Homo sapiens

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Homo sapiens

[¦hō·mō ′sap·ē·ənz]
(vertebrate zoology)
Modern human species; a large, erect, omnivorous terrestrial biped of the primate family Hominidae.
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Homo sapiens

the biological term for human beings. The species term 'S apiens’ means ‘intelligent’, as opposed to other species of the genus Homo, such as Homo erectus. Strictly, the term for the current variety of humans is Homo sapiens sapiens, as opposed to other subspecies of the species sapiens, such as Homo sapiens neanderthalis.
Collins Dictionary of Sociology, 3rd ed. © HarperCollins Publishers 2000
References in classic literature ?
Jerry, who heard, registered, and recognized many words that were as truly tools of thought to him as they were to humans, but who, by inarticulateness of birth and breed, could not utter these many words, nevertheless in his mental processes, used images just as articulate men use words in their own mental processes.
Difficult as this is to accomplish, it is still more difficult to persuade the human into any organised effort to alleviate the ill conditions of the lesser animals.
Past experience suggested that the great wings were a part of some ingenious mechanical device, for the limitations of the human mind, which is always loath to accept aught beyond its own little experience, would not permit him to entertain the idea that the creatures might be naturally winged and at the same time of human origin.
The reason is that he escaped from being a human when he was seven days' old; he escaped by the window and flew back to the Kensington Gardens.
Beyond these general characters their heads had little in common; each preserved the quality of its particular species: the human mark distorted but did not hide the leopard, the ox, or the sow, or other animal or animals, from which the creature had been moulded.
When the memory of the first races felt itself overloaded, when the mass of reminiscences of the human race became so heavy and so confused that speech naked and flying, ran the risk of losing them on the way, men transcribed them on the soil in a manner which was at once the most visible, most durable, and most natural.
--My happiness itself do I throw out into all places far and wide 'twixt orient, noontide, and occident, to see if many human fish will not learn to hug and tug at my happiness;--
The movement of humanity, arising as it does from innumerable arbitrary human wills, is continuous.
"They would fight among themselves, and while they fought the Mahars would fall upon them, and even though the Mahar race should die out, of what value would the emancipation of the human race be to them without the knowledge, which you alone may wield, to guide them toward the wonderful civilization of which you have told me so much that I long for its comforts and luxuries as I never before longed for anything.
It was through nature, ennobled in this way by the semblance of passion and thought, that the poet approached the spectacle of human life.
Among the sentiments of most powerful operation upon the human heart, and most highly honorable to the human character, are those of veneration for our forefathers, and of love for our posterity.
Strange as it may seem to a human being, all the complex apparatus of digestion, which makes up the bulk of our bodies, did not exist in the Martians.

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