA. This is particularly true for retroviruses, such as HIV, that survive and propagate by inserting their genetic material into our genomes. Human DNA is littered with copies of these short retroviral genomes, many from viruses that caused diseases millions of years ago and that may no longer circulate. Over time the retroviral sequences accumulate random mutations just as any other sequence does, so that the different copies are similar but not identical. By examining the amount of divergence among these copies, researchers can use molecular clock techniques to date the original retroviral infection. The scars of these ancient infections are also visible in the host immune system genes that constantly adapt to fight the ever evolving retroviruses.

PtERV1 is one such relic virus. In modern humans, a protein called TRIM5α works to prevent PtERV1 and related retroviruses from replicating. Genetic evidence suggests that a PtERV1 epidemic plagued ancient chimpanzees, gorillas and humans living in Africa about four million years ago. To figure out how different primates responded to PtERV1, in 2007 researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle used the many randomly mutated copies of PtERV1 in the chimpanzee genome to reconstruct the original PtERV1 sequence and re-create this ancient retrovirus. They then performed experiments to see how well the human and great ape versions of the TRIM5α gene could restrict the activity of the resurrected PtERV1 virus. Their results indicate that a single change in human TRIM5α most likely enabled our ancestors to fight PtERV1 infection more effectively than our primate cousins could. (Additional changes in human TRIM5α may have evolved in response to a related retrovirus.) Other primates have their own sets of changes in TRIM5α, probably reflecting retroviral battles that their predecessors won.

Defeating one type of retrovirus does not necessarily guarantee continued success against others, however. Although changes in human TRIM5α may have helped us survive PtERV1, these same shifts make it much harder for us to fight HIV. This finding is helping researchers to understand why HIV infection leads to AIDS in humans but not in nonhuman primates. Clearly, evolution can take one step forward and two steps back. Sometimes scientific research feels the same way. We have identified many exciting candidates for explaining the genetic basis of distinctive human traits. In most cases, though, we know only the basics about the function of these genome sequences. The gaps in our knowledge are especially large for regions such as HAR1 and HAR2 that do not encode proteins.

These rapidly evolving, uniquely human sequences do point to a way forward. The story of what made us human is probably not going to focus on changes in our protein building blocks but rather on how evolution assembled these blocks in new ways by changing when and where in the body different genes turn on and off. Experimental and computational studies now under way in thousands of labs around the world promise to elucidate what is going on in the 98.5 percent of our genome that does not code for proteins. It is looking less and less like junk every day.

Michael Tomasello: What Makes Humans Human?

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In his new book, “Becoming Human,” (Harvard University Press, 2019) Michael Tomasello brings together more than two decades of his research on what makes humans unique. The book builds on Tomasello’s work studying young children’s development, and on the psychological processes that set young children apart from human’s closest living relatives, the great apes.

Duke Today asked Tomasello to describe some of the book’s key ideas. He is James Bonk Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience.

Q: How did you become interested in the question “What makes humans unique?”

Aristotle and Descartes, for example, never saw a non-human primate, much less an ape. The primates were all wiped out of Europe by that time. Zoological Gardens were first established in the early 1800s. And so around Darwin's time they started housing monkeys and apes in zoos. Darwin met an orangutan, Jenny, in the London Zoo, and this was really quite formative for him. It gave him more courage to say that humans are also primates, because this animal, Jenny, was so similar to us.

Q: You draw from Darwin, Piaget, lots of different sources. Was it once thought that raw intelligence distinguished us from the apes?

TOMASELLO:  One of our most important studies was a huge study we did with over 100 human children and over 100 chimpanzees. We gave them a big battery of tests – a big IQ test if you will. It covered understanding of space, causality, quantities, as well as social learning, communication, reading the intentions of others.

We found that 2-year-old children – before they can read or do anything mathematical – look just like the apes on physical things, such as causality, quantities and space. But in the social domain, they are already way ahead.

So it’s not just that humans are generally smarter, it’s that we have a special kind of smarts. We are able to plug into the knowledge and skills of other people and to take their perspective, by collaborating, communication and learning from them in unique ways.

Q: Can you give one example of how the 2-year-old child looked so different from the 2-year-old chimp in those tests?

TOMASELLO:  So, the pointing gesture. Human infants typically start pointing at around 11 or 12 months of age, and when you point for them, they understand it immediately. Neither apes nor any other animals use the pointing gesture in their natural communication. So if a child is looking for something and you point behind the couch, they know you are intending to help them find the thing behind the couch.

With chimps, if they’re looking for something and you point … they’re clueless, absolutely clueless. They don’t understand that you’re trying to help them. Having unique communicative skills such as pointing - not to mention language as socially shared conventions - is absolutely essential in children’s development.

Q: Not only are humans social, you’ve called us “ultra-social.” Can you explain what you mean by that?

TOMASELLO:  There are lots of social animals, but theirs is usually a fairly simple sociality. A herd of antelope -- they don’t really interact in complicated ways. But humans interact in highly complex ways, much of it aimed at coordinating with others cooperatively and communicatively.

For 99 percent of our evolutionary history humans lived in hunter-gatherer groups. Hunter-gatherer groups are highly cooperative. It’s sort of like one big family. They are all helping one another and sacrificing for one another all the time. And being able to get along in that special way enables us to put our heads together to create new things and to solve problems that we couldn’t solve on our own.

“When people tell me how uncooperative humans are, I say, ‘You have the wrong baseline. You should hang around chimpanzees sometime!’” -- Michael Tomasello

“The fall,” as it were, was transitioning from hunter-gatherer life to agriculture and cities, where now there are lots of people living in one place. Individuals start monopolizing resources, you get power and capital, etc. So that’s the world we live in today, where some people dominate others, and there’s a lot of uncooperative behavior based on different power structures and conflicts between in-groups and out-groups.

When people are in a small group of people they know – family, friends, small communities – they’re incredibly cooperative compared to other apes.  When people tell me how uncooperative humans are, I say, “You have the wrong baseline. You should hang around chimpanzees sometime!”

Q: You talk a lot about the importance of the human sense of “we.” Are you hopeful that humans will be able to expand our sense of “we?’

TOMASELLO:  Well, in a way. But the bad news is that one of the things that brings people together is having a common enemy, being under threat. All politicians know this, especially the more authoritarian ones. Maybe aliens from outer space will invade, and we’ll all come together against that!

But seriously, I do think education and exposure to people from different cultural backgrounds tends to make people see the world more broadly and appreciate the values of others. So institutions like Duke have an important role to play.

Q: Given that so much of what makes us human depends on social learning, do you think early education is too individualistic?

TOMASELLO:  I do. One of the things I think is missing in the development and education of young children is they need more unsupervised peer interactions.

There are certain kinds of problem-solving where the key is to be able to see it from a different perspective. That’s where cooperating with peers, rather than being instructed by adults, is particularly effective.

And in the moral domain it’s absolutely essential that children sometimes interact among themselves without adult supervision to create their own moral compass. Morality is not following authoritative rules, but rather working things out cooperatively with others on an equal level.

Q: You have kids. How has your work affected your own child-rearing?

TOMASELLO:  I have a young daughter. If my daughter has a friend over to play, I go to another room. And if they come to me to resolve something, I say “I don’t know, I wasn’t there. I didn’t see it. I don’t know what happened. You guys work it out.”

That’s a pretty small thing. But that’s one concrete way it’s affected my parenting.  

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Evelyn Glennie Sounds-Off

What makes us human.

1 January 2015

For all the immense achievements of mankind I cannot help but think that a definitive answer to the question ‘what makes us human?’ eludes us. There is no concise thing we can point to, no simple ‘this’ or ‘that’, without more questions being raised. The whole matter is so enormous that it ties my brain in knots! Perhaps the fact that I am able to think about the question at all is what makes me human. In the words of Descartes: cogito ergo sum – I think therefore I am.

As a species we continually explore the complexities of our own neurology and the mechanics of our human bodies. We learn more every day about the amazing and surprising ways we exist under both favourable and adverse conditions. For instance, we are coming to realizing that our senses constitute many layers of sub-senses, as I can personally testify. Human life, as a biological and a social phenomenon, is a difficult subject to tackle all in one go, not least because our individuality is a big part of who we are. There are few traits that everybody exhibits, few parameters that we can use to define all human beings equally and universally.

This year I have been starkly reminded of the extremes humanity can reach; from the horrific death of fellow drummer Lee Rigby to the heart-wrenching situation endured by the parents and community of April Jones. Finding an answer to the question ‘what makes us human?’ seems particularly hard when viewed in the context of humanity’s extreme behaviour.

On a global level I am aware that large groups of people are traumatised by the atrocities of others. In some territories, the use of force and oppression appears to be the favoured method of resolving conflict. Such ‘resolution by force’ requires somebody – a government, a military body, a judicial system, individuals or whoever – to justify that use of force. What does this say about us a humans? Clearly some people abuse the system, judging and acting in a way that deprives affected people of their influence, their ability to defend themselves and sometimes their basic human rights. Such control comes in many guises, justified in the name of anything from democracy to dictatorial power.

On the other hand we often turn to debate in order to resolve our differences. We can debate anything from deciding what to have for lunch to deliberations over major international crises. For example, world leaders at the G8 attempt to find solutions to global problems such as starvation, the lack basic infrastructure for millions of people (in places like Africa) and the vast number of resources wasted elsewhere in the world. Our ability to debate these topics says something about our humanity, too, but so does the fact that we allow such terrible things to happen in the first place, not to mention our expectation that there will always be someone else around to solve the problems we create.

I ask myself, therefore, if the answer to my question ‘what makes us human?’ is compassion. Our capacity for substantial levels of compassion is perhaps easiest to see in the charity sector where people work tirelessly to fund improvement, offer hope and provide mechanisms to end all manner of misery, all for the benefit of others. Perhaps prayer is the answer; our long legacy of turning to omnipresent, super-human beings to guide us to resolutions we cannot find ourselves and to provide us with spiritual sanctuary from our suffering. Or maybe it is patience that defines us. After all, this is the trait I find myself turning to extremely frequently, whether I am waiting in queues at airports or striving to perfect a piece of music.

Perhaps the answer is simpler than that. I am human and I have feelings. Do my feelings make me human? If they are I face a conundrum. I know from personal experience that other species such as cats and dogs clearly have feelings too. Having empathy and sensitivity towards others is essential and can make a huge difference to our perception and treatment of others. Such traits are most notably evident in hospitals, hospices and other such caring environments. But there are issues with some organisations, individual care homes and hospitals, where there appears to be a lack of empathy and sensitivity with devastating effect.

Curiosity also plays a large part in what defines us as human. Our curiosity has been directed inward as much as outward. Research into the development and working of the human body has grown to a discipline of unimaginable scale. With every discovery about our humanity we are faced with the question of whether or not we should revise the way we envisage ourselves as human beings. The science of modern medicine has allowed us to overcome challenges that would once have killed us or left us permanently disabled. We have developed cures and prosthetics, we are able to regenerate cells from living tissue and perform countless other procedures that bring, not just the prospect of recovery, but also hope and continued quality of life. Some medical advances raise moral questions, too. For instance, our ability to manipulate human embryos brings joy to families the world over while also raising concerns about the ethical implications of our actions.

This very human sense of curiosity is my mainstay. I have found ways to feel and sense sound that do not rely on the usual physiological methods. My innate curiosity led to the discovery that I could use my body as a resonating chamber and sense sound using the whole of myself rather than only using my ears. I was then able to fulfil my hopes and dreams of becoming a musician. I have learned to understand speech by lip reading and I have learned to feel sound as if though my body were a giant ear.

So are our hopes and dreams the essence of what makes us human? Or perhaps the key is strength of character and determination. Personally, I have certainly needed all of these traits throughout the journey of my life. But I also feel being open-minded is important. Open-mindedness leads us to information that allows us to make choices and decisions we might not otherwise have made. It also brings about flexibility and adaptability. When I lost my hearing I chose to adapt and integrate myself into a mainstream school. From my perspective the choice was either to be pigeonholed as disabled or to find a way open up a new career as the world’s first full time solo percussionist. I have never regretted my ability to make my own choices!

What makes us human? Clearly the answer is complicated. I am reminded of another question that I am frequently asked: would I be better musician if I had not lost my hearing? I have no idea. But I do know life begins and ends with listening. Perhaps the fact that I have opened my body and my mind to a different way of listening enables me to be more sensitive. If other people learned to engage their bodies as a huge ear perhaps their idea of what makes us human would be affected too.

In conclusion, I feel that compassion, patience, inclusion, individuality and cultural awareness are all forms of social listening. To me, social listening is predominantly what makes us human.

© Evelyn Glennie, 2015

Image: Judit Klein (licence:  CC-BY-ND 2.0  )

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What Makes Us Human?

Among animals, humans are unique, but why?

Archaeology, Anthropology, Biology, Geography, Human Geography, Physical Geography

The Leakey family has been studying fossils in Eastern Africa since 1931, when Dr. Louis Leakey led an expedition to Olduvai Gorge , in what is now Tanzania. Louis and Mary Leakey’s middle son, Richard, eventually took over the family legacy. Richard married Meave Epps when she worked for his father and they began exploring Kenya’s Lake Turkana Basin in the late 1960s. Richard and Meave’s daughter, Louise, also became a paleontologist focusing on fossils in the Lake Turkana area. Today, both Meave and Louise Leakey are National Geographic Explorers-in-Residence. Together, they have discovered some of the most significant paleoanthropologic fossils in history. This video is an excerpt from the film Bones of Turkana . The film takes place in the area around ancient Lake Turkana. The area is known as a cradle of human life. Evidence shows that hominids may have lived near Lake Turkana 4.2 million years ago. Bones of Turkana , which highlights the Leakeys’ careers, gives greater insight into fossil-hunting, as well as depicting the lives of some human ancestors. This video focuses on some of the traits that define us as modern humans. The three traits described are bipedalism , language , and tool making. This video assumes some familiarity with the theory of evolution , the process of how organisms developed from earlier forms of life. Evolution is not a linear process, but a dynamic one. One species does not morph directly into another, but diverges from its ancestors. Evolution takes place throughout a population over a long period of time, due to environmental pressures. This video sometimes uses the phrases “more advanced” or “less advanced” which actually don’t apply to evolution. Species evolve to fit the particular environment that they are occupying at a given time, not to “advance” to a different evolutionary stage.

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What Makes You Who You Are?

Maybe not as much as you thought..

Posted June 5, 2013 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

[Article updated on 21 June 2019.]

Personality can be defined as a person's pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving. All well and good, but what happens if we dig a little bit deeper? What is "a person" and, more precisely, what does it take for a person no longer to be the same person? Are you the same, identical person at all times? Are you the same person that you were a minute, a day, a year, 10 years ago? If so, what do you have in common with the person that you were 10 years ago?

A person is a mental being, but not just any mental being, because many animals are also mental beings. A person is a self-conscious mental being who, according to the English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), is "a thinking, intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places." According to this definition, you are a person because you can think about yourself in the past, future, and conditional, and in a variety of different places: "In February I might go on a holiday to India," "Last summer I went on holiday to Florida," "Last month I could have won the lottery, if only I had bought a ticket."

If a person is "a self-conscious mental being," what is it that makes him so? Is it his body, his brain, his "soul?" Imagine that he has a serious accident that leaves him lying brain-dead on a hospital bed. His body is still alive but he is no longer self-conscious nor can he ever be again. Is he then still a person? If not, then his physical body cannot be that which makes him a person.

Let us for a moment turn to the second aspect of the question, what it takes for a person no longer to be that same person. Some philosophers have argued that a person at a time A can be the same as a person at a time B because his body or brain is the same body or brain at both times, in the sense that they are spatiotemporally continuous (continuous in space and time). Other philosophers have argued that this is not the case and that a person at a time A can be the same as a person at a time B because they are psychologically continuous, that is, the mental states of the person at a time B derive or descend from the mental states of the person at a time A.

To help elucidate this problem, the American philosopher Sydney Shoemaker (born 1931) asks us to imagine that science has advanced to such an extent that brain transplants are now possible. Two men, Mr. Brown and Mr. Robinson, each have their brain removed and operated on at the same time. However, a poorly trained assistant inadvertently puts Brown's brain into Robinson's head, and Robinson's brain into Brown's head. One of these men dies, but the other—say the one with Brown's brain and Robinson's body (let's call him "Brownson")—eventually regains consciousness. When asked his name he replies "Brown." Subsequently, he is able to recognize Brown's wife and family and to recount Brown's childhood memories, but he cannot recognize Robinson's wife and family nor recount Robinson's childhood memories.

Who then is this man Brownson with Brown's brain and Robinson's body? If he is Brown, as most people would argue, then a person cannot be reduced to a body, as indeed the earlier brain-dead scenario may already have demonstrated. This leaves us with two possibilities: Either Brownson is Brown because he has Brown's brain, or he is Brown because he is psychologically continuous with Brown.

To decide between these two possibilities, let us carry our thought experiment further still. As many people have survived with half their brain destroyed, let us imagine that Brownson's brain (or indeed anyone's brain, say Smith's) is now divided into two equal halves or hemispheres and that each hemisphere is transplanted into a brainless body. After the operation, two people awake who are both psychologically continuous with Smith, and who have the same character and memories as Smith. If both people are psychologically continuous with Smith, are they both Smith? If so, then are they also each other? Most people would argue that, even though the two people may be very similar at the time of awaking from the operation, they are in fact two people and not one and the same.

So what can we conclude from this mind-boggling discussion, and what are the implications for personality? It seems that what makes you a person, what makes you "a self-conscious mental being," depends causally upon the existence of your brain but at the same time amounts to something more than just your brain. What this might be is unclear, and perhaps for a reason.

As human beings, we have a tendency to think of our personhood as something concrete and tangible, something that exists "out there" in the real world, and that therefore extends through time. However, it is possible that personhood is in fact nothing more than a product of our minds, merely a convenient concept or schema that enables us to relate our present self with our past, future, and conditional selves.

According to the Buddha, the failure to recognize this illusion of the self is the source of all ignorance and unhappiness. It is by renouncing the self—that is, by dropping his ego defences and committing metaphorical suicide —that a person can open up to different modes of being and relating and become a pure essence of humanity. Only then is he free to recast himself as a more mindful , joyful, and productive person, and, in so doing, attain the only species of transcendence and immortality that is open to man.

Neel Burton is author of Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception .

Neel Burton, M.D. , is a psychiatrist, philosopher, and writer who lives and teaches in Oxford, England.

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Essay on What Makes A Man Truly Human

Students are often asked to write an essay on What Makes A Man Truly Human in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on What Makes A Man Truly Human

Understanding of self.

The first thing that makes a man truly human is self-awareness. This means understanding one’s thoughts, feelings, and actions. It is about knowing who we are, what we want, and why we behave in a certain way. This self-awareness sets humans apart from other creatures.

Emotional Intelligence

Another important aspect is emotional intelligence. This is the ability to recognize, understand, and manage our own emotions and those of others. It helps us to empathize with others, manage stress, and make personal decisions that achieve positive results.

Compassion and Kindness

Compassion and kindness are vital human qualities. These are feelings of understanding and caring for the pain or distress of others. It also includes acts of kindness, which are actions that help others without expecting anything in return.

Ability to Communicate

Humans have a unique ability to express thoughts and feelings through language. This ability to communicate allows us to share ideas, learn from each other, and work together. It is a key part of what makes us human.

Spirit of Inquiry

Lastly, the spirit of inquiry makes us human. This is our natural curiosity and desire to learn and understand the world around us. It drives us to ask questions, seek answers, and continually learn and grow.

250 Words Essay on What Makes A Man Truly Human

Being human: a basic understanding.

Being human is more than just being born as a human being. It’s about how we think, act, and live. It’s about our values, our relationships, and our actions.

Kindness and Compassion

One thing that makes us truly human is kindness. Kindness means being good to others. It’s about helping people when they need it. Compassion is another important thing. It means understanding other people’s feelings. When we see someone who is sad or hurt, we should try to help them feel better.

Ability to Think and Learn

Humans are different from other animals because we can think and learn. We can solve problems, make plans, and create new things. This ability is part of what makes us human. When we use our minds to learn and grow, we are being truly human.

Respect for Others

Respect is another thing that makes us human. We should treat all people with kindness and fairness, no matter who they are or where they come from. This means listening to others, understanding their feelings, and treating them the way we want to be treated.

Responsibility

Being human also means taking responsibility for our actions. If we do something wrong, we should admit it and try to make it right. This shows that we understand the difference between right and wrong, which is a big part of being human.

In conclusion, being truly human means being kind, compassionate, thoughtful, respectful, and responsible. It’s about how we treat others and how we live our lives. It’s about being the best person we can be.

500 Words Essay on What Makes A Man Truly Human

Being human: an introduction.

Being human is more than just being born as a Homo sapiens. It’s about the qualities we show, the actions we take, and the way we treat others. But what makes a man truly human? Let’s explore this further.

Emotions and Feelings

One of the things that makes us human is our ability to feel emotions. Humans can feel happiness, sadness, anger, love, and many other feelings. These emotions guide our actions and reactions. For example, if a friend is sad, we might feel sympathy and try to cheer them up. Our emotions help us connect with others and understand their experiences.

Another thing that makes us human is our ability to think and learn. Humans have a natural curiosity. We ask questions about the world around us and seek answers. We learn from our experiences and use this knowledge to make decisions. This ability to think and learn helps us grow as individuals and as a society.

Language and Communication

Humans are social beings. We live in communities and interact with others. One of the ways we do this is through language. Language allows us to express our thoughts and feelings. It helps us share our ideas and learn from others. Communication is a key part of what makes us human.

Morality and Ethics

Humans also have a sense of morality and ethics. We understand the difference between right and wrong. We have a sense of fairness and justice. These moral and ethical values guide our actions and decisions. They help us live in harmony with others and contribute to society.

Compassion and Empathy

Finally, what truly makes a man human is his ability to show compassion and empathy. Compassion is the feeling of caring for others and wanting to help them. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. These qualities allow us to form strong relationships and create a caring community.

In conclusion, being human is about more than just being a member of the Homo sapiens species. It’s about our emotions, our ability to think and learn, our use of language, our moral and ethical values, and our compassion and empathy. These qualities make us truly human. They allow us to connect with others, contribute to society, and lead meaningful lives.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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Home — Essay Samples — Philosophy — Human Nature — What Does It Mean to Be Human

What Does It Mean to Be Human

• Categories: Being a Man Human Nature

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Published: Sep 5, 2023

Words: 632 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Table of contents

The power of consciousness and thought, connections and relationships, self-awareness and identity, the pursuit of meaning and legacy, conclusion: embracing the human experience.

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Essay on Humanity

500 words essay on humanity.

When we say humanity, we can look at it from a lot of different perspectives. One of the most common ways of understanding is that it is a value of kindness and compassion towards other beings. If you look back at history, you will find many acts of cruelty by humans but at the same time, there are also numerous acts of humanity. An essay on humanity will take us through its meaning and importance.

Importance of Humanity

As humans are progressing as a human race into the future, the true essence of humanity is being corrupted slowly. It is essential to remember that the acts of humanity must not have any kind of personal gain behind them like fame, money or power.

The world we live in today is divided by borders but the reach we can have is limitless. We are lucky enough to have the freedom to travel anywhere and experience anything we wish for. A lot of nations fight constantly to acquire land which results in the loss of many innocent lives.

Similarly, other humanitarian crisis like the ones in Yemen, Syria, Myanmar and more costs the lives of more than millions of people. The situation is not resolving anytime soon, thus we need humanity for this.

Most importantly, humanity does not just limit to humans but also caring for the environment and every living being. We must all come together to show true humanity and help out other humans, animals and our environment to heal and prosper.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

The Great Humanitarians

There are many great humanitarians who live among us and also in history. To name a few, we had Mother Teresa , Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Princess Diana and more. These are just a few of the names which almost everyone knows.

Mother Teresa was a woman who devoted her entire life to serving the poor and needy from a nation. Rabindranath Tagore was an Indian poet who truly believed in humanity and considered it his true religion.

Similarly, Nelson Mandela was a great humanitarian who worked all his life for those in needs. He never discriminated against any person on the basis of colour, sex, creed or anything.

Further, Mahatma Gandhi serves as a great example of devoting his life to free his country and serve his fellow countrymen. He died serving the country and working for the betterment of his nation. Thus, we must all take inspiration from such great people.

The acts and ways of these great humanitarians serve as a great example for us now to do better in our life. We must all indulge in acts of giving back and coming to help those in need. All in all, humanity arises from selfless acts of compassion.

Conclusion of the Essay on Humanity

As technology and capitalism are evolving at a faster rate in this era, we must all spread humanity wherever possible. When we start practising humanity, we can tackle many big problems like global warming, pollution , extinction of animals and more.

FAQ of Essay on Humanity

Question 1: What is the importance of humanity?

Answer 1: Humanity refers to caring for and helping others whenever and wherever possible. It means helping others at times when they need that help the most. It is important as it helps us forget our selfish interests at times when others need our help.

Question 2: How do we show humanity?

Answer 2: All of us are capable of showing humanity. It can be through acknowledging that human beings are equal, regardless of gender, sex, skin colour or anything. We must all model genuine empathy and show gratitude to each other and express respect and humility.

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How to Be a Good Person Essay

What does it mean to be a good person? The essay below aims to answer this question. It focuses on the qualities of a good person.

Introduction

What does it mean to be a good person, qualities of good person, works cited.

The term “good” has relative meanings depending on the person who is defining it. Several qualities can be used to define what constitutes a good person. However, there are certain basic qualities that are used to define a good person. They include honesty, trust, generosity, compassion, empathy, humility, and forgiveness (Gelven 24).

These qualities are important because they promote peaceful coexistence among people because they prevent misunderstandings and conflicts. A good person is fair and just to all and does not judge people. He or she is nice to everyone regardless of religion, race, social and economic class, health status, or physical state (Gelven 25).

A good person treats other people with respect, care, and compassion. Respect shows that an individual values and views the other person as a worthy human being who deserves respect. Compassion is a quality that enables people to identify with other people’s suffering (Gelven 27). It motivates people to offer help in order to alleviate the suffering of others. A good person has compassion for others and finds ways to help people who are suffering. Showing compassion for the suffering makes them happy.

It promotes empathy, understanding, and support. In addition, good people are forgiving. They do not hold grudges and let go of anger that might lead them to hurt others. They think positively and focus their thoughts on things that improve their relationships (Needleman 33). They avoid thinking about past mistakes or wrongs done by others. Instead, they think of how they can forgive and move on.

A good person is honest and trustworthy. This implies that they avoid all situations that might hurt the other person, such as telling lies, revealing secrets, and gossiping (Needleman 34). As such, their character or personality cannot be doubted because they do not harbor hidden intentions.

They act in open ways that reveal their true characters and personalities. On the other hand, good people are kind and respectful. They offer help voluntarily and work hard to improve the well-being of other people. In addition, they treat all people equally despite their social, physical, or sexual orientations. Good people do not discriminate, hate, deny people their rights, steal, lie, or engage in corrupt practices (Tuan 53).

Good people behave courageously and view the world as a fair and beautiful place to live in (Needleman 40). They view the world as a beautiful place that offers equal opportunities to everyone. Good people believe that humans have the freedom to either make the world a better or worse place to live in. They act and behave in ways that improve and make the world a better place.

For example, they conserve the environment by keeping it clean for future generations. A popular belief holds that people who conserve the environment are not good but just environmental enthusiasts. However, that notion is incorrect and untrue. People conserve the environment because of their goodness. They think not only about themselves but also about future generations (Tuan 53). They are not self-centered and mean but generous and caring.

Good people are characterized by certain qualities that include trust, honesty, compassion, understanding, forgiveness, respect, courage, and goodwill. They do not steal, lie, discriminate, or deny people their rights. They think about others’ welfare and advocate for actions that make the world a better place. They promote justice and fairness because they view everyone as a deserving and worthy human being.

Gelven, Michael. The Risk of Being: What it Means to be Good and Bad . New York: Penn State Press, 1997. Print.

Needleman, Jacob. Why Can’t We be good? New York: Penguin Group US, 2007. Print.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. Human Goodness . New York: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. Print.

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IvyPanda. (2023, October 28). How to Be a Good Person Essay. https://ivypanda.com/essays/what-it-means-to-be-a-good-person/

"How to Be a Good Person Essay." IvyPanda , 28 Oct. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/what-it-means-to-be-a-good-person/.

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IvyPanda . 2023. "How to Be a Good Person Essay." October 28, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/what-it-means-to-be-a-good-person/.

1. IvyPanda . "How to Be a Good Person Essay." October 28, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/what-it-means-to-be-a-good-person/.

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IvyPanda . "How to Be a Good Person Essay." October 28, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/what-it-means-to-be-a-good-person/.

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An Essay: What Makes us Human

I wrote this essay for a class I took about Gandhi in 2012. I graduated as a Humanities major at San Francisco State University in 2013 and still reflect on the the discussions we had in this class. I am proud to say that I got an A on this paper and as a ~reward~ I also got to read it aloud to my class mates ( insert sarcasm font ). I am terrified of public speaking, so this was actually a very bittersweet situation. Anyway, I thought that it was a fun read and makes you think a little. Enjoy!

What Makes Us Human

Humans, Homo sapiens , people; there are many names that describe us as a species. We are the top of the food chain, intelligent, capable of speech and complex communication, and so much more. The question of what it means to be a human has innumerable answers. Each person has their own unique set of beliefs and opinions on the way that life should be lived. Our emotions, abilities, and reactions are qualities that generally are unique to humans. As a member of the mammal class, we are the most intellectually developed animals. Humans have grown and developed into prosperous societies and communities throughout history at an ever changing and remarkable speed. The characteristics of each individual person on this planet are unique and diverse. It is the notion that each person has the capability to live their lives in any way they want, go anywhere, and make choices that makes life and humanity what it is. The meaning of being human is the characteristics that drive us. The will to live, thrive, love, and hope makes us a species that is like no other on this planet.

The question of what it means to be human brings up the contrasts of what a human is not. One answer could be that we are not wild animals. Although we belong to the same classification as a wide range of animals, we are immensely different than them. Our capability to communicate by speech and have conscious thoughts and ideas that we can share and implement, are just a few traits that are unique to humans. I work at a veterinary hospital in the east bay as a Registered Veterinary Technician (RVT), or animal nurse. I share each day of my life caring for and working with many different types of animals. I am an animal lover, caregiver, and owner. The animals that I see and handle bring a unique and fascinating insight into the bonds between humans and animals. People care for their pets and love them as an equal member of their family. Our pets rely on us for their basic needs for food and shelter and are capable of giving unconditional love no matter what the circumstances are. I look to many animals in envy and for inspiration to become a person who is kind, happy, carefree, joyful, and appreciative of life in general, just like the way our pets live each day. Although we look at our beloved pets as irreplaceable parts of our families, we never look at them as equals. This line is what distinguishes the distance between humans and animals. We as animals are creatures that are ever benefiting from our intelligence and inventions. We have distanced ourselves from animals, domestic and wild, by our growing knowledge and creations that have advanced our society and changed the way we live in the world. Even though only a few genes separate us from most animals, we don’t always think of ourselves one of them. Our exceptional brain is what gives us intelligence and is the sole trait that makes us human.

The characteristics that make humans unique to every other living thing on Earth, is our strong will to live and thrive and the ability to continuously adapt, change, hope, and love. We have powerful emotions that are capable of driving people to do anything to get what they want in life. Terrifying and catastrophic incidents happen every day all over the world. People have the ability and strength to overcome the challenges that come about from such affairs. In desperate times people are capable of coming together and accomplishing great feats to overcome devastating situations. Gandhi was a great and inspiring person who’s theories and practices go beyond what most people believe they are able to achieve. There is conflict, anger, war, and violence happening all throughout the world. Whether soldiers fighting overseas or family members arguing within our own households, the challenges of living a loving and peaceful life can be a difficult act for most people. Even with all of the violence in the world, we are still able to live our lives and cope with the difficult situations that may arise. People are able to live through intense pain, suffering, and illness with the love and support of others. With the will to survive and to continue to live on and have a future, individuals can overcome impossible feats. We as humans are complicated beings that are capable of infinite amount of accomplishments. Our capacity to influence, motivate, and help each other and ourselves, is an aspect that makes us exceptional.

There are an enormous amount of qualities that give meaning to being a human. Being human means that I have a choice of what I want to do and how I want to live my life. There are many obstacles that can get in the way of the dreams and plans in each person’s life. People are capable of doing horrific and devastating things to the world, but we also are able to change the world to be a better and more positive place. Gandhi was and remains to be a model that everyone could look to in the hopes of making this world and each of our lives happy and peaceful. Humans are a species that grow and change each and every day. With the theories and practice that Gandhi has left behind, humanity still has much to learn and grow to become communities that can live in harmony and goodwill.

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Human - List of Free Essay Examples And Topic Ideas

The topic of being human encompasses a vast range of inquiries into the nature, purpose, and experience of human life. Essays on “human” could delve into the biological, psychological, social, or cultural aspects of human existence. They might explore philosophical or ethical questions about human nature, rights, or responsibilities, or delve into the many ways in which the human experience is constructed, interpreted, and transformed. They might also investigate the relationships between humans and other forms of life, the environment, technology, or the divine. A substantial compilation of free essay instances related to Human you can find at PapersOwl Website. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

What Makes Humans Unique

The question is What makes humans unique? In this society I’ve come across humans beings who don’t like to think of themself as animals such as our great ancestors. In class we’ve learned that human activity that society thought is uniquely are also performed by animals: birds (parrots) who uses language to communicate to one another, chimpanzees that make tools and use those tools. In class we watched this video about a chimpanzee named Tuke, Klouce that solved a honey […]

The Meaning of being Human

In the article, “The Question We Must keep Asking,” the philosophical question that is being analyzed is, what does it mean to be human? This question is a very discussed topic amongst philosophers. It is hard to find one single answer to this question. To answer this philosophical question we must consider several factors that make up a human. Humans are one of the relatively few species to get enough self-awareness to distinguish themselves when they see their reflection in […]

Tintern Abbey Poem by William Wordsworth

The poem talks about an author visit to Tintern Abbey, a place in the southern part of Wale, a place he had visited before at his tender age. The poet expresses the feeling nature had to his youthful age and what he experienced after his second visit when a grownup person .He expresses his earlier feelings at his tender age towards nature and realizes that he could never understand nature at his young age since he was only impressed with […]

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An Ideal Human being

As stated in my definition, human beings define themselves and determine their future through their thoughts and actions. Each human lives in a world of past decisions and follows a path to the future they want to hold. With this, a human being's destiny or purpose could not be predetermined by some higher being. Since humans have the capability to make their own choices, then they have the ability to change their path in life. It would be impossible to […]

What does the Human Future Hold for Us?

Whether technology is to be embraced or if humans should strive for simplicity is constantly in the forefront of the human mind. One hundred and forty-nine years ago, when the first railroad was completed, a new technological era was beginning to start. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell made the first phone call to his assistant Thomas Watson, an event that changed the course of human history. Shortly after in 1885, Karl Benz took the first drive in his new technological […]

Compare and Contrast about Cats and Dogs

 Dogs and cats have several similarities, but even more distinctions. Both animals are easily loved by mankind and will display love and affection in return for good treatment. Some people enjoy the presence of a cat, and others are simply dog lovers. Based on the history, characteristics, and similarities of the two creatures, dogs are considered to be man's best friend- but most likely it's the feline who is. Thousands of years ago, a man trapped wolves and used a […]

Robots Replacing Humans

On meeting stages and at crusade rallies, tech chiefs and government officials caution of an approaching computerization emergency — one where laborers are step by step, at that point at the same time, supplanted by canny machines. In any case, their admonitions veil the way that a robotization emergency has effectively shown up. The robots are here, they're working in administration, and they're pounding laborers into the ground. The robots are looking after lodging servants, revealing to them which space […]

“The Open Boat” Theme: Nature’s Indifference and the Struggle of Humankind

Introduction: Stranded at sea and at the mercy of nature, many realizations can be made about the relationship between nature and mankind. “The Open Boat,” a short story by Stephen Crane, is a very symbolic piece of writing that is full of details that are still relevant today. One of the many themes that stands out throughout the story is the theme that nature appears to be indifferent to mankind. This theme is the backbone of the story as the […]

Comparison of the Story and Poem “There Will Come Soft Rains”

 The short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury and Sara Teasdale’s poem take place after a nuclear war. The stories can be compared through reference to man dying and nature continously being carried on. The story and poem express the fire which creates horrible effects on life such as people, animals and the home. Both authors are dealing with what occured to the cities and each person after a war. The two authors incorporate how human beings […]

Values of Human Existence in Brave New World

What role does scientific and technological progress play in works of dystopian literature such as Brave New World? Brave New World, written by Aldous Huxley, portrays a dystopian society where the Central London Hatching and Conditioning Centre reproduces thousands of nearly identical human embryos, and then conditions to separate them into five different castes, which functions in society as an organized factory to reach economic and social prosperity. Huxley wrote this novel in 1931 when totalitarianism and socialism dominated in […]

The Concept of Pattern Recognition of the Human Brain

Have you ever stared at an inanimate object, like a cloud, and seen a familiar object, such as a sheep or a face? Surely most people have experienced this, and this is because of our brain's innate ability to recognize patterns. This is only possible with large brains that can support high-level reasoning and memory storage. All of the major hallmarks of human qualities, like advanced language, tool-making, and art, are only possible with our ability to recognize patterns. Pattern […]

A Place i would Like to Visit again

A place I love to visit and why The world is embellished with colorful and mesmerizing places. Being a traveling lover, there are many places that I dream to visit but if I have to choose one, it would be “the global village Dubai”. It is claimed to be the world’s greatest tourist attraction and I love to visit here as it is a whole place itself including outdoor cultural, entertainment and shopping centers. The global village is located on […]

The Enduring Depths of ‘Moby Dick’: a Literary Journey into Human Obsession and Natural Forces

History "Moby Dick," writes Herman Melville, is work art, that uncorks beyond existence only other literary marine adventure. It - fundamentally epic search, hunt, guided captain necessity Ahab insatiable in repressions despite Moby Dick, legendary whale. Ishmael, seaman, that determines ashore a whale ship Pequod under a captain command Ahab, sees history to open he through his eyes in one flow from a book. So as moving forward history, it becomes cave, that whole walk interested fixing Ahab solitary with […]

An Important Role Free Will in Oedipus the King

Fate is often said to be inevitable, an adverse outcome, condition, or end and free will is the ability to choose at your own discretion. In our everyday life, we make decisions and are often told that life is about making choices. It is because we have free will that we make choices which may lead to positive consequences if the choice is rational and yet other times our decisions lead to negative consequences. Free will plays an important role in Oedipus the King and fate […]

Animal Lover and Visit to the Animal Park

For the longest time, I never thought I would one day opt to go to the animal park. I am a true animal lover who has never been to animal park. Phenomenon One day, several years back, a friend of mine wanted to visit the zoo and so asked if I could accompany him. At first, I was a bit resistant but then I later gave in to his idea because there was not much to lose. My parents gave […]

Inspirational Person Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking was an English physicist, cosmologist, and author. He had to overcome a disease called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. It is an incurable disease where nerve functions begin to gradually shut down and caused Stephen Hawking depression and an inability to move. He took up his cross by living with his disability and thriving while still having it. He inspired people around the world to spread awareness for ALS in 2015. Growing up both of his parents went to the […]

From Dreams to Reality

We have all felt and tasted the unpleasantness of failure. Most people commonly in life have failed at some point but it is how we learn from our failures that classify success. When looking at the event leading up to any significant success, we will often discover failure to be the biggest motivator in life. Through my journey to my dream career, I found out that failure can be the biggest tool to being successful and fulfilling your dream. At […]

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Brave New World: how Society Manipulates Children’s Consciousness

Huxley’s Brave New World portrays humans being controlled by science and their government. A science experiment so to speak. Taking away people’s freedom of choice doesn’t make life less stressful, happy or fulfilling. In chapter 2 pages 19-23 the scene shows the grim reality of Huxley showing how the human mind can be controlled. The director takes the students to a nursery to watch this in action. Nurses present babies with bowls filled to the top with blossoms. Before the […]

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Software programs have become an indispensable part of our lives and we use tend to use them subconsciously while using our phone to consciously while regulating our room temperatures through a thermostat. Softwares have changed our whole perspective of individual work as well as business interaction for providing customer service in a fast and effective way. By the virtue of software programs, we can make changes under a certain domain throughout the world in a matter of seconds. As we […]

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Have you ever seen a shirt, watched a movie, or read a book and thought to yourself, this reminds me of the ’90s, or another time in the past?  We can connect to previous and future time periods in many ways.  In the following paper, we will go over three different novels and an essay.  Each of these is a representation of its time period.  We will discuss how they fit in with different time periods and also how they […]

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How to Start a Compassion

Similarly, According to the article, the author has stated that Turgenev saw human beings as creatures bestowed with awareness, realization, feelings, and capable of finding the difference right and wrong. They have their own moral values and norms. While, Marx saw them always as “snowflakes in an avalanche, as instances of general forces, as not yet fully human because utterly conditioned by their circumstances” (Dalrymple,page 2 How and How Not to Love Mankind 2.pdf).Turgenev and Marx both of the great […]

Each Person’s Personality is Different

Material is what we like and what we are like is the spiritual, personality. Each of us lives through a combination of both physical and spiritual values. However, there is a very common tendency to fail to see the attachment and correlation between these two values. Therefore, sometimes we take material elements very seriously, sometimes we are too emotionally heavy. But for my personally, the harmonious combination between these two factors is the most essential foundation for a life. It […]

In “The Story of the Hour” by Kate Chopin, Mrs Mallard

Many authors have graced the pages of writing, but when they can touch you and can full you with an understanding in such details that it awakening your senses to a new light, it then becomes a piece of art. A part of you as you will see with the authors that follows. In “To Build a Fire,” Jack London uses realistic and sometimes unpleasant images to describe how cold the air is. For example,the man’s spittle “crackled in the […]

Personification in “There Will Come Soft Rains”: Exploring Technology

Humanity's Evolution with Technology In the poem There Will Come Soft Rains, by Sara Teasdale and the short story Videotape, by Don DeLillo, the authors include some similarities relating to humanity yet offer different perspectives on the matter. One offers an insight into what could be in the future without humanity, while the other shows that technology is already impacting the change in human culture and the way of life at its current development. Despite the remarkable benefits gained by […]

Exposing Reality in “Behind the Formaldehyde Curtain”

Most of the general population is not aware of what is being done to their loved ones’ bodies behind closed curtains as they wheel them off to the mortuary services. Summary of "Behind the Formaldehyde Curtain" English writer Jessica Mitford, in her essay “Behind the Formaldehyde Curtain,” explains undertakers’ process of embalming and restoration of the deceased before the actual funeral. Mitford criticizes the distasteful process of embalming and exposes the commercialization of the funeral industry. She adopts a humorous […]

Biology’s Role: Shaping Lives and our World

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Risk is the presence of uncertainty of results regarding present actions ( Shastri and Shastri, 2014 ). Risk arises due to occurrence of chance events, incubating and culminating in the changing dynamics of the environment. All functional areas of an organization are affected by risk. A single event can unleash a variety of risks. Risk is omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient. Risk management is a process effected by the entity’s board of directors, management and other personnel, applied in strategy setting […]

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How To Write An Essay On Human Behavior

Introduction to the study of human behavior.

Writing an essay on human behavior requires an exploration of the complex interplay of biological, psychological, and social factors that influence how individuals act and react in various situations. Your introduction should begin with a general overview of human behavior as a field of study, highlighting its relevance in understanding ourselves and the society we live in. Clarify the specific aspect of human behavior you will focus on, whether it's a psychological theory, a particular type of behavior, or a study of how certain environments influence actions. Establish a thesis statement that outlines your main argument or the perspective from which you will approach the topic.

Delving into Theories and Concepts

The body of your essay should delve into the theories and concepts that are pertinent to your topic. If you’re exploring a psychological perspective, discuss relevant theories such as behaviorism, cognitive psychology, or psychoanalysis. For an essay on social influences, you might examine how cultural, familial, or peer influences shape behavior. Provide examples and evidence from scientific research to support your discussion. This part of the essay should demonstrate your understanding of the theoretical foundations of human behavior and how these theories explain or predict human actions.

Analyzing Real-World Applications

Move on to discussing the real-world applications or implications of the theories or concepts you have explored. This could involve analyzing case studies, current events, or everyday behaviors through the lens of your chosen theoretical framework. Discuss the significance of understanding human behavior in various fields such as education, healthcare, business, or public policy. Highlight how insights into human behavior can lead to more effective solutions in these areas. This analysis should link theory with practice, showing how a deeper understanding of human behavior is essential in addressing real-world issues.

Concluding with Insights on Human Behavior

Conclude your essay by summarizing your key findings and reflecting on the broader implications of your study of human behavior. Restate how your exploration contributes to a deeper understanding of the chosen aspect of human behavior. Offer thoughts on how continued study in this area can lead to further insights and improvements in various aspects of human life. A strong conclusion will not only tie together your analysis but also encourage continued exploration and curiosity about the complexities of human behavior, reinforcing the idea that this field of study is crucial to understanding the human condition.

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What Makes Us Human Essay Example

• Pages: 5 (1291 words)
• Published: August 30, 2016
• Type: Essay

What is it that we are made up of? I know a human has a body made up of two legs, two arms, two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and two ears, but that is not what makes us human. Human beings are made up of feelings, the ability to think, communication, and many other elements. Feelings show the way we feel between each other and is the reason for our survival. The ability to think is so important because just because we can think doesn’t always mean we do think. Communication is essential to human society. These are some of the elements I consider to be the most important of being human.

Feelings, is something that makes us humans. Feelings, is one important element that makes us humans because that is how we can relate how others f

eel and that is the reason humans have survived for thousands of years. I believe if someone does not have feelings, that is inhumane and our human survival would have extinct. Feelings are sadness, happiness, love, and very importantly there is sympathy and empathy. When someone sees another person in pain and has the desire to help that person and calls for help or helps them themselves that is humane.

Sometimes it is empathy when we know how someone else is feeling and share the pain or happiness. But I believe sympathy is very important because even though you might not feel the pain, but you understand that it is painful. I believe that is how humans have survived for so long because we help each other survive. Doctors, Police Officers, Firefighters fo

instance help people get out of buildings in fire, help protect people that are in danger, and save peoples lives that they have never met before. For thousands of years we have helped each other survive.

We automatically help the people we love and value, but when we help the people we have never met before and are complete strangers that is when we can definitely say that is why we have human survival. If everyone just took care of themselves and the people they new, I think our human survival would be reaching extinction. An example of this would be like when the Germans where trying to kill all Jews. Many German families had sympathy and risked their lives to help Jewish families survive during the war. Some German families would help the Jewish by giving them shelter, food, and clothing.

The Germans who helped the Jewish had no obligation to help and were prohibited to help, but because they had feelings they felt like they needed to help the Jewish. On the other hand during the war there was so much inhumanity going on. The Germans felt like they were above the Jews and enjoyed torturing and killing Jewish families with no remorse. It has happened in many wars where people have no remorse and torture others for fun, but what makes us survive is the people who care about others and help each other survive.

Well in my belief if it wasn’t for all the people who have cared for others our human survival would become extinct. We are human because we have the ability to think. The ability

to think gives us the opportunity to reason and realize what is going on. "Thinking is skilled work. It is not true that we are naturally endowed with the ability to think clearly and logically - without learning how, or without practicing. " Alfred Mander, Author Logic for the Millions, 1947. This quote made me realize that sometimes we think we think, but it is not true.

For example when I was younger and I was asked what I thought about drugs I just remembered what my mom told me and what my friends new about drugs being bad, but I never researched what drugs were and I always said I thought drugs were bad. To think is to go beyond what people tell us, to ask questions and go beyond what we are told and understand. That is what makes us humans because an animal can react and do what people tell them, but do they ask questions to what they are doing? Do they think to themselves what should I do tomorrow?

Animals as they grow don’t have many choices, they grow, they have survival instincts, and they can adapt to life experiences. Animals can think and be aware of their surrounding, but there is no study where it shows that they develop critical thinking. Not just because we are humans we think, but we do have the ability to think. We have the ability to ask questions and understand why things happen or why we should do things. To think is an important human element that I believe not all humans take advantage of.

An essential element of being

human is communication. Communication is very important because that is how we interact with each other. We communicate by talking, writing, drawings, and body language. Talking to one another is one of the easiest way of communicating because we say what we feel like we need to say and let others know how we feel. Talking is also the easiest way to get a fast response and when it is in person you can see a persons body language. Body Language is very important because it shows how we react to certain ideas or feelings.

Body language like eye contact and facial expressions can say a lot more than words and is an effective communication to a natural body response. For example when a mother is told, someone from the family has passed away, and the mother may start crying and her three year old child that does not understand what is going on asks what is wrong? A mother could wipe her tears and say she is fine, when she is in pain, but does not want to alarm her child. A child may not understand at the moment, but as we grow we start understanding body language.

Writing is also a way of communicating. Writing or drawings lets us describe how we feel when we cannot talk or let things out in words. Writing is a way of expressing ourselves when we do not have the courage to talk face to face or when you cannot communicate by talking. Drawings can let out someone’s emotions and ideas. Drawings by children can be an outreach to parents when they can’t explain how

they feel. I believe all drawings can tell a story if we pay attention to it. Writing is not just in paper anymore, but also by email or txt.

Communication with others can now be so easy with technology because there are so many forms of communicating now, but is it effective communication. I believe technology is taking away from communication. Cell phones text messaging has become so popular that now it has become almost impossible for some people to have a real conversations in person because it has become so easy to talk to multiple people at the same time text messaging that it is hard to focus in one conversation.

Communication is very important, but I believe effective communication is slowly fading away with all this new technology. Overall communication is needed and is essential element to being human. There is many elements that make us human. Feelings, the ability to think, and communication are the top three I believe are the most important elements to being human. I believe we are human and have lived for thousands of years due to our feelings. If we did not have feeling and the ability to think we would be extinct.

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While AI-made content has its merits, the discernment and emotional depth inherent in authentic human expression continue to distinguish it as a unique and irreplaceable aspect of human like text creation.

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Ensuring Quality in AI-Generated Text:

• Define Clear Objectives: Clearly outline your content goals to guide the AI model in generating text aligned with your intentions.
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• Use Reliable AI Models: Choose reputable and well-trained AI models to ensure a higher quality output. Verify the model's credentials before implementation.
• Continuous Monitoring: Regularly monitor AI-generated content and adapt as needed. Stay involved in the process to maintain quality over time.

By employing a strategic approach, combining human oversight, and utilizing trustworthy AI models, you can ensure the quality of AI-generated text, aligning it seamlessly with your content objectives and standards.

Why Is Humanizing AI Written Text Important?

Humanizing AI written text is crucial for forging authentic connections and elevating user engagement:

• Establishing Authenticity: Adding a human touch ensures that content feels genuine, fostering trust and resonance with the audience.
• Enhancing Engagement: Humanized AI content captures attention, increasing audience engagement and interaction.
• Emotional Resonance: Humanization allows for the infusion of emotion, making content more compelling and memorable.
• Improving Clarity: It enhances readability, ensuring that complex information is conveyed in a more accessible manner.
• Standing Out: In a crowded digital landscape, humanized content distinguishes brands, leaving a lasting impression on the audience.

Effortlessly Tailor Tone to Align with Brand Identity

Ever wondered why some brands effortlessly strike a chord with their audience while others struggle to find their voice? Imagine this:  71% of consumers are more likely to engage with AI to human text that aligns with a brand's personality. Frustrating, isn't it?

Enter AISEO Humanize AI Text. Don't let your brand sound like everyone else; make it uniquely yours. Our Undetectable AI tool empowers you to infuse your AI-generated content with a tone that resonates seamlessly with your brand personality. No more disconnects or generic messaging.

In a world where authenticity builds brand loyalty, don't settle for a one-size-fits-all tone. AISEO Humanize AI Text ensures your brand speaks in its distinctive voice, forging genuine connections and leaving a lasting impression.

Tailor your tone effortlessly – because in the realm of brand identity, conformity is forgettable. Choose AISEO Humanize AI Text and let your brand's voice stand out in the crowd.

How Does Humanizing AI Text Improve Content Quality?

Humanizing AI generated text contributes significantly to AI to human text quality improvement:

• Clarity and Readability: Humanization refines text, improving clarity and readability by eliminating robotic tones and enhancing flow.
• Authentic Engagement: Adding a human touch fosters authentic engagement, making the content more relatable and appealing to the audience.
• Emotional Resonance: Human like content has the ability to convey emotions effectively, creating a more impactful and memorable reader experience.
• Versatility: The diverse modes offered by a human text converter cater to various AI to human text goals, allowing users to tailor enhancements for different types of AI to human text.
• User-Centric Approach: Humanization prioritizes the audience's understanding, ensuring AI to human text resonates effectively with diverse readers.

By infusing AI-generated content with a human-like quality, the humanization process significantly elevates AI to human text quality, making it more engaging, relatable, and valuable for the audience.

Can AI Truly Replicate Human Writing Style?

While AI has made significant strides in mimicking human writing styles, complete replication remains a challenge:

• Pattern Recognition: AI Text converter tool excels at recognizing and replicating patterns, allowing it to simulate certain aspects of human writing styles.
• Creativity and Intuition: Genuine human creativity and intuitive thinking are intricate qualities challenging for AI to fully replicate.
• Contextual Understanding: AI Text converter tool may struggle with nuanced contextual understanding, leading to occasional disparities in tone and style.
• Adaptability: While AI can adapt to predefined styles, it may lack the dynamic adaptability and nuanced changes inherent in authentic human expression.

In summary, while AI can emulate specific elements of human sounding writing, the intricate depth, creativity, and adaptability of genuine human sounding writing styles remain distinctive and challenging for AI to completely replicate.

What Benefits Does Humanization Bring to User Engagement?

Humanizing content contributes to a more engaging and impactful user experience:

• Authentic Connection: Adding a human touch fosters a genuine connection, resonating with users on a personal level and rank higher on search engines
• Emotional Resonance: Humanized content has the power to evoke emotions, making it more memorable and relatable for users.
• Improved Readability: Humanization enhances readability, ensuring that content is easily comprehensible and accessible to a broader audience.
• Increased Attention: Engaging, relatable content captures and sustains user attention, reducing bounce rates and increasing overall engagement metrics.
• Trust Building: Authentic, human-like content builds trust with users, fostering a positive perception of the brand or message.

By prioritizing humanization, content creators create a more immersive and user-centric experience, ultimately leading to increased engagement, trust, and satisfaction among their audience.

How Can I Make AI-Generated Content More Personalized?

Infusing Personalization into AI-Generated Content:

• Define User Segments: Identify specific user segments and tailor content to their preferences, needs, and behaviors.
• Utilize Data Insights: Leverage user data to understand individual preferences, enabling more personalized content recommendations.
• Dynamic Content Generation: Implement advanced algorithms that dynamically adjust content based on user interactions, ensuring a tailored experience.
• Interactive Elements: Incorporate interactive elements like personalized recommendations, quizzes, or polls to engage users on an individual level.
• Customizable Templates: Create content templates that allow for easy personalization, such as inserting user names or location-based information.

By harnessing user data, leveraging advanced algorithms, and incorporating interactive elements, you can elevate AI-generated content to a more personalized and engaging level, fostering a deeper connection with your audience.

Accelerate Content Creation with AI Humanizer Integration

Ever find yourself stuck in the content creation maze, racing against time to deliver engaging material? Here's a reality check: the average person's attention span is now shorter than that of a goldfish, standing at a  mere 8 seconds . Feeling the pressure?

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Can AI Replace Human Content Creators?

While AI has made strides in content generation, it cannot fully replace the nuanced creativity, emotional intelligence, and diverse perspectives human creators bring:

• Creativity and Intuition: AI lacks the innate creativity and intuition of human language, limiting its ability to generate truly original content.
• Emotional Depth: Genuine human language emotion and empathy in content generation remain unparalleled, contributing to deeper audience connections.
• Adaptability: Human language can adapt writing styles, tone, and voice dynamically based on various contexts, providing a level of versatility AI text converter struggles to replicate.
• Innovation: Human creators drive innovation, pushing boundaries, and introducing novel ideas, qualities that AI often imitates but cannot originate.

While AI serves as a valuable human text converter, the unique qualities of human content creators ensure a balance that combines the efficiency of AI with the irreplaceable touch of human ingenuity.

What are the concerns related to AI-generated content?

Concerns Surrounding AI-Generated Content:

• Bias and Fairness: AI text converter may perpetuate biases present in training data, leading to content that reflects and amplifies societal biases.
• Quality Control: Ensuring the accuracy and quality of AI-generated content poses challenges, requiring vigilant human oversight.
• Ethical Considerations: Questions arise about the ethical implications of AI-generated content, especially when it comes to misinformation and manipulation.
• Originality and Creativity: AI text converter struggles to achieve the depth of creativity and originality inherent in human-created content.
• User Understanding: AI text converter may misinterpret user intent or fail to grasp the nuanced context, potentially resulting in irrelevant or inappropriate content.
• Job Displacement: Concerns about job displacement in creative industries as AI takes on content generation tasks traditionally performed by humans.

Addressing these concerns involves continuous refinement of AI text converter models, ethical considerations, and a thoughtful balance between automated processes and human oversight.

What Role Does Human Editing Play in AI-Generated Content?

Human editing acts as a critical checkpoint in refining and enhancing the output of AI text:

• Context Refinement: Human editors bring context based understanding, refining content to align seamlessly with intended meanings and nuances.
• Creativity Injection: Editors infuse a creative touch, adding elements of originality, flair, and intuition that AI text converter might lack.
• Ensuring Consistency: Human editors maintain consistency in tone, style, and voice, ensuring a cohesive and polished final piece.
• Quality Assurance: Editors serve as the final quality assurance layer, identifying and rectifying errors or awkward phrasing that automated systems might overlook.
• Adapting to Nuances: Humans excel at interpreting subtle nuances, adapting content to suit dynamic contexts, and ensuring cultural sensitivity.

In summary, human editing is indispensable in elevating the overall quality, authenticity, and user appeal of AI content, contributing a unique blend of creativity, understanding, and refinement. You can also try our AISEO AI writer free no sign up.

How to find the best bypass tools that can humanize the AI text?

Selecting Optimal Bypass Tools for Humanizing AI Text:

• Evaluate Features: Look for a human text converter with diverse features, including mode selection (Standard, Shorten, Expand, Simplify, Improve Writing) to cater to varied content goals.
• User-Friendly Interface: Opt for a human text converter with an intuitive interface, facilitating easy navigation and efficient text transformation.
• Quality of Humanization: Assess the quality of humanization by experimenting with different modes and evaluating the naturalness and coherence of the output.
• Customization Options: Choose a human text converter that offers customization options, allowing users to fine-tune the humanization process according to their preferences.
• User Reviews: Explore user reviews to gauge real-world experiences and determine the effectiveness and reliability of the human text converter.
• Integration Capability: Ensure the human text converter seamlessly integrates into your workflow, offering convenience and efficiency in the humanization process.

By carefully considering features, usability, quality, customization, user feedback, and integration capabilities, you can identify the best bypass tools to humanize AI text effectively.

Instantly Humanize AI Content for Meaningful Communication

Ever felt like your AI content lacks the soulful touch needed for real connection? In a digital world inundated with information,  64% of consumers say they find generic brand messaging annoying. Are you losing your audience?

Enter the antidote: AISEO AI Humanizer. It's time to break free from the robotic monotony and breathe life into your words. Our human text converter effortlessly transforms sterile text into a conversation, ensuring your audience feels heard, not ignored.

No more struggling to strike the right chord or losing your audience in a sea of sameness. AISEO is AI Text converter tool that bridges the gap, infusing your content with a human touch that captivates and resonates.

Choose the AISEO Text converter tool and let your words speak volumes, fostering meaningful connections in a world hungry for authenticity.

How Can I Prevent AI Content from Sounding Robotic?

Preventing Robotic Tone in AI Content:

• Use Natural Language Processing (NLP): Employ Natural Language Processing techniques to enhance the language flow and coherence, making the content sound more human-like and rank higher on search engines.
• Incorporate Varied Sentence Structures: Avoid repetitive sentence structures; introduce variety to mimic natural conversation patterns.
• Emphasize Tone and Voice: Define a specific tone and voice for your content to infuse personality and authenticity.
• Integrate Colloquial Language: Incorporate colloquial expressions and language to add a conversational tone and rank higher on search engines.
• Review and Edit: After content generation, manually review and edit to refine any robotic-sounding phrases or awkward constructions.

By prioritizing natural language processing, embracing variety in sentence structures, defining tone, incorporating colloquial language into sentence structure, and performing manual reviews, you can effectively prevent AI content from sounding robotic, ensuring a more engaging and human-like experience for your audience.

Do I Still Need Human Proofreading for AI Content?

Yes, human proofreading remains essential for ensuring the quality and authenticity of AI content:

• Contextual Based Understanding: Human proofreaders can discern contextual nuances and ensure the content aligns accurately with intended meanings.
• Creative Adaptations: Humans excel at making creative adaptations, refining language, and enhancing the overall writing quality, aspects often challenging for  AI text converter .
• Emotional Intelligence: Proofreaders bring emotional intelligence to the process, ensuring that the content effectively resonates with human's emotions.
• Error Identification: While AI text converter is powerful, human form proofreaders can identify subtle errors, nuances, and inconsistencies that automated systems might miss.
• Maintaining Tone: Human form proofreading ensures the preservation of tone, voice, and the unique nuances of the intended writing style.

Combining AI text converter efficiency with human form proofreading expertise ensures a meticulous and polished final output, striking a balance between automation and human form touch.

What Steps Can Prevent AI Content from Being Misleading?

Preventing Misleading AI Content:

• Clear Guidelines: Establish clear guidelines for the AI text converter model, defining ethical boundaries and acceptable content parameters.
• Human form Oversight: Introduce human form oversight to review and approve AI content, ensuring it aligns with ethical standards.
• Regular Audits: Conduct regular audits of AI content to identify and rectify any potentially misleading information.
• Fact-Checking: Integrate fact-checking processes to verify the accuracy of information presented in AI content.
• Transparent Attribution: Clearly attribute AI content as such, maintaining transparency about its origin.

By combining ethical guidelines, human form, regular audits, fact-checking, and transparent attribution, you can convert AI generated content and mitigate the risk of AI content being misleading, ensuring that it aligns with ethical standards and provides accurate, trustworthy information to your audience.

What Factors Determine the Quality of AI-Generated Content?

Determinants of Quality in AI Content:

• Training Data Quality: The quality of the data used to train the AI text converter model significantly influences the content it produces.
• Algorithm Sophistication: The complexity and effectiveness of the underlying algorithms impact the AI's ability to generate high-quality content.
• User Input and Feedback: Incorporating user input and feedback refines the AI's understanding, enhancing the relevance and quality of generated content.
• Context Awareness: A strong free online tool with AI model considers context, ensuring content aligns with the intended meaning and purpose.
• Regular Updates: Keeping the AI writing tool model updated with the latest data and trends ensures it continues to generate relevant and high-quality content.

By addressing these factors – quality training data, sophisticated algorithms, machine learning, user input, context awareness, and regular updates advanced proprietary algorithms – you can convert AI generated content and optimize the quality of AI content, ensuring it meets your standards and serves its intended purpose effectively.

Maximizing Content Impact through AI Humanization

Ever experienced the frustration of seeing your carefully crafted AI content go unnoticed in a sea of digital noise? In a landscape saturated with impersonal messaging, connecting with your audience can feel like an uphill battle. Did you know that  72% of consumers crave authenticity in brand communication? Are you struggling to make your voice heard?

Introducing AISEO AI Humanizer free AI text generator. It's the solution you've been searching for to inject life into your content and forge genuine connections with your audience. Our AI human generator transcends robotic monotony, breathing authenticity into every word. Say goodbye to generic messaging and hello to AI content generator that resonates deeply with your audience.

No more guessing games or lost opportunities. With AISEO Text converter tool, your content becomes a catalyst for meaningful interactions and lasting relationships. Choose AISEO AI generator text free and let your voice cut through the noise, sparking authentic conversations in a digital world craving authenticity.

How does AISEO's AI Humanizer tool handle complex or technical content?

AISEO's AI Humanizer tool is designed to adeptly handle complex or technical content, ensuring that even the most intricate information is transformed into engaging, free human online text. Here's ai writing how our AI content generator tool tackles such content:

• Contextual Understanding: The human generator AI employs advanced natural language processing (NLP) techniques to grasp the nuances of technical jargon and complex concepts.
• Adaptive Algorithms: Our AI message generator free utilizes adaptive algorithms that can decipher and translate technical terminology into more accessible language without compromising on accuracy for undetectable AI free.
• Customizable Modes: Users can select from a range of humanization modes, including Standard, Shorten, Expand, Simplify, or Improve Writing, allowing them to tailor the transformation process according to the specific requirements of the content.
• Fine-Tuned Output: By allowing users to specify their content goals, such as enhancing clarity or adjusting human like tone, the AI Humanizer tool produces output that strikes the perfect balance between technical accuracy and readability.
• Continuous Improvement: AISEO continually refines and updates the AI Humanizer tool to ensure it remains effective in handling even the most complex content, incorporating user feedback and advancements in AI technology.

With these key features in place, AISEO's AI Humanizer tool confidently tackles complex or technical content, delivering humanized text that is both informative and engaging.

Can the AI Humanizer tool accommodate different languages and cultural nuances?

Yes, AISEO's AI Humanizer tool is designed to accommodate different languages and cultural nuances effectively, ensuring that content is humanized in a manner that resonates with diverse audiences. Here's how our AI tool achieves this:

• Multilingual Support: The AI to human text converter is equipped with multilingual capabilities, allowing it to process text in various languages, including but not limited to English, Spanish, French, German, and more.
• Cultural Sensitivity: AISEO has incorporated cultural sensitivity into the AI Humanizer tool, enabling it to recognize and adapt to cultural nuances in language usage, expressions, and idiomatic phrases.
• Customization Options: Users can customize the humanization process to align with specific cultural contexts and preferences, ensuring that the output reflects cultural sensitivity and appropriateness.
• Continuous Training: AISEO continually trains and updates the AI Humanizer tool with diverse datasets from different languages and cultural backgrounds, enhancing its ability to understand and incorporate cultural nuances effectively.

By offering multilingual support, cultural sensitivity, customization options, and continuous training, the AI Humanizer tool ensures that content is humanized in a way that respects and resonates with diverse linguistic and cultural contexts.

What measures does AISEO take to ensure the privacy and security of user data when using the AI Humanizer tool?

At AISEO, ensuring the privacy and security of user data when using the AI Humanizer tool is paramount. We implement a comprehensive set of measures to safeguard user data throughout the entire process. Here's how we ensure privacy and security:

• Data Encryption: All user data, including input text AI and output SEO optimized content, is encrypted both in transit and at rest to prevent unauthorized access.
• Secure Infrastructure: We utilize secure server infrastructure with robust firewalls and intrusion detection systems to protect against external threats and vulnerabilities.
• Access Controls: Access to user data is strictly limited to authorized personnel only, and stringent access controls are enforced to prevent unauthorized access or data breaches.
• Compliance: Our Undetectable AI tool adhere to industry-standard data protection regulations such as GDPR and CCPA, ensuring that user data is handled in accordance with legal requirements.
• Anonymization: Personal identifying information is anonymized whenever possible to minimize the risk of data exposure.
• Regular Audits: Our Undetectable AI tool conduct regular security audits and assessments to identify and address any potential vulnerabilities or weaknesses in our systems.

By implementing these measures, AISEO AI text and AI humanizer tools, ensures that user data remains private and secure when utilizing the AI text generator online free and AI Humanizer tool, giving users peace of mind regarding their data privacy.

Is there a limit to the length or size of text that the Humanizer AI tool can process efficiently?

The text AI generator offered by AISEO is designed to efficiently process text online free of varying lengths and sizes, ensuring a seamless humanization process regardless of plagiarism free content volume. While there isn't a strict limit imposed on the length or size of humanize AI text that the AI text humanizer can handle, certain factors may influence its efficiency:

• Processing Time: Longer or larger texts may require additional processing time compared to shorter ones, but the SEO tool is optimized to handle large volumes efficiently.
• Resource Availability: The Undetectable AI tool's performance may depend on available computational resources, such as processing power and memory, which can impact its efficiency when processing extensive texts.
• User Experience: To maintain a smooth user experience, AISEO may recommend breaking down exceptionally lengthy AI written content into manageable chunks for optimal processing efficiency.

Overall, while there isn't a fixed limit, AISEO ensures that the AI Humanizer tool can effectively process texts of varying lengths and sizes to meet users' needs efficiently.

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The hidden risk of letting AI decide – losing the skills to choose for ourselves

Dana and David Dornsife Professor of Psychology and Director of the Wrigley Institute for Environment and Sustainability, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Disclosure statement

Joe Árvai does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and University of Southern California provide funding as members of The Conversation US.

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As artificial intelligence creeps further into people’s daily lives, so do worries about it. At the most alarmist are concerns about AI going rogue and terminating its human masters.

But behind the calls for a pause on the development of AI is a suite of more tangible social ills. Among them are the risks AI poses to people’s privacy and dignity and the inevitable fact that, because the algorithms under AI’s hood are programmed by humans, it is just as biased and discriminatory as many of us. Throw in the lack of transparency about how AI is designed, and by whom , and it’s easy to understand why so much time these days is devoted to debating its risks as much as its potential.

But my own research as a psychologist who studies how people make decisions leads me to believe that all these risks are overshadowed by an even more corrupting, though largely invisible, threat. That is, AI is mere keystrokes away from making people even less disciplined and skilled when it comes to thoughtful decisions.

Making thoughtful decisions

The process of making thoughtful decisions involves three common sense steps that begin with taking time to understand the task or problem you’re confronted with. Ask yourself, what is it that you need to know, and what do you need to do in order to make a decision that you’ll be able to credibly and confidently defend later?

The answers to these questions hinge on actively seeking out information that both fills gaps in your knowledge and challenges your prior beliefs and assumptions. In fact, it’s this counterfactual information – alternative possibilities that emerge when people unburden themselves of certain assumptions – that ultimately equips you to defend your decisions when they are criticized.

The second step is seeking out and considering more than one option at a time. Want to improve your quality of life? Whether it’s who you vote for, the jobs you accept or the things you buy, there’s always more than one road that will get you there. Expending the effort to actively consider and rate at least a few plausible options, and in a manner that is honest about the trade-offs you are willing to make across their pros and cons, is a hallmark of a thoughtful and defensible choice.

The third step is being willing to delay closure on a decision until after you’ve done all the necessary heavy mental lifting . It’s no secret: Closure feels good because it means you’ve put a difficult or important decision behind you. But the cost of moving on prematurely can be much higher than taking the time to do your homework. If you don’t believe me, just think about all those times you let your feelings guide you, only to experience regret because you didn’t take the time to think a little harder.

Dangers of outsourcing decisions to AI

None of these three steps are terribly difficult to take. But, for most, they’re not intuitive either. Making thoughtful and defensible decisions requires practice and self-discipline . And this is where the hidden harm that AI exposes people to comes in: AI does most of its “thinking” behind the scenes and presents users with answers that are stripped of context and deliberation. Worse, AI robs people of the opportunity to practice the process of making thoughtful and defensible decisions on their own.

Consider how people approach many important decisions today. Humans are well known for being prone to a wide range of biases because we tend to be frugal when it comes to expending mental energy. This frugality leads people to like it when seemingly good or trustworthy decisions are made for them . And we are social animals who tend to value the security and acceptance of their communities more than they might value their own autonomy.

Add AI to the mix and the result is a dangerous feedback loop: The data that AI is mining to fuel its algorithms is made up of people’s biased decisions that also reflect the pressure of conformity instead of the wisdom of critical reasoning . But because people like having decisions made for them, they tend to accept these bad decisions and move on to the next one. In the end, neither we nor AI end up the wiser.

Being thoughtful in the age of AI

It would be wrongheaded to argue that AI won’t offer any benefits to society. It most likely will, especially in fields like cybersecurity , health care and finance , where complex models and massive amounts of data need to be analyzed routinely and quickly. However, most of our day-to-day decisions don’t require this kind of analytic horsepower.

But whether we asked for it or not, many of us have already received advice from – and work performed by – AI in settings ranging from entertainment and travel to schoolwork , health care and finance . And designers are hard at work on next-generation AI that will be able to automate even more of our daily decisions. And this, in my view, is dangerous.

In a world where what and how people think is already under siege thanks to the algorithms of social media , we risk putting ourselves in an even more perilous position if we allow AI to reach a level of sophistication where it can make all kinds of decisions on our behalf. Indeed, we owe it to ourselves to resist the siren’s call of AI and take back ownership of the true privilege – and responsibility – of being human: being able to think and choose for ourselves. We’ll feel better and, importantly, be better if we do.

• Artificial intelligence (AI)
• Critical thinking
• Critical thinking skills
• Decision psychology

Sydney Horizon Educators (Identified)

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What the data says about abortion in the U.S.

Pew Research Center has conducted many surveys about abortion over the years, providing a lens into Americans’ views on whether the procedure should be legal, among a host of other questions.

In a  Center survey  conducted nearly a year after the Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision that  ended the constitutional right to abortion , 62% of U.S. adults said the practice should be legal in all or most cases, while 36% said it should be illegal in all or most cases. Another survey conducted a few months before the decision showed that relatively few Americans take an absolutist view on the issue .

Find answers to common questions about abortion in America, based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Guttmacher Institute, which have tracked these patterns for several decades:

How many abortions are there in the U.S. each year?

How has the number of abortions in the u.s. changed over time, what is the abortion rate among women in the u.s. how has it changed over time, what are the most common types of abortion, how many abortion providers are there in the u.s., and how has that number changed, what percentage of abortions are for women who live in a different state from the abortion provider, what are the demographics of women who have had abortions, when during pregnancy do most abortions occur, how often are there medical complications from abortion.

This compilation of data on abortion in the United States draws mainly from two sources: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Guttmacher Institute, both of which have regularly compiled national abortion data for approximately half a century, and which collect their data in different ways.

The CDC data that is highlighted in this post comes from the agency’s “abortion surveillance” reports, which have been published annually since 1974 (and which have included data from 1969). Its figures from 1973 through 1996 include data from all 50 states, the District of Columbia and New York City – 52 “reporting areas” in all. Since 1997, the CDC’s totals have lacked data from some states (most notably California) for the years that those states did not report data to the agency. The four reporting areas that did not submit data to the CDC in 2021 – California, Maryland, New Hampshire and New Jersey – accounted for approximately 25% of all legal induced abortions in the U.S. in 2020, according to Guttmacher’s data. Most states, though,  do  have data in the reports, and the figures for the vast majority of them came from each state’s central health agency, while for some states, the figures came from hospitals and other medical facilities.

Discussion of CDC abortion data involving women’s state of residence, marital status, race, ethnicity, age, abortion history and the number of previous live births excludes the low share of abortions where that information was not supplied. Read the methodology for the CDC’s latest abortion surveillance report , which includes data from 2021, for more details. Previous reports can be found at  stacks.cdc.gov  by entering “abortion surveillance” into the search box.

For the numbers of deaths caused by induced abortions in 1963 and 1965, this analysis looks at reports by the then-U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, a precursor to the Department of Health and Human Services. In computing those figures, we excluded abortions listed in the report under the categories “spontaneous or unspecified” or as “other.” (“Spontaneous abortion” is another way of referring to miscarriages.)

Guttmacher data in this post comes from national surveys of abortion providers that Guttmacher has conducted 19 times since 1973. Guttmacher compiles its figures after contacting every known provider of abortions – clinics, hospitals and physicians’ offices – in the country. It uses questionnaires and health department data, and it provides estimates for abortion providers that don’t respond to its inquiries. (In 2020, the last year for which it has released data on the number of abortions in the U.S., it used estimates for 12% of abortions.) For most of the 2000s, Guttmacher has conducted these national surveys every three years, each time getting abortion data for the prior two years. For each interim year, Guttmacher has calculated estimates based on trends from its own figures and from other data.

The latest full summary of Guttmacher data came in the institute’s report titled “Abortion Incidence and Service Availability in the United States, 2020.” It includes figures for 2020 and 2019 and estimates for 2018. The report includes a methods section.

In addition, this post uses data from StatPearls, an online health care resource, on complications from abortion.

An exact answer is hard to come by. The CDC and the Guttmacher Institute have each tried to measure this for around half a century, but they use different methods and publish different figures.

The last year for which the CDC reported a yearly national total for abortions is 2021. It found there were 625,978 abortions in the District of Columbia and the 46 states with available data that year, up from 597,355 in those states and D.C. in 2020. The corresponding figure for 2019 was 607,720.

The last year for which Guttmacher reported a yearly national total was 2020. It said there were 930,160 abortions that year in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, compared with 916,460 in 2019.

• How the CDC gets its data: It compiles figures that are voluntarily reported by states’ central health agencies, including separate figures for New York City and the District of Columbia. Its latest totals do not include figures from California, Maryland, New Hampshire or New Jersey, which did not report data to the CDC. ( Read the methodology from the latest CDC report .)
• How Guttmacher gets its data: It compiles its figures after contacting every known abortion provider – clinics, hospitals and physicians’ offices – in the country. It uses questionnaires and health department data, then provides estimates for abortion providers that don’t respond. Guttmacher’s figures are higher than the CDC’s in part because they include data (and in some instances, estimates) from all 50 states. ( Read the institute’s latest full report and methodology .)

While the Guttmacher Institute supports abortion rights, its empirical data on abortions in the U.S. has been widely cited by  groups  and  publications  across the political spectrum, including by a  number of those  that  disagree with its positions .

These estimates from Guttmacher and the CDC are results of multiyear efforts to collect data on abortion across the U.S. Last year, Guttmacher also began publishing less precise estimates every few months , based on a much smaller sample of providers.

The figures reported by these organizations include only legal induced abortions conducted by clinics, hospitals or physicians’ offices, or those that make use of abortion pills dispensed from certified facilities such as clinics or physicians’ offices. They do not account for the use of abortion pills that were obtained  outside of clinical settings .

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The annual number of U.S. abortions rose for years after Roe v. Wade legalized the procedure in 1973, reaching its highest levels around the late 1980s and early 1990s, according to both the CDC and Guttmacher. Since then, abortions have generally decreased at what a CDC analysis called  “a slow yet steady pace.”

Guttmacher says the number of abortions occurring in the U.S. in 2020 was 40% lower than it was in 1991. According to the CDC, the number was 36% lower in 2021 than in 1991, looking just at the District of Columbia and the 46 states that reported both of those years.

(The corresponding line graph shows the long-term trend in the number of legal abortions reported by both organizations. To allow for consistent comparisons over time, the CDC figures in the chart have been adjusted to ensure that the same states are counted from one year to the next. Using that approach, the CDC figure for 2021 is 622,108 legal abortions.)

There have been occasional breaks in this long-term pattern of decline – during the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, and then again in the late 2010s. The CDC reported modest 1% and 2% increases in abortions in 2018 and 2019, and then, after a 2% decrease in 2020, a 5% increase in 2021. Guttmacher reported an 8% increase over the three-year period from 2017 to 2020.

As noted above, these figures do not include abortions that use pills obtained outside of clinical settings.

Guttmacher says that in 2020 there were 14.4 abortions in the U.S. per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44. Its data shows that the rate of abortions among women has generally been declining in the U.S. since 1981, when it reported there were 29.3 abortions per 1,000 women in that age range.

The CDC says that in 2021, there were 11.6 abortions in the U.S. per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44. (That figure excludes data from California, the District of Columbia, Maryland, New Hampshire and New Jersey.) Like Guttmacher’s data, the CDC’s figures also suggest a general decline in the abortion rate over time. In 1980, when the CDC reported on all 50 states and D.C., it said there were 25 abortions per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44.

That said, both Guttmacher and the CDC say there were slight increases in the rate of abortions during the late 2010s and early 2020s. Guttmacher says the abortion rate per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 rose from 13.5 in 2017 to 14.4 in 2020. The CDC says it rose from 11.2 per 1,000 in 2017 to 11.4 in 2019, before falling back to 11.1 in 2020 and then rising again to 11.6 in 2021. (The CDC’s figures for those years exclude data from California, D.C., Maryland, New Hampshire and New Jersey.)

The CDC broadly divides abortions into two categories: surgical abortions and medication abortions, which involve pills. Since the Food and Drug Administration first approved abortion pills in 2000, their use has increased over time as a share of abortions nationally, according to both the CDC and Guttmacher.

The majority of abortions in the U.S. now involve pills, according to both the CDC and Guttmacher. The CDC says 56% of U.S. abortions in 2021 involved pills, up from 53% in 2020 and 44% in 2019. Its figures for 2021 include the District of Columbia and 44 states that provided this data; its figures for 2020 include D.C. and 44 states (though not all of the same states as in 2021), and its figures for 2019 include D.C. and 45 states.

Guttmacher, which measures this every three years, says 53% of U.S. abortions involved pills in 2020, up from 39% in 2017.

Two pills commonly used together for medication abortions are mifepristone, which, taken first, blocks hormones that support a pregnancy, and misoprostol, which then causes the uterus to empty. According to the FDA, medication abortions are safe  until 10 weeks into pregnancy.

Surgical abortions conducted  during the first trimester  of pregnancy typically use a suction process, while the relatively few surgical abortions that occur  during the second trimester  of a pregnancy typically use a process called dilation and evacuation, according to the UCLA School of Medicine.

In 2020, there were 1,603 facilities in the U.S. that provided abortions,  according to Guttmacher . This included 807 clinics, 530 hospitals and 266 physicians’ offices.

While clinics make up half of the facilities that provide abortions, they are the sites where the vast majority (96%) of abortions are administered, either through procedures or the distribution of pills, according to Guttmacher’s 2020 data. (This includes 54% of abortions that are administered at specialized abortion clinics and 43% at nonspecialized clinics.) Hospitals made up 33% of the facilities that provided abortions in 2020 but accounted for only 3% of abortions that year, while just 1% of abortions were conducted by physicians’ offices.

Looking just at clinics – that is, the total number of specialized abortion clinics and nonspecialized clinics in the U.S. – Guttmacher found the total virtually unchanged between 2017 (808 clinics) and 2020 (807 clinics). However, there were regional differences. In the Midwest, the number of clinics that provide abortions increased by 11% during those years, and in the West by 6%. The number of clinics  decreased  during those years by 9% in the Northeast and 3% in the South.

The total number of abortion providers has declined dramatically since the 1980s. In 1982, according to Guttmacher, there were 2,908 facilities providing abortions in the U.S., including 789 clinics, 1,405 hospitals and 714 physicians’ offices.

The CDC does not track the number of abortion providers.

In the District of Columbia and the 46 states that provided abortion and residency information to the CDC in 2021, 10.9% of all abortions were performed on women known to live outside the state where the abortion occurred – slightly higher than the percentage in 2020 (9.7%). That year, D.C. and 46 states (though not the same ones as in 2021) reported abortion and residency data. (The total number of abortions used in these calculations included figures for women with both known and unknown residential status.)

The share of reported abortions performed on women outside their state of residence was much higher before the 1973 Roe decision that stopped states from banning abortion. In 1972, 41% of all abortions in D.C. and the 20 states that provided this information to the CDC that year were performed on women outside their state of residence. In 1973, the corresponding figure was 21% in the District of Columbia and the 41 states that provided this information, and in 1974 it was 11% in D.C. and the 43 states that provided data.

In the District of Columbia and the 46 states that reported age data to  the CDC in 2021, the majority of women who had abortions (57%) were in their 20s, while about three-in-ten (31%) were in their 30s. Teens ages 13 to 19 accounted for 8% of those who had abortions, while women ages 40 to 44 accounted for about 4%.

The vast majority of women who had abortions in 2021 were unmarried (87%), while married women accounted for 13%, according to  the CDC , which had data on this from 37 states.

In the District of Columbia, New York City (but not the rest of New York) and the 31 states that reported racial and ethnic data on abortion to  the CDC , 42% of all women who had abortions in 2021 were non-Hispanic Black, while 30% were non-Hispanic White, 22% were Hispanic and 6% were of other races.

Looking at abortion rates among those ages 15 to 44, there were 28.6 abortions per 1,000 non-Hispanic Black women in 2021; 12.3 abortions per 1,000 Hispanic women; 6.4 abortions per 1,000 non-Hispanic White women; and 9.2 abortions per 1,000 women of other races, the  CDC reported  from those same 31 states, D.C. and New York City.

For 57% of U.S. women who had induced abortions in 2021, it was the first time they had ever had one,  according to the CDC.  For nearly a quarter (24%), it was their second abortion. For 11% of women who had an abortion that year, it was their third, and for 8% it was their fourth or more. These CDC figures include data from 41 states and New York City, but not the rest of New York.

Nearly four-in-ten women who had abortions in 2021 (39%) had no previous live births at the time they had an abortion,  according to the CDC . Almost a quarter (24%) of women who had abortions in 2021 had one previous live birth, 20% had two previous live births, 10% had three, and 7% had four or more previous live births. These CDC figures include data from 41 states and New York City, but not the rest of New York.

The vast majority of abortions occur during the first trimester of a pregnancy. In 2021, 93% of abortions occurred during the first trimester – that is, at or before 13 weeks of gestation,  according to the CDC . An additional 6% occurred between 14 and 20 weeks of pregnancy, and about 1% were performed at 21 weeks or more of gestation. These CDC figures include data from 40 states and New York City, but not the rest of New York.

About 2% of all abortions in the U.S. involve some type of complication for the woman , according to an article in StatPearls, an online health care resource. “Most complications are considered minor such as pain, bleeding, infection and post-anesthesia complications,” according to the article.

The CDC calculates  case-fatality rates for women from induced abortions – that is, how many women die from abortion-related complications, for every 100,000 legal abortions that occur in the U.S .  The rate was lowest during the most recent period examined by the agency (2013 to 2020), when there were 0.45 deaths to women per 100,000 legal induced abortions. The case-fatality rate reported by the CDC was highest during the first period examined by the agency (1973 to 1977), when it was 2.09 deaths to women per 100,000 legal induced abortions. During the five-year periods in between, the figure ranged from 0.52 (from 1993 to 1997) to 0.78 (from 1978 to 1982).

The CDC calculates death rates by five-year and seven-year periods because of year-to-year fluctuation in the numbers and due to the relatively low number of women who die from legal induced abortions.

In 2020, the last year for which the CDC has information , six women in the U.S. died due to complications from induced abortions. Four women died in this way in 2019, two in 2018, and three in 2017. (These deaths all followed legal abortions.) Since 1990, the annual number of deaths among women due to legal induced abortion has ranged from two to 12.

The annual number of reported deaths from induced abortions (legal and illegal) tended to be higher in the 1980s, when it ranged from nine to 16, and from 1972 to 1979, when it ranged from 13 to 63. One driver of the decline was the drop in deaths from illegal abortions. There were 39 deaths from illegal abortions in 1972, the last full year before Roe v. Wade. The total fell to 19 in 1973 and to single digits or zero every year after that. (The number of deaths from legal abortions has also declined since then, though with some slight variation over time.)

The number of deaths from induced abortions was considerably higher in the 1960s than afterward. For instance, there were 119 deaths from induced abortions in  1963  and 99 in  1965 , according to reports by the then-U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, a precursor to the Department of Health and Human Services. The CDC is a division of Health and Human Services.

Note: This is an update of a post originally published May 27, 2022, and first updated June 24, 2022.

Support for legal abortion is widespread in many countries, especially in Europe

Nearly a year after roe’s demise, americans’ views of abortion access increasingly vary by where they live, by more than two-to-one, americans say medication abortion should be legal in their state, most latinos say democrats care about them and work hard for their vote, far fewer say so of gop, positive views of supreme court decline sharply following abortion ruling, most popular.

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NPR defends its journalism after senior editor says it has lost the public's trust

David Folkenflik

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust.

NPR's top news executive defended its journalism and its commitment to reflecting a diverse array of views on Tuesday after a senior NPR editor wrote a broad critique of how the network has covered some of the most important stories of the age.

"An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America," writes Uri Berliner.

A strategic emphasis on diversity and inclusion on the basis of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation, promoted by NPR's former CEO, John Lansing, has fed "the absence of viewpoint diversity," Berliner writes.

NPR's chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff Tuesday afternoon that she and the news leadership team strongly reject Berliner's assessment.

"We're proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories," she wrote. "We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world."

NPR names tech executive Katherine Maher to lead in turbulent era

She added, "None of our work is above scrutiny or critique. We must have vigorous discussions in the newsroom about how we serve the public as a whole."

A spokesperson for NPR said Chapin, who also serves as the network's chief content officer, would have no further comment.

Praised by NPR's critics

Berliner is a senior editor on NPR's Business Desk. (Disclosure: I, too, am part of the Business Desk, and Berliner has edited many of my past stories. He did not see any version of this article or participate in its preparation before it was posted publicly.)

Berliner's essay , titled "I've Been at NPR for 25 years. Here's How We Lost America's Trust," was published by The Free Press, a website that has welcomed journalists who have concluded that mainstream news outlets have become reflexively liberal.

Berliner writes that as a Subaru-driving, Sarah Lawrence College graduate who "was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother ," he fits the mold of a loyal NPR fan.

Yet Berliner says NPR's news coverage has fallen short on some of the most controversial stories of recent years, from the question of whether former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election, to the origins of the virus that causes COVID-19, to the significance and provenance of emails leaked from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden weeks before the 2020 election. In addition, he blasted NPR's coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

On each of these stories, Berliner asserts, NPR has suffered from groupthink due to too little diversity of viewpoints in the newsroom.

The essay ricocheted Tuesday around conservative media , with some labeling Berliner a whistleblower . Others picked it up on social media, including Elon Musk, who has lambasted NPR for leaving his social media site, X. (Musk emailed another NPR reporter a link to Berliner's article with a gibe that the reporter was a "quisling" — a World War II reference to someone who collaborates with the enemy.)

When asked for further comment late Tuesday, Berliner declined, saying the essay spoke for itself.

The arguments he raises — and counters — have percolated across U.S. newsrooms in recent years. The #MeToo sexual harassment scandals of 2016 and 2017 forced newsrooms to listen to and heed more junior colleagues. The social justice movement prompted by the killing of George Floyd in 2020 inspired a reckoning in many places. Newsroom leaders often appeared to stand on shaky ground.

Leaders at many newsrooms, including top editors at The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times , lost their jobs. Legendary Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron wrote in his memoir that he feared his bonds with the staff were "frayed beyond repair," especially over the degree of self-expression his journalists expected to exert on social media, before he decided to step down in early 2021.

Since then, Baron and others — including leaders of some of these newsrooms — have suggested that the pendulum has swung too far.

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New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger warned last year against journalists embracing a stance of what he calls "one-side-ism": "where journalists are demonstrating that they're on the side of the righteous."

"I really think that that can create blind spots and echo chambers," he said.

Internal arguments at The Times over the strength of its reporting on accusations that Hamas engaged in sexual assaults as part of a strategy for its Oct. 7 attack on Israel erupted publicly . The paper conducted an investigation to determine the source of a leak over a planned episode of the paper's podcast The Daily on the subject, which months later has not been released. The newsroom guild accused the paper of "targeted interrogation" of journalists of Middle Eastern descent.

Heated pushback in NPR's newsroom

Given Berliner's account of private conversations, several NPR journalists question whether they can now trust him with unguarded assessments about stories in real time. Others express frustration that he had not sought out comment in advance of publication. Berliner acknowledged to me that for this story, he did not seek NPR's approval to publish the piece, nor did he give the network advance notice.

Some of Berliner's NPR colleagues are responding heatedly. Fernando Alfonso, a senior supervising editor for digital news, wrote that he wholeheartedly rejected Berliner's critique of the coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict, for which NPR's journalists, like their peers, periodically put themselves at risk.

Alfonso also took issue with Berliner's concern over the focus on diversity at NPR.

"As a person of color who has often worked in newsrooms with little to no people who look like me, the efforts NPR has made to diversify its workforce and its sources are unique and appropriate given the news industry's long-standing lack of diversity," Alfonso says. "These efforts should be celebrated and not denigrated as Uri has done."

After this story was first published, Berliner contested Alfonso's characterization, saying his criticism of NPR is about the lack of diversity of viewpoints, not its diversity itself.

"I never criticized NPR's priority of achieving a more diverse workforce in terms of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. I have not 'denigrated' NPR's newsroom diversity goals," Berliner said. "That's wrong."

Questions of diversity

Under former CEO John Lansing, NPR made increasing diversity, both of its staff and its audience, its "North Star" mission. Berliner says in the essay that NPR failed to consider broader diversity of viewpoint, noting, "In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans."

Berliner cited audience estimates that suggested a concurrent falloff in listening by Republicans. (The number of people listening to NPR broadcasts and terrestrial radio broadly has declined since the start of the pandemic.)

Former NPR vice president for news and ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin tweeted , "I know Uri. He's not wrong."

Others questioned Berliner's logic. "This probably gets causality somewhat backward," tweeted Semafor Washington editor Jordan Weissmann . "I'd guess that a lot of NPR listeners who voted for [Mitt] Romney have changed how they identify politically."

Similarly, Nieman Lab founder Joshua Benton suggested the rise of Trump alienated many NPR-appreciating Republicans from the GOP.

In recent years, NPR has greatly enhanced the percentage of people of color in its workforce and its executive ranks. Four out of 10 staffers are people of color; nearly half of NPR's leadership team identifies as Black, Asian or Latino.

"The philosophy is: Do you want to serve all of America and make sure it sounds like all of America, or not?" Lansing, who stepped down last month, says in response to Berliner's piece. "I'd welcome the argument against that."

"On radio, we were really lagging in our representation of an audience that makes us look like what America looks like today," Lansing says. The U.S. looks and sounds a lot different than it did in 1971, when NPR's first show was broadcast, Lansing says.

A network spokesperson says new NPR CEO Katherine Maher supports Chapin and her response to Berliner's critique.

The spokesperson says that Maher "believes that it's a healthy thing for a public service newsroom to engage in rigorous consideration of the needs of our audiences, including where we serve our mission well and where we can serve it better."

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

What Blocking Emergency Abortion Care in Idaho Means for Doctors Like Me

O n April 24, the Supreme Court will hear arguments weighing whether Idaho politicians have the power to block doctors from giving emergency medical care to patients experiencing pregnancy complications—a case that will open the door for other states to prohibit emergency reproductive care and worsen medical infrastructure for people across the board. Once again, politicians have set up a case that could have devastating impacts on the ability of doctors to provide--and for pregnant women to receive--essential reproductive health care.

I’m a family physician who’s practiced medicine in rural Idaho for more than 20 years, where I’ve had the opportunity to guide hundreds of patients through their pregnancies. It’s no exaggeration when I say that my state’s health care system is in crisis, thanks in enormous part to our near-total abortion ban. Now, instead of trying to salvage what’s left, Idaho politicians are looking to hasten our downward spiral, making it even harder for doctors like me to provide care to patients in need. I can only hope that the Court will take into account that it’s not just abortion at stake in this case—it’s the future of emergency room care and medicine altogether.  

Rural health care has always faced challenges, but in the nearly two years since the overturning of Roe v. Wade , it’s gotten exponentially worse. In Idaho, we’ve lost nearly a quarter of our obstetricians since the state’s abortion ban went into effect—colleagues and friends who got into medicine to help people are being forced out of practicing obstetrics in our state. They realized it was impossible to provide adequate care while under the thumb of politicians more interested in advancing their extremist agenda than protecting the health of their constituents.

Idaho’s abortion ban makes it a crime for anyone to perform or assist with performing an abortion in nearly all circumstances. The ban does not even include an exception for when a person’s health is at risk—only for when a doctor determines that an abortion is necessary to prevent the pregnant person’s death. Ask any doctor and they'll tell you that this "exception" leads to more questions than answers.

Read More: ‘ Am I a Felon?’ The Fall of Roe v. Wade Has Permanently Changed the Doctor-Patient Relationship

Patients need an emergency abortion for a wide range of circumstances, including to resolve a health-threatening miscarriage. But there is no clear-cut legal definition under the ban of what exactly that looks like or when we can intervene, and doctors—operating under the threat of prosecution—have no choice but to err on the side of caution.

“Can I continue to replace her blood loss fast enough? How many organ systems must be failing? Can a patient be hours away from death before I intervene, or does it have to be minutes?” These are the callous questions doctors are now forced to think through, all the while our patient is counting on us to do the right thing and put their needs first.

As a result, pregnant patients sometimes make repeated trips to the ER because they’re told time and time again that nothing can be done for them until their complications get more severe. Imagine if someone you love had a 104-degree fever but you were told nothing could be done until it spiked to 106 and your organs were failing. Requiring patients to get right up to the point of no return before administering care is not sound medical policy—it’s naked cruelty, and it’s only going to get worse as long as we allow extremism, not science, to run rampant in our statehouses and trample over our safe system of care.

It also violates a longstanding federal law—the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA)—that requires hospitals to treat emergencies before they become life-threatening. That’s exactly why the U.S. Department of Justice sued Idaho soon after the state’s abortion ban took effect. The lawsuit argues only that Idaho must allow doctors to provide abortions in medical emergencies when that is the standard stabilizing care, but even that proved too much for state leaders.

Instead, Idaho politicians fought the DOJ all the way up to the Supreme Court. How the Supreme Court rules will have broad implications that will reverberate throughout the country. If the Court holds that federal law no longer protects pregnant people during emergencies, it will give anti-abortion politicians across the country the green light to deny essential abortion care, push providers to leave states where the choices made with their patients can be second-guessed by prosecutors, and continue this cycle of inhumanity for patients. 

As we’ve seen in Idaho, policies guided by anti-abortion extremism make health care worse for everyone. This assault on abortion has not ended with abortion—rather, it has extended to more of our rights and health care, with birth control , IVF , prescription drugs , and now emergency medical care all at risk.  

This must stop. 

For nearly 40 years, federal law has guaranteed that patients have access to necessary emergency care, including when a pregnancy goes horribly wrong. The Supreme Court must uphold this law and ensure pregnant people continue to get the care they need when they need it most. The health of my patients in West Central Idaho—and millions of other Americans across the country—deserve nothing less.

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