- the book
Here’s what I mean. Recently, I’ve been reading this book called Scienceblind by Andrew Shtulman, a book about intuitive theories. The 8th chapter of this book highlights intuitive thoughts about life, and what life means to us.
- moving=living
One of the examples given in the book that highlight our understanding of life is how young children don’t see plants as ‘living’. Our reasoning behind this is simple; moving=living. Life as defined by biologists includes anything that extracts energy from their environment and uses that to further exist. So then why might our intuitive understanding of life be so wrong? The book goes on to provide an explanation: living things that move such as other people or animals interact with us, they can be dangerous or helpful: this is why we focus on them. Even within things that move, children focus on the ones that are most like us. This is also brought up in the book: ‘the more similar an organism is to us, the more likely preschoolers/young children are to attribute it biological properties’. So in short, the more human-like an organism is, the more ‘alive’ it seems to us.
- relating biological processes to ‘feelings’
Children relate biological processes such as eating and sleeping to feelings: we eat because we are hungry, or sleep because we are tired. These are feelings that we feel, that cause us to perform biological processes. Children see ‘life’ through this sort of filter, which in turn causes them to have misconceptions on what exactly is living. While this logic may work on a pet like a dog or cat, a plant that can’t ‘feel hungry’ still needs nutrients to ‘eat’ and are still living. The amount of diversity in living organisms also causes confusion. What eating and sleeping looks like varies a lot in the biological world, yet as humans , we still see organisms that function like us as more ‘living’ than ones that do not.
- conclusion
There isn’t an organism that is more living than another, however through our own skewed intuitive reasonings, it may appear as if one organism can be ‘more alive’ than another. Humans are inclined by nature to put ourselves on a pedestal: things seemingly more ‘human’ than others are deemed as more ‘living’.
My World 