# Cognitive test to separate humans from non-humans

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cognitive-test-to-separate-humans-from-non-humans/817307>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [July 5, 2018, 2:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cognitive-test-to-separate-humans-from-non-humans/817307 "2018-07-05T02:40:24Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\
**Post date:** [July 6, 2018, 2:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cognitive-test-to-separate-humans-from-non-humans/817307/21 "2018-07-06T14:21:52Z")

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The “just look at them” test is probably more reliable than a genetic test. Nobody would claim that a specimen of _Homo hela_ is a person, but genetically it’d be almost identical to us, having diverged from _Homo sapiens_ less than a century ago.

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**Author:** ![Reply](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/reply/32/15952_2.png) [@Reply](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Reply)\
**Post date:** [July 6, 2018, 9:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/cognitive-test-to-separate-humans-from-non-humans/817307/22 "2018-07-06T21:13:40Z")

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> [@Chronos](#):
>
> The “just look at them” test is probably more reliable than a genetic test.

This same thought has been used to justify, far too many times, that black people are more apelike and thus less human. It was almost certainly also a contributing factor to the extinction of neanderthals. Visual similarities have no actual bearing on speciation; a chihuahua doesn’t stop being a dog just because it looks so different from a husky. Visual similarities have also led to many species being misidentified as related when it’s just due to coincidentally convergent evolution. Taxonomy is a collection of mistakes of visual identification that are only slowly being corrected due to better understandings of genetics.

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