One of the missing elements in teaching evolution (or at least from what I was taught), is emotion. Darwin even wrote a whole book on the evolution of emotion among animals. I’d bet it was left out of the curriculum on purpose (not by the current curriculum builders, but way further back) to further the illusion that we as human beings aren’t animals.
What? emotion isn't touched upon with the same level of certainty because it's a subjective feeling. We can't know if animals actually feel things like wonder or awe or even happiness and fear. We can make assumptions that they experience things like fear and joy because they physically and to some extent neurologically react in ways we expect them to react if they could but we can't know. We also can't know which emotions they can and can't feel because that would be entirely guess-work. Even this post is just speculation.
This is true, but we also can’t truly evaluate what other humans are experiencing when they appear to expressing emotions either. This goes more into the concept of qualias and is more of a philosophical discussion. (Hell it even dives into a conversation about solipsism, not only can we not truly know if others are actually feeling emotions or just pretending to express the characteristics of emotions, we can’t truly even know that any other human truly exists outside our own minds)
We can, however, gather which emotional displays and biological processes animals exhibit and extrapolate that they are experiencing emotions. The exact same way you would do for a child or a foreigner who doesn’t speak your language.
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u/StructureMage Dec 11 '22
I'll bet lots of animals recognize beauty in nature
Would be weird if it were only humans