Does poetry make us human?

[vaneramos]

The question of human uniqueness keeps surfacing. Edmund Blair Bolles on Babel's Dawn, a blog about the origins of speech, argues it isn't language itself that makes us human, but the ability to perceive ourselves as a group, which in turn "gives us something to talk about." Co-operative behaviour, among hunting apes for example, should not be interpreted as evidence of a group concept as long as a simpler explanation remains viable. He claims that such behaviour can be explained as opportunism, or social adaptation involving simple rules of action. Elsewhere he argues group behaviour in animals is the result of natural selection, rather than a manifestation of intelligence. Apparently, Bowles believes intelligence is the thing that sets us apart from the animal kingdom.

Hello, intelligence itself has arisen from natural selection. Why is it still so important to prove humans are unique? Each creature has evolved various strategies for survival. While language and complex social behaviour happen to have developed in our own genetic tool kit, they do not necessarily make us superior. We are successful according to our own selfish standards, but from another perspective it's clear our intelligence is backfiring, just as fatally as a common loon's tendency to trample its own eggs when it panics.

We are unique, however we bear more similarities with our evolutionary kin then we do with an octopus, which has evolved intelligence along a line alien to ours. It is dangerously arrogant to continue arguing that Something sets our species apart from the rest.

Meanwhile, Irish writer Josephine Hart is quoted in TimesOnline:

After all, what is it that makes us human? It is language. And poetic language is the most rare form. It's like a gem because the wisdom and insight of the poet is compressed into it. It's a thrilling thing that a line can set off in your mind a whole world of potential experience.

She points out that poetry is more intrinsic to culture in Ireland than elsewhere, and claims it is indispensible. "To deny yourself [poetry] is voluntarily to starve your soul." She blames a movement of anti-elitism in education for allowing the greatest aspects of language to die out.

I find myself much more susceptible to this line of thinking, but for the sake of argument let's ask, "What if poetry is not unique to the human race?" I've heard it in the lonely call of the loon. I've seen it in the play of light on the river.

Maybe language has merely given us another way of expressing the interplay of chaos and control intrinsic to nature. Our particular human rhythm and rhyme are not superior, but they hold special meaning to us, because they are our own. We are important to ourselves.