What separate human beings from lower-animals? By Tom Robbins

What is it, that separate human beings from the so-called lower animals?
Well, as I see it, it\'s exactly one half-dozen significant things:
Humor, Imagination, Eroticism - as opposed to the mindless, instinctive mating of glow-worms or raccoons - Spirituality, Rebelliousness, and Aesthetics, an appreciation of beauty for its own sake.

In any event, of the six qualities that distinguished the human from the subhuman, Imagination and Humor are probably the most crucial.
Those with imagination could envision improvements and only those with a sense of humor could savor a good laugh when those improvements backfired or turned to crap.
Of all our different expressions of beingness, only laughter was pure enough, complex enough, free enough, endowed with enough mystery of meaning, to accurately reflect the soul.

Now, since those are the features that define a human being, it follows that the extent to which someone is lacking in those qualities is the extent to which he or she is less than human. Capisce? And in those cases where the defining qualities are virtually nonexistent, well, what we have are entities that are north of the animal kingdom but south of humanity, they fall somewhere in between,they\'re our MISSING LINKS.

There are more of them, in fact, than there are of us.
Missing links ought to be treated as the equal of full human beings in the eyes of the law, that they should not suffer discrimination in any usual sense, but that their writings and utterances should be generally disregarded and that they should never, ever be placed in positions of authority.