this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
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I heard a fascinating notion on the radio the other day - the thing that makes us unique as a species is that we're storytellers. Other animals can teach each other things, like whales and dolphins teaching their young how to hunt fish, or crows warning each other that one particular person is shady; but no other species invents Santa Claus to demonstrate that one should give for the joy of giving.
Humans have a unique capacity to not only understand complex, abstract ideas about how we should interact with each other; but also to reinvent and transmit these ideas in an evolutionary eyeblink. This memetic transmission and interpretation of societal ideas is having an impact on the earth as profound as when genetic transmission came along. And it's done through our capacity to tell each other stories, about how things might be and how we think they should be.
I wonder how much of our sense of self, as an ongoing narrative, stems from that ability to invent a story.
I think the ability to amass, retain, and augment information learned by our ancestors is our killer feature. Storytelling is an important part of it, using rhythm and rhyme to help us remember and pass on those stories, being able to encode those stories as art and writing, they're all ways to make it easier for the next generation to get up to speed quickly and then push the boundaries of understanding even further, instead of every generation having to relearn all the basics the hard way. It's not perfect and it's still incredibly lossy, but I think that's why we broke out and became, I think it's fair to say, the dominant lifeform on the planet. Is that the bar for sentience? I don't think so, but I don't really have a better one.
Also we invented santa claus to teach kids that every authority figure in your life will willingly engage in a conspiracy to gaslight and bribe you in order to make you behave the way they want you to.
I absolutely agree with everything in your first paragraph, and completely disagree with the second! That said, stories evolve at least as quickly as the language they're built from, and I'm sure every family that hangs up stockings has their own unique spin for Santa. But intentionally gaslighting your kids in order to teach an object lesson about how people will manipulate you seems like an awfully convoluted way to go about it, especially when the kid comes out ahead for it!
I think it started as a story to get kids excited, because that's fun. In my family, the kids were brought into the act as they got old enough to understand that the point; and I assume this was very common back when kids had to help with everything as soon as they were old enough. The kids then get to practice giving without any intention of getting recognition for it, which helps make more charitable adults.
That's not to say that the story doesn't get used to enforce behavior - the existence of Krampus shows a long history of that! But I don't think it's used primarily for that anymore.
While I think it's a nice thought, I still find the idea that humans are the ONLY "storytellers" to be falling into the same trap as tool use. Just because we haven't witnessed or recorded it doesn't mean that other species don't tell "stories".
Heck, even crows learn faces and then tell other crows about those faces. If that's not some form of "storytelling" idk what is.
I was incautious with my phrasing, I should have said something like “humans have a singular capacity” etc. There may well be other storytelling species (in fact, I hope there are!) Whalesong seems like it could have the necessary complexity, for instance. I don't think crows warning each other about particular faces quite constitutes a story, though - that seems more like spreading "we hate that guy!" without any of the context a story would provide. Would be easy to check for storytelling with the species that can imitate speech, though.
I suspect this is a big part of what we're looking for when we're exploring personhood in nonhumans, too - whenever talking to animals, aliens, etc comes up in fiction, people inevitably end up swapping stories with them. Suggests to me that storytelling ability is what people are actually looking for.
my cat will throw her toys in the air to chase them herself. That's make believe in a form.