Homo sapiens

There he sits, this thinking, building animal, his machines humming gently all around him and his thoughts whirring inside his head. Artifaction and abstraction have come to dominate his life. One might almost suppose that action -simple animal action- would be beneath him, surviving only as a remnant from his primeval past. but this is not so. Throughout it all, he has remained a creature of action -a gesticulating, posturing, moving, expressive primate. He is as far today from becoming the disembodied, plasma-fed, giant superbrain of science fiction as he was back in his prehistoric hunting past. Philosophy and engineering have not replaced animal activity, they have added to it. The fact that we have developed a concept of happiness and have words to express it, does not stop us from performing the action-pattern of stretching our lips into a smile. The fact that we have boats does not stop us swimming.

Manwatching by Desmond Morris.