"And how can you compare beauty to potential to learn?"
There's a big difference between potential to learn and actually learning. Yeah, everyone probably could, if they spent enough time at it, attain Ph.D levels of intellectual achievement. But they won't. At some point, they'll say "This is stupid. I have better things to do with my life," and go do those.
"Even in races the difference between the top world runner and his peers is not by much."
There's not much difference between the top world runner and his peers. There's a huge difference between the top world runner and you or me. The people at the top of the field are already putting in as much effort as is humanly possible. On top of that, they have talent. There're lots more people who also put in as much effort as is humanly possible, but find they're still nowhere close to the top. Usually, they get discouraged by this and choose a passion where their effort gives them a bit more reward.
"Genetically speaking we humans are pretty much identical."
That all depends on how broadly you define "identical". We share about 99.9% of our genes with other humans. We share about 98% with chimpanzees. Most people would say that there's a fairly large difference between a human and a chimpanzee.
In a broad sense, yeah, virtually everything alive is practically identical. A human and an ebola virus are made of the same elemental building blocks, and the roughly million-fold difference in their size and complexity is peanuts compared to the breadth of the universe or the minisculeness of the Planck length.
But most of what makes us human is the ability to discriminate, the ability to look at details and pick out tiny differences. So yeah, there's probably a few milliseconds separating the top two sprinters in the world. But those few milliseconds might as well be an eternity for them. The difference is probably irrelevant for a layperson, but it matters a lot for someone in the sport.
There's a distinction between "everyone is equal" and "everyone is equal at everything they do". The former is a way of defining equality - I find it a pretty useful way, but I recognize that this says more about me than it does about the world. The latter is just factually incorrect.
I'm also wrong about the chimpanzees - recent research suggests that they share only 95% of genes with humans, not 98% - but at least I'm not off by a few orders of magnitude.
Read it, it doesn't state up to how many significant digits that percent is accurate so it doesn't prove I'm wrong. They may have just shorten it for brevity.
The convention in science is that you display as many digits as your measurement is significant to. If it were significant to two digits, it would've been 99%; if it were significant to four digits, it would've been 99.90%.
In any case, that number's backed up by several sources:
There's a big difference between potential to learn and actually learning. Yeah, everyone probably could, if they spent enough time at it, attain Ph.D levels of intellectual achievement. But they won't. At some point, they'll say "This is stupid. I have better things to do with my life," and go do those.
"Even in races the difference between the top world runner and his peers is not by much."
There's not much difference between the top world runner and his peers. There's a huge difference between the top world runner and you or me. The people at the top of the field are already putting in as much effort as is humanly possible. On top of that, they have talent. There're lots more people who also put in as much effort as is humanly possible, but find they're still nowhere close to the top. Usually, they get discouraged by this and choose a passion where their effort gives them a bit more reward.
"Genetically speaking we humans are pretty much identical."
That all depends on how broadly you define "identical". We share about 99.9% of our genes with other humans. We share about 98% with chimpanzees. Most people would say that there's a fairly large difference between a human and a chimpanzee.
In a broad sense, yeah, virtually everything alive is practically identical. A human and an ebola virus are made of the same elemental building blocks, and the roughly million-fold difference in their size and complexity is peanuts compared to the breadth of the universe or the minisculeness of the Planck length.
But most of what makes us human is the ability to discriminate, the ability to look at details and pick out tiny differences. So yeah, there's probably a few milliseconds separating the top two sprinters in the world. But those few milliseconds might as well be an eternity for them. The difference is probably irrelevant for a layperson, but it matters a lot for someone in the sport.
There's a distinction between "everyone is equal" and "everyone is equal at everything they do". The former is a way of defining equality - I find it a pretty useful way, but I recognize that this says more about me than it does about the world. The latter is just factually incorrect.