Unique-ier, Unique-ier-est, Unique?

This nice little piece is about this year's Class Day address to Stanford University by neuroscientist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky. Sapolsky wrote a lovely book, "A Primate's Memoir" a few years ago about his adventures in Africa in the high-risk arena of baboon colonies. Here he bends over backwards not to accord unique cognition to humans - citing chimpanzees' ability to empathize and cuddle and comfort individuals who have been set upon. He also stresses the things we share with a host of other species. Many other species kill their own kind in anger or cold blood, he says. Bat females share food with the progeny of other bats, because, if they do not, their young will not get altruistically fed. Humans operate the same "tit-for-tat" rules. Women in college dorms synchronize ovulation in the same way as do rodents...etc. etc. So, while we are basically just another "off the rack" mammal, argues Sapolsky, there are some things we are capable of that simply have no direct equivalent in the rest of the animal kingdom. He cites the case of a nun who ministered to a bunch of the most frightening and lethal humans on the planet - on death row in a Louisiana prison. "The less forgivable the act", she had said, when questioned why she had spent most of her life on such low-life, "the more it must be forgiven. The less lovable a person is, the more you must find the means to love them." As a strident atheist, says Sapolsky, "this strikes me as the most irrational, magnificent thing we are capable of as a species". Then why does it not make us unique, Bob. Why teeter on the brink of calling us so?