Consider the Weather
Consider this: if you take a human born in the middle of Africa – descended from Africans – and swap them with someone born and descended from people living in the Northern Hemisphere for many generations, both humans are capable of surviving in their new climate. A dark-skinned African with a coat is essentially as effective in the cold as a light-skinned Swede in a coat. And in the hot climate, the Swede would acclimate to the situation in short order. Their skin would darken and they would sweat effectively enough to maintain a stable core temperature.
Now, further consider that this capacity is not only in-built in every human, but likely has been since BEFORE humans started migrating. Our African thought experiment may well be descended from humans that have been in that area of the world for dozens of millennia. Before humans were subjected to wildly varying climate, they were able to rapidly adapt enough so that they might be ABLE to travel to completely different climate zones without speciation. Humans the world over are still, obviously, completely biologically compatible.
This is the human trait that can be claimed to set us apart from other animals. We can’t prove we’re the smartest – dolphins show remarkable intellect, for instance, and it may be impossible to measure them on the same scale that we measure ourselves – but we CAN claim to be one of the most adaptable (multi-cellular) creatures to ever show up on Earth. This is the key to the species’ current success. With any luck, it will get us out of more trouble than it has gotten us into.
