All things being equal

At the risk of sounding trite, I have a lot of trouble finding a reason a human is morally or evolutionarily superior to a skunk. For that matter, many animals show one or several of the "finer" qualities of humanity, like altruism, beneficence, heroism, charity, etc. All things being equal, its actually a pretty level playing field.

So really, are we better than skunks (and by better I mean more evolved) because we can combine all these qualities into a single species and direct them to shared, predefined purpose?
I don't think so.

I'd like to argue that perhaps what makes us different..."better"...than all other species of life-forms on this planet is our unique ability to get organized. There is no other species of animal that forms a Congress to decide what the rest of a large group of the species should do, or not do. If a wolf performs errant, anti-wolf activities, the wolfpack does not form a jury, try, and punish the perpetrating wolf.
One might argue that those activities are just products of our modern society, that they aren't executed because we organize well, but because we formed a society that needed rules and in order to establish rule of law we formed tribunals and trial by jury etc etc. That may indeed be true. But what about military operations? What about parades? What about concerts?

Friday night I went to a local high school's holiday concert (because even though it was all Christmas carols, calling it Christmas is offensive). While watching a small army of high school students labor through some dumbed-down versions of Mannheim Steamroller, I could not help but be struck by how magical it is to watch a symphony perform. What other species does something like that?
Music, or the act of creating noise for pleasure, is not unique to humanity. However, I am struggling to think of a single instance in the entire animal kingdom where a species of animal participates in creating chords other than humans. The creation of a tune, with different voices that are working together to produce a harmony, is something that cannot be found outside the human species.
One might argue that animals may create their own music, or that our dim understanding of animal communication restricts our ability to grasp their beauty. However, even animals that tend to make music, like the whale, do so with a purpose. Mockingbirds only mimic other birds, though with great success.

The point here is not that music is what makes us unique, rather the making of the music. Chimpanzees never hear one chimpanzee making noises and proceed to start making noises a third or a fifth higher. No other species produces large groups that perform for others. No other species piles into large stadiums to watch the most athletic amongst them play games. No other species sends their smartest to train at colleges (or an imagined animal equivalent of college). Simply put: no other species organizes quite like we do.

So it comes down to a chicken/egg argument. Is our ability to organize due to the development of human civilization? Or is human's advanced civilization a byproduct of some evolutionary mechanism that appeared in our species, enabling us to organize like never before?

Mostly, nature appears to work by experimentation and random mutation, and one could argue (reasonably) that humanity has had no significant accomplishment due solely to evolution in the last 50,000 years. It makes the most sense that Nature, having tried the pack hunting technique and found it successful, and having found the omnivorous, land-dwelling homo erectus a good candidate with it's unusually large brain and long gestational period, chose to test out a new concept, that of complex organization, and found that the homos took to it like a fish to water.

At that moment, when pre-humans first said to themselves "Hey, if we (of Tribe A) band together with Tribe B and Tribe C, elect a leadership, re-evaluate roles in the new super-tribe, and then form a raiding party, we'll have more resources to allocate to the war effort against Tribe D. Then Tribe E saw the destruction of Tribe D at the hands of Tribe ABC, and quickly formed an alliance with Tribes F and G, while sending an emissary to establish peaceful trade with Tribe ABC...


_