How did we humans come to be so different from other animals? That question could not have even been posed until Darwin showed that our differences from animals had evolved. We were not created different from animals. Instead, we had come over time to be different from them.

Until recently, the question how that had happened belonged to the exclusive province of palaeontology and comparative anatomy. Now, insights are flooding in from many other fields, such as molecular biology, linguistics, cognitive psychology, and even art history. As a result, the problem of the evolution of human inventiveness looks as if it may at last be becoming soluble. It is surely among the most challenging questions in biology today.

Despite Darwin, all of us still lump clams, cockroaches, and cuckoos together under an umbrella concept that we term ‘animals’, and that we contrast with us humans – as if clams, cockroaches, and cuckoos somehow had more in common with each other than they do with us. We thrust even chimpanzees down into that abyss of bestiality, while we stand uniquely on high.

All our unique features are ultimately expressions of our unique inventiveness. Just think of some of the unique forms that our inventiveness takes:

• Unlike any animal, we communicate with each other by means of spoken language and written books.

• We thereby know about things that happened in remote places and at remote past times, such as Schrödinger's 1943 lectures. What animal species possesses any knowledge of what some other individual of its own species on another continent was thinking fifty years ago?

• We depend completely on tools and machines for our living.