Most of our science, philosophy and religion starts from the assumption that there are humans and there are animals – and there could never at any point be any common ground between them. To call someone an animal is as bad an insult as you can offer, and yet we’re all mammals. For centuries, the notion of human uniqueness was the most fundamental orthodoxy. Now it is being challenged. Book after book ventures into the no-man’s-land – the no-animal’s-land – that lies between our species and the other ten million or so in the animal kingdom. As often as not, they reveal more of ourselves than of our fellow animals.
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Not inferior: different. But that’s a concept that humans have struggled with across the centuries, probably since before language began. “One scientific survey from the 1970s found that sloths ‘are the most numerically abundant large mammal’, accounting for almost a quarter of the mammalian biomass,” writes Cooke, “which is a sophisticated biological way of saying you can take your patronising looks and direct them at some other animal.”
For years, it was accepted that the issue was binary. You could be objective, or you could be sentimental. Scientific orthodoxy stated that animals had no emotions or personalities: even to consider such a matter was a sin. This was not something to be investigated or put to the test. It was an error that could be corrected with a single word: anthropomorphism.
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All the barriers we have erected between ourselves and other animals turn out to be frail and porous: emotion, thought, problem-solving, tool use, culture, an understanding of death, an awareness of the self, consciousness, language, syntax, sport, mercy, magnanimity, individuality, names, personality, reason, planning, insight, foresight, imagination, moral choice… even art, religion and jokes.
It’s all in Darwin, but we have spent getting on for two centuries ignoring or distorting the stuff he taught us. In The Descent of Man, he wrote: “The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.” If you accept evolution by means of natural selection, that must be true.
Why, then, are humans so resistant to the idea? We can find the answer in human history. For many years it was important to uphold the notion of the moral and mental inferiority of non-white people, because without such a certainty colonialism and slavery would be immoral. And that would never do: they were so convenient.
To change our views on the uniqueness of human beings would require recalibrating 5,000 years or so of human thought, which would in turn require revolutionary changes in the way we live our lives and manage the planet we all live on.
And that would be highly inconvenient.
- More Here
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Not inferior: different. But that’s a concept that humans have struggled with across the centuries, probably since before language began. “One scientific survey from the 1970s found that sloths ‘are the most numerically abundant large mammal’, accounting for almost a quarter of the mammalian biomass,” writes Cooke, “which is a sophisticated biological way of saying you can take your patronising looks and direct them at some other animal.”
For years, it was accepted that the issue was binary. You could be objective, or you could be sentimental. Scientific orthodoxy stated that animals had no emotions or personalities: even to consider such a matter was a sin. This was not something to be investigated or put to the test. It was an error that could be corrected with a single word: anthropomorphism.
[---]
All the barriers we have erected between ourselves and other animals turn out to be frail and porous: emotion, thought, problem-solving, tool use, culture, an understanding of death, an awareness of the self, consciousness, language, syntax, sport, mercy, magnanimity, individuality, names, personality, reason, planning, insight, foresight, imagination, moral choice… even art, religion and jokes.
It’s all in Darwin, but we have spent getting on for two centuries ignoring or distorting the stuff he taught us. In The Descent of Man, he wrote: “The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.” If you accept evolution by means of natural selection, that must be true.
Why, then, are humans so resistant to the idea? We can find the answer in human history. For many years it was important to uphold the notion of the moral and mental inferiority of non-white people, because without such a certainty colonialism and slavery would be immoral. And that would never do: they were so convenient.
To change our views on the uniqueness of human beings would require recalibrating 5,000 years or so of human thought, which would in turn require revolutionary changes in the way we live our lives and manage the planet we all live on.
And that would be highly inconvenient.
- More Here
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