The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters by Christine E. Webb; Avery, 336 pp., $32
God himself, David tells us in the Psalms of the Old Testament, made humans “a little lower than the angels; you crowned them with glory and honor and put everything under their feet.” Today, after nearly 2,000 years of science, many thinkers still insist that our species reigns supreme. “Although we are animals,” writes philosopher Roger Scruton, “we are not just animals.” We are better than other creatures, he stated in a 2017 New York Times op-ed. His assertion that humans, alone, “inhabit a life-world that is not reducible to the world of nature,” echoes millennia of received wisdom. The idea that humans are uniquely intelligent, powerful, and important is such a cultural given in Western philosophy, religion, and science that few of us bother to question it.
From Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872, to zoologist, biophysicist, and animal behaviorist Donald Griffin’s Animal Thinking (1984) to primatologist Frans de Waal’s Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (2016), my home bookshelves groan with titles nimbly illustrating the complexity of other animals’ emotions and smarts: Not only chimpanzees and crows, but even fish and insects make and use tools. Octopuses search out and join together coconut halves to build secure shelters. Goldfish remember a maze learned five months before. Fruit flies turn to drink when deprived of mates. Dolphins identify themselves and one another with signature whistles, comparable to names. Moray eels and fish, coyotes and badgers, wolves and ravens cooperate to hunt. And new findings seem to pour in almost daily.
Harvard primatologist Christine E. Webb is well aware of these discoveries, and in her work with baboons and other primates, she has made a few of her own. In her exciting new book, The Arrogant Ape, she takes her research-based conclusions a bold step further, contending that the very idea of human supremacy is “an assumption, one frequently masquerading as an obvious truth.” Though taught in our schools and universities, normalized in our research institutions, and permeating our everyday speech, that assumption arises from sloppy science, lame reasoning, and flaccid imaginations. And it’s a deception as dangerous as it is ubiquitous.
Much of what we “know” about comparisons between animal and human minds comes from the equivalent of comparing apples and meteorites. Webb points out that most laboratories studying animal cognition use intellectually handicapped subjects. From beagles to monkeys to rats, lab animals are typically raised in boring, stressful, sterile environments—conditions proven to cause physical damage to any brain. Often these poor animals aren’t fed properly. Webb worked in a primate lab, where animals are often kept at 85 percent of their normal body weight—supposedly to motivate them to perform for a food reward. “Imagine depriving a child of food or water before subjecting them to a series of math tests,” Webb writes.
Researchers then compare the scores of pathetically deprived animals with those of free-living humans who are atypical of our species. They are WEIRD: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. “We know that cognitive processes—theory of mind, spatial ability, causal reasoning, and others—vary markedly across human cultures,” Webb writes. Yet researchers treat WEIRD people as benchmarks, not outliers.
Finally, most cognitive experiments on animals suffer from a pitiful lack of imagination. “Scientists have conventionally gravitated toward studying the species that most resemble our own,” Webb tells us. In our labs, we judge animals’ intellect by their ability to solve problems that are important and meaningful to us, but not to them. These are tasks at which they have nonetheless often performed remarkably. Species as diverse as chimps, dolphins, and parrots—the last of which can respond meaningfully to questions in spoken English—have learned how to use strings of human words in syntactically sensitive order. (No human has ever deciphered the language of another species. We’re still baffled by some ancient human languages, like Linear A.) “Minds need not resemble ours to be comparatively complex,” Webb writes. More original, biologically relevant experiments could help us learn about minds unlike our own—and prove far more interesting and edifying. (In fact, one study recently adapted the famous Marshmallow Test, developed to test toddlers’ ability to delay gratification, to see whether cuttlefish possessed the same talent. The cephalopods aced it.)
So why do we cling to the myth of human exceptionalism? Human hubris does not afflict every belief system. The sentience of nonhuman creatures is widely accepted in many Indigenous, animist, and pagan traditions. But, Webb points out, the people in power right now are WEIRD. And asserting that all other species are inferior frees us to confine, torture, eat, crowd out, and eradicate everyone else, whenever we feel like it.
Human exceptionalism is a convenient lie. It uses the same logic that white supremacists employed to support slavery and that Nazis used to justify the Holocaust. This observation, though true, may offend many people, but their dismay is evidence of the ubiquity of the myth that holds our species supreme. And like the beliefs of the white supremacists and Nazis, the idea of human supremacy, writes Webb, has given rise to cataclysmic atrocities: the most dramatic extinction of species since an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs; pollution so widespread that plastic particles litter our blood, our brains, our breast milk; climate change that has set the world ablaze.
In the speech that gives this magazine its name, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes that the scholar must reject old ideas and think for him or herself. That’s what Webb is asking of us. What she advocates is nothing short of a Copernican-level revolution—and with equally revolutionary benefits. Decentering humans from our worldview, she promises, will give us better science, more effective conservation, and deeper connections with people and animals. Understanding our true place on the planet would also bestow on us greater humility—perhaps the virtue we need most urgently to confront the catastrophes of our own making.