What separates humans from monkeys?

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Trees and dance floors!
Clothes too

there were monkey bars at all the schools i went to.



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Maybe I should have asked what separates monkey bars from singles bars...I'm sort of stumped on that one.

i guess that monkeys hang in monkey bars where as singles only sit in people bars.

I had to go with: "Just saying 'no' (able to control instincts or deny animal behaviors/desires)"

Whether it's free will or something else, we have both "thoughts" and "feelings/emotions"
It was a close call with the "Wild party" option, because they both hit on the same difference if you ask me.

It boils down to "I can feel like doing something, but think better of it" I don't believe that many other animals can do that. Maybe dolphins. Maybe some domesticated animals.
More other animals can think ahead... though not to the extent that we can.

Others answers, like language, god, sin, science, they are derivative from these two.

Unfortunately not all of our decision making process:


http://www.ted.com/talks/laurie_santos.html

^Monkey economics.

I assume we're talking about apes, not monkeys.

I'd say it's definately our development of language and writing. With that invention, it became possible to store the knowledge of mankind in an external, durable, corporeal form, which allowed the ideas of past generations to be studied by the young and built upon. In this way, humanity's knowledge was allowed to accumulate and advance at ever-accelerating rates, and human culture became the strength of the species, rather than our mere selves.

Animals can be made addicted to beer.

the main difference between humans and monkeys would be that monkeys have a tail.

Just to clarify...although you are making me smile in this very long conference...the use of the term monkey is a facetious refernce to the Scopes 'monkey trial'. Feel free to think apes, primates or even just animals in general.

The lack of a tail. Lucky monkeys!

I wouldn't say science as much as "culture". Apes may teach their kids some stuff, but our cultural heritage is HUGE, humongous. You do not need to learn about how to construct planes in order to use one. We as humans have quite a large repository of knowledge that we can use. Apes can learn some arithmetic, but we humans can learn all the stuff a guy like Euclid thought of thousands of years ago. Nothing an ape discovers now will be learned by the apes that are born in a thousand of years.

Humans are a very mixed bunch. No one knows what the variation of intellect might be in even the same species of ape. Some humans are very bright but if the average human has a IQ of 100 (by definition) that's not very impressive and it's the small group with high intellect and large knowledge that make the advances. There are some rather bright people who are so immersed in superstition that they wildly misinterpret whatever knowledge they have. The state of current human societies indicates humans are acting with a collective intellect not advanced over a termite colony.