{"id":38988,"date":"2018-10-11T07:28:58","date_gmt":"2018-10-11T12:28:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=38988"},"modified":"2018-10-11T07:28:58","modified_gmt":"2018-10-11T12:28:58","slug":"our-opposable-thumb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=38988","title":{"rendered":"Our opposable thumb"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Our opposable thumb<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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\u201cStereoscopic vision, depth perception, certain emotions and other perceptions, and the ability to stretch our thumbs farther than most other species, the ability to build and destroy things, and many other traits individually or in combination separate us from other species, not necessarily all species though.<\/a>\u00a0 Other animals with opposable thumbs include gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and other variants of apes; certain frogs, koalas, pandas, possums and opossums, and many birds have an opposable digit of some sort.\u00a0 Many dinosaurs had opposable digits as well.\u00a0 Granted, most of these are primates, as are we.\u00a0 I wonder if rationalization is something unique to humans.\u00a0 The ability to ponder may be as well.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Humans are not the only species with an opposable thumb.\u00a0 We are not the species with the largest brain.\u00a0 We are not the only species to communicate or walk bipedal.\u00a0 So what does make Homo sapiens unique? Perhaps it has something to do with our imagination, our ability to ponder \u201cwhat if?\u201d and our stubborn persistence.\u00a0 Long ago I realized that I depend very strongly on my ability to imagine.\u00a0 Confronted by a challenging situation I imagine choices unfolding into the future.\u00a0 \u201cWill this work?\u201d I let my imagination run and a scenario plays out allowing me to decide \u201cyes, I think this will work\u201d or \u201cno, I don\u2019t think this will work.\u201d \u00a0I wonder, is imagination the real strength of Homo sapiens?\u00a0 It certainly helps when deciding a direction of action if we can picture a scenario in our head and imagine future outcome, assuming our assumptions are correct.<\/p>\n

Now let\u2019s take it one step further, what about belief in the absence of knowing?\u00a0 What does it mean that we can act even in the absence of logical argument?\u00a0 True story.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our opposable thumb \u201cStereoscopic vision, depth perception, certain emotions and other perceptions, and the ability to stretch our thumbs farther than most other species, the ability to build and destroy things, and many other traits individually or in combination separate us from other species, not necessarily all species though.\u00a0 Other animals with opposable thumbs include […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[16692,180,2057,16693,22230,7943,786],"class_list":["post-38988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-animasoul","tag-crises","tag-hope","tag-jody-tishmack","tag-opposable-thumb","tag-solutions","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38988"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38989,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38988\/revisions\/38989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}