What is the difference between man and animal?

Question

What is the difference between man and animal?

Answer 1

Nothing, except humans are arrogant enough to think there are many

Answer 2

Humans are the only animals that wear clothes, use fire, speak (by intentionally pausing their breathing), and walk upright, most of the time!

Answer 3

free will

Answer 4

There are many, but one of the main ones is man's ability to communicate via spoken language.

Answer 5

Here is an answer I recently gave for a similar question - somewhat edited:

In common parlance, the term 'animal' does not have the same meaning that it has in scientific discourse. Even though I have never seen a dictionary whihc included this definition, many people if not most commonly mean something other than human when they say "animal". I am not defending this practice - merely pointing it out.

Scientifically - that is - in the real world, we are animals.  

Unlike most animals, we desire to be special and engage in willful denial of our animal nature. Even anthropologists tend to believe that there is some value to ennumerating characteristics which separate us from other animals, though they are careful to avoid saying we are not animals (usually).  Can you imagine a squirrel doing this?

Answer 6

Instinct dominates animals.  Man often has to re-remember instinct.

Answer 7

None.

We are neither Algae, protists, fungi, archaea or bacteria. We are certainly not plants...that leaves animals.

Man is, therefore, an animal and everybody who reads ought to know this.

Observation: "ear wax of satan, is so much nicer than I am. I am striving to make my responses more amenable.

Answer 8

Uh, we ARE animals; we are one species of animal (specifically, we are a species of apes).

There's more than one thing that distinguishes us from other animals -- I see no reason to assume there's only ONE difference.

A huge one is our brain size: if you plot brain weight against body weight, taking into account that bigger bodies require bigger brains, but not in a one-for-one-unit ratio, we stand out as having much bigger brains for our body-size than anything else.

There are also big differences in the stucture of said brain, such as the part that's specialized for processing language and other symbols.

We also develop and mature much more slowly than similar critters.

Answer 9

Very little, as it turns out. So far, the only thing I'd say that marks us out as different is out is our imagination and higher reasoning skills.

Altruism, recreational s*x and drugs, medicine, speech, tool use, war, clothing... pretty much everything else we do is done by other animals. They even show 'cultural' learned behaviour with food gathering (chimps) and languages (dolphins) that vary from one location to the next.