Since the beginning, we’ve always been bothering ourselves about what sets us apart from other nonhuman animals. We’ve done so in many curiosity-driven ways: vivisections, laboratory analysis, and experimentations. These are some of the many things we’ve done to torment our fellow nonhuman animals.

And mainly, our anxieties are questions as to why we’ve developed so rapidly in contrast with other animals. If you are doubting our progress, I advise you to quickly donate your phone to a charity. What isolates our successes from other miserably stagnant animals?

One of the commonest argument (advocated by semantics practitioners) is that owing to our advance ways of using language, we have a developmental competitive advantage over our rivals in the animal kingdom.

E.g., many animals (excluding humans) have proven to only use a disadvantageous language that only allows them to express severely basic communications between each other, “I want to eat, sleep, mate; beware! There’s danger coming.” These are part of the basic things nonhuman animals seem to be uttering all the time. Whereas by contrast, humans have shown to be capable of saying far crazier things. E.g.—

The constitutional court has unanimously decided to rewrite obsolete policies that allow for the exploitation of illegal immigrants as part of its fight against human rights violations.

If you were to try explaining the above statement to a nonhuman animal you may realise that these animals do not understand or concern themselves about rewriting policies or democracy as much as we do, such abstract concepts are beyond their vocabularies.

And due to this reason: our ability to say more than we should—humans can listen to ingenuous individuals or groups that claim to have abstract ideas capable of improving human life; and we can collaborate collectively to help such individuals bring about their ideas into reality.

Again, because of our free-moving tongues our intellectual geniuses—like Einstein—are capable of freely explaining their scientifically abstract perspectives to us, so that we can capitalise on their ideas and reap the rewards as a species. But sadly, a chimpanzee Einstein will have to die with his ideas unknown because of his congenital verbal impotence, or more plainly, because of his inability to talk extensively.

To enhance the advantage of complex language use even further ancient humans invented writing down symbols (words) as a means to store their observations or wisdom—and in so doing, they’ve allowed their descendants to learn from them in their absence, and more importantly for their descendants to also modify the inherited teachings to make them more suitable for their own modern society.

But sadly again, even if our fictitious chimpanzee Einstein was capable of telling his chimpanzee friends about his abundant ideas, his ideas will eventually be forgotten because nonhumans cannot write, or more technically, because they cannot store symbols(words) for future reference.

All in all, what’s special about humans is our ability to use language in an extremely intricate way, which is an ability nonhuman animals aren’t blessed with.