KorbenDallas

I did a double-take on that one, too

Animals don't have language and so cannot have concepts.  Without concepts they cannot regard instances of the concept as units.  
What animals do have is abilities of pattern recognition and memory and patterned behavior and those do a pretty good job together of doing everything  a conceptual capacity would do with respect to (for example) a mammalian predator taking a go at stalking a new type of prey it hadn't encountered before.  So those mammals would not benefit from a conceptual capacity so evolution has not rewarded selection for it.  Humans can operate at that level: Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink is about pre-conceptual pattern recognition and I am specifically referring the examples there of "antiquities experts who recognize a fake at a glance" long before they can articulate what exactly is wrong with the fake.
 

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MisterSwig, isn’t it incomplete to think of the biological standard to be only health over sickness and not also reproduction of the species over its demise with the present generation? I’m serious on that. As far as basics of humans goes, isn’t reproduction (and nurturing children) part of them?

Why does A have to be A in order for it to be A?

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Welcome to OBJECTIVISM ONLINE, Phylo!
In ATLAS SHRUGGED, did you read through all of Galt's radio speech? Was that pretty much all of interest to you? Do you have areas within the topics that come up in Rand's fiction that are especially of interest to you?
A lot of Rand's readers have found her ideas helpful in making a life and finding happiness. Some of us additionally just really love some areas of philosophy, and pursue them with great passion and enjoyment. I like the big picture of philosophy for one thing, and I like making my own big picture ever more full and precise. I think the presentation of Rand's philosophy in a systematic way by Leonard Peikoff in his OBJECTIVISM: THE PHILOSOPHY OF AYN RAND is excellent. It is not more technical or difficult than the presentation in Galt's Speech. It does round out what was in the Speech with further issues that Rand and associates refined in the years from ATLAS to the end of her life. That Peikoff book, known by the acronym OPAR, was based very much on Peikoff's 1976 lectures laying out Rand's philosophy, and Rand was present at those lectures, and anyway knew what was to be in them, and she proclaimed them to be an accurate representation of her philosophy. One nice thing about his book is that he has citations to Rand's own writings pretty much all along the way.
I have some formal training in physics and in mathematics and in philosophy. I study many sorts and areas of philosophy from ancient to now. I advise, for serious study of the major figures in philosophy, not only study of elementary logic, as Dallas recommended, but the study of Euclid's geometry. But it depends on your interests and life situation whether you would want to study philosophers much besides Rand. One does understand hers better in some ways (endless additional ways, really) by studying others' and comparing to hers. You can see some of my own writings resulting from such studies in my 'Books to Mind' sector at this site and at the 'Stephen Boydstun Corner' over here (I am the author who accidentally ended up with the name Guyau there): http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?/forum/126-stephen-boydstun-corner/ 
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I recommend a study in logic.  Peikoff has a good one: Introduction to Logic
Lionel Ruby's Logic: An Introduction is a good textbook to use with the course.
Also, Rand goes over abstraction in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.

I don't remember where I heard it, it was a story about Ayn Rand saying she rarely had an emotion that she couldn't figure out its source in a short time.  The more abstract the subject the longer it might take. 
Leonard Peikoff remarked that Ayn Rand could respond emotionally to broad abstractions which is very rare. 
When exactly in her life did she organize words into the phrases that resonate so concisely, integrating a process of reasoning with a process of investigating emotional responses. 
I still wonder why the title of this thread is Nathaniel Branden.

Thank you for that clarification. I think I'll continue on this board, where one's name de plume is one's identity. Identity matters.