For merely being the only specie blessed with a rational, thinking brain, humans can already be considered superior to all other forms of life. However, when other attributes are to be also taken into consideration, humans can appear to be more or less no different from what is collectively known as the lower strata of life forms. When it comes to ways of life, some species of plants and animals alike do exhibit patterns in the same way that different groups or races of people have a way of life that is distinct from each other.
There are plants that live from eating insects, for instance, in the same way that some herds of mammals or schools of fish stay in a group to protect themselves from predators. Similarly, different groups of humans exhibit several ways of life that are patterned accordingly, depending on race, gender, religion, geography, and so on. Humans are also rather similar to the other forms of life when it comes to biological instincts. This is to be expected since as a life form, humans, like all other life forms, are bound by the conditions of biology that cannot be helped.
Like animals, for example, humans, in matters of life and death that is, can apply the law of the jungle. In this case, humans can stand out in terms of culture, but only because the word itself is defined as pertaining to people. This culture, however, if defined loosely, can be applied to those species that exhibit a remarkable pattern in their ways of life. Besides, humans do not necessarily need culture to survive. Humans have lived for ages on raw animal instinct and have been surviving, now social animals, to this day.
However, humans survived and lived from ancient times up to the present through the use of tools, a behavior that was never exhibited by any of the species from the lower strata of life forms (Evans, 2004). Thus, this ability to use tools to gather food, protect themselves and their kin, and survive, truly sets humans apart from their lower-life counterparts, from the age before any culture was ever born up to the modern day and age where it seems as if culture was all there ever was. www.ecotao.com/holism/hu_sap.htm