You’re a large-brained scheming dreamer with a sense of justice: What it means to be human

You animal! Ape! Your ancestors had sex with Neanderthals!

The Unthinkable philosophy column opens today with a crude test of speciesism. Why would you be insulted by the opening remarks – unless you felt humans were somehow a cut above nature?

Human exceptionalism is perhaps the last acceptable form of discrimination, and also the root cause of many of our greatest evils. The pillaging of Earth’s resources, the polluting of seas and the industrialised abuse and torture of other animals can all be traced back to our sense of entitlement as a species.

“Humans have lived for centuries as if we’re not animals,” the British author Melanie Challenger writes in a new book on the topic. While religion gave us the idea of a soul to make us special, most of those without a faith “rely on species membership as if it is a magical boundary”.

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Blending personal experience with scientific observation, Challenger has a talent for making the known seem unexpected or unsettling. “We’ve made salmon that grow to our timetable” is one sobering observation in How to Be Animal: A New History of What It Means to Be Human.

Is there a risk, though, of pushing the argument too far? In the bid to highlight the characteristics we share with other animals, do some scientists and environmentalists gloss over the things that make Homo sapiens unique? And, at a time when certain politicians are keen to make us think the worst of one another, do we really need to give the misanthropes – or haters of humankind – more ammunition?

Challenger is this week's Unthinkable guest.

Is there a scientific basis for human exceptionalism?

Melanie Challenger: "There's a scientific basis for everything that makes an animal or a plant exceptional in as much as biology and behaviour work uniquely in any living thing to solve the problems and, indeed, improve the quality of a life. So we could think about the extraordinary echolocation that bats use to aid them in finding an insect in the dark. That is exceptional.

“But what we’re talking about with humans is really: how are we going to the moon and uploading videos on YouTube while other animals are still embedded entirely in their ecosystem? And that is mind-blowingly weird. No wonder we seek scientific explanations for this.

“The first thing to say is that some of this is down to cumulative culture... A huge leap in human life can take place without any significant underlying change to our biology. But even early hunters were behaving in ways that are pretty remarkable. So what most scientists end up focusing on is our cognition – what is it in the way we think about and process information about the world and ourselves that has led to our exceptional skills? And there’s plenty of evidence for our mental skills. Humans are large-brained, highly co-operative, with a well-developed prefrontal cortex.

“We’re schemers and we’re dreamers. We’re also preoccupied by ideas like justice and fairness that come from the importance of our social relationships.

“That said, it’s always important to recall that humans are unusual in having no other living species in their lineage. That means we really do stick out like a sore thumb. But the human lineage was actually quite branched until only a few tens of thousands of years ago. And we weren’t the only primate lineage evolving a big-brained, intelligence-heavy path.

“The Paranthropus ape lineage also looks to have faced selection pressures for mental skills. They died out, however. We may never know why, but it’s sobering to consider that in a parallel history the world might have looked more like a planet of the apes with several overlapping and competing intelligent primates wandering around.”

If we are just animals, does life lose meaning?

"Absolutely not! This worry comes from a worldview that has argued other animals' lives have no meaning… There's a related belief that because we are the only animals concerned with 'meaning', then only we give meaning to the world.

“But consider that meaning-giving is a biological thing itself – a readiness in our evolved intelligence to use ideas about value and purpose to assist us in our planning and co-operation. If we accept that possibility, then all we’re doing is responding to what is already meaningful. For other animals, meaning is baked in from the beginning.”

One of the things you discuss in the book is the orangutan's capacity for love, and how this brings it closer to the human experience. Should we rank the moral worth of non-human animals by how closely they resemble us?

"Unequivocally no. I am deeply opposed to the moral-ranking of biological traits. I mention the remarkable orangutan because their particular traits are so close to ours that it is easy to make sense of why they should matter to us. Orangutans are highly endangered because of what we do. As animals with moral agency, we should be ashamed of this.

“Orangutans likely plan, feel, even love in ways that are imaginable to us. But what are we really doing when we act morally? To me, in its simplest and most reductive, we are responding to the needs and signals from another in ways that respect and don’t harm...

“If we are properly responsive to needs, we don’t have to get into the business of ranking biological capacities and saying one set of evolved traits somehow matters more fundamentally than others.”

Towards the end of the book you write very poignantly about the sense of loss a parent can feel as their child reaches ‘the threshold of independence’. To what extent can the experience of motherhood be compared across species?

“That is a good question. And I will be honest – it is one I am still attempting to answer. Firstly, one thing is clear for mammals, at least. Much that we most value as ‘virtues’ in human behaviour – compassion, empathy, kindness, and so forth – piggyback on the biological architecture of the maternal-child bond in infancy, and flash to life in other crucial negotiations between mates, between parents and their children.

“We know that hormone levels shift in males and females of all mammals – humans included – through proximity to a mate and through pregnancy and child-rearing. Most often those hormones and the feelings and emotions – and other mammals likely experience pleasurable urges too – go about the business of increasing bonding and reducing aggression …

“Are there analogous bonds across animals? For sure – and what’s great about biology is that it’s infinitely varied. Sometimes biology will figure out a way to switch sexes in a single animal, as in the parrotfish. Sometimes the males are the caregivers, as in the famous case of seahorses. But that’s not the case for mammals – there’s no ducking the fact that for our biological class, the maternal-baby bond is key.

“But neither does it mean that the biology of sex is some rigid, deterministic thing. That idea comes from a profound misunderstanding of biology. And it is a shame that we’ve spent a lot of western civilisation diminishing, even hiding, the role of mothers in that crucial nought-to-three-years phase of life.

“It is also a shame that we have sought to undo the hopeless prejudices against women by trying to lift women free of their maternal biology. I think we’ve got this all wrong. We should be putting mothers at the centre of life, making our working lives more adaptable to motherhood, rather than seeing motherhood as a biological trap.”

Of the future, you write, ‘there’s every reason to believe that when faced with a threatening reality, we will seek greater separation between us and the rest of nature.’ There has been some progress in acknowledging our interdependence with other animals in recent years. Do you fear that progress may be undone?

“Yes, this keeps me up at night. What I think people haven’t fully caught up with yet is that we have these intense new tools that will allow us to apply industry and engineering to biology. That is hugely appealing. Can we make smarter people? Can we make animals that don’t suffer when we slaughter them? Can we engineer our babies so they don’t get sick? Can we live longer? This isn’t science fiction; this is happening right now. And with very little public involvement or oversight...

“The fourth industrial revolution includes genomics, gene drive, artificial intelligence – basically industrialising biology. Great things may come from this. But other animals are likely to pay a hefty price. And we should expect, with due attention to industrial history, that some unforeseen but disastrous consequences might also follow if we don’t do this with some good frameworks in place. I don’t see evidence of those frameworks at present.”

[ published ]