“Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a deity. [Yet it is] more humble and, I believe, true to consider him created from animals.”
–Charles Darwin
Thus, since the opening of modernity five centuries ago, human beings have had to confront (for starters) four major discontinuities which problematized their alleged radical uniqueness and special status in the universe. In each case, “rational man” had to rethink human identity ¯ his species identity common to all other humans, or rather, all those counted as “human” and as part of the valuer’s community. In quick succession, the reflexive members of Homo sapiens had to overcome scientific and philosophical false dichotomies and illusions of separation from the infinite cosmos, the animal world, the unconscious, and machines. Humans had to engage, even if to deflect, the theoretical developments that increasingly decentered their place in a Platonic perfect unchanging universe allegedly constructed for them to lay down culture and “civilization” over nature, which has meaning only when seized for human purposes.
Those possessing the virtue (celebrated by Nietzsche) of “intellectual honesty” had to begin digesting the nauseating knowledge that the glorious celestial empire was not created in their honor. Rather, it gradually became clear, humans inhabited a small speck of infinite space on a miniscule planet floating in the cold darkness without inherent purpose. Irrepressibly, evidence mounted that humans emerged 5-8 million years ago from a diverse primate family. They co-evolved with other species, with their animality grounded in biological dynamics from which consciousness emerges. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it began to dawn on growing numbers of humans that there are other kinds of minds in the universe, both organic (animals) and inorganic (machines).
And yet, as we have seen, there is a dialectic between decentering and recentering. As happens so often, when humans are forced to face their contingency and limitations, they struggle to reinterpret and domesticate radical theories in a way that preserves their cosmic singularity, divinely-bestowed privileges, and supremacist identities. But are we now as a species reaching a tipping point where anthropocentric and speciesist outlooks finally give way, or at least lose all intellectual credibility?
While Mazlish ably describes four major challenges to human identity from the sixteenth century to the contemporary era, there are many additional developments in the decentering process and human identity formation that are important to highlight and thematize[9]. Many of the conceptual breakthroughs and revolutions in the last half century relate to a deepening understanding of animal minds and our own animality. After the four major blows to anthropocentric and speciesist identities inflicted by Copernicus, Darwin, Freud, and cybernetics, Richard Ryder ¯ the English philosopher who coined the term “speciesism” ¯ believes that, “We must now continue this process by discarding speciesism along with our other delusions or grandeur, and accept our natural place in the universe.”[10]
The fact is that only since 1859 has humanity begun to understand the forces of life and their origins and nature at all. Mythology, religion, philosophy, and science all contributed to constructing myths, distortions, and false consciousness that failed to grasp the organic emergence of Homo sapiens in evolutionary processes. Archaeology dates back only to the late 1800s, and it did not become a systematic science until after World War II. Humans had virtually no conception of apes until the late nineteenth century, and accounts from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries describe gorillas as dangerous degenerates, beast-men, or monsters. In the eighteenth century writers such as Lord Monboddo believed that the great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans) were races of primitive people ignorant of the ways of speech. Growing acquaintance with their physiology and behaviors, however, began to subvert human belief in their own uniqueness as it became increasingly obvious that primates were our closest biological relatives and that humans were part of an animal continuum and evolutionary process. Increasing knowledge of ape anatomy and behavior “subverted a traditional form of human self-confidence (…) the apes undermined convictions of human peculiarity and privilege. Gradually or fitfully, the process has continued ever since.”[11]
Philosopher Raymond Corbey describes the threat and challenge posed to human identity with the discovery of the great apes:
Apart from a progressing modernisation and secularisation and the growing influence of the natural sciences, a crucial factor which led to the profound change in the North Atlantic way of seeing the world was the discovery and the study of the apes and the early apelike hominides. Finally, it was no longer theology with its creation story which gave humanity its position within nature but the development of evolution. These newly discovered creatures, similar to humans but yet animals, turned out to be our closest relatives and therefore threatened traditional and well loved beliefs of human God-likeness and uniqueness. Nevertheless, the sacrosanct boundary between humans and animals which determined who could be owned, who could be killed, who could be eaten was not given up but redrawn. The exclusively human area was vigorously defended and again and again redefined … [it is important to describe] the involuntary withdrawal from former beliefs of human uniqueness which have been challenged over and over again by debates on apes.[12]
“Ecology” did not emerge as an official science until 1866, when German Darwinist Earnest Haeckel coined the term. As the study of organisms in their relation to one another and their environment, ecology is an inherently holistic outlook that contextualizes the origin and nature of human animals within a larger web of life. Yet, whereas humans arrogantly assume they live in technological castles that hover above the natural world, ecology showed that they in fact are an extension and part of nature and are deeply interdependent on an inconceivably complex system of relationships. Ecology, indeed, is a humbling discipline, for it reveals that humans ¯ who conceive of themselves as the highest form of life ¯ are utterly dependent upon the smallest, “lowest,” and most “mundane” forms. The earthworm, dung beetle, butterfly, and bacteria are far more crucial for the dynamics of the Earth than humans who, indeed, at this critical point in their social evolution are a destructive and disruptive force threatening all life systems of the planet.
At the beginning of the twentieth century it was believed that a large brain was the initial step and driving force of human evolution, a falsehood encouraged with the hoax of the Piltdown man. Until 1924, when Raymond Dart discovered the “Taung child” fossil in South Africa and identified it as a new species, A. africanus, anthropologists wrongly assumed that humans evolved in Europe or Asia rather than Africa, and they falsely believed that large brains developed before bipedality. Only in the 1950s (and more fully in the 1970s) did anthropologists discover more australopithecine fossils in Africa and thereby begin to understand that our earliest ancestors were more like non-human primates than modern humans. Archaeology bears direct relation on the construction of species identity. The discovery of “Lucy,” for example, broadened the criteria of “human,” it significantly pushed our ancestral line back in time, and it set up a line-drawing problem established on the dilemma of a slippery slope. As Felipe Fernandez-Armesto notes, “if we can accept Lucy as an ancestress, it helps to stretch the elasticity of the embrace in which we clasp each other, regardless of colour or creed, outward appearance or mental resources or moral worth.”[13] But, he asks, why stop there? Why exclude still earlier generations of human ancestors? Why not include Ardepithecus ramidus, an apelike hominid capable of upright walking 4.4 million years ago, but nonetheless lived in trees? Or chimpanzees? How and where does one draw the line between human and nonhuman? Are there objective, non-arbitrary grounds for delineation?
Not until 1960, when Jane Goodall made her historic journey to Gombe National Park in Tanzania, Africa did human beings possess even a rudimentary understanding of the higher apes, specifically the chimpanzee. Using her pioneering method of “habituation,” of patient observation that invited eventual acceptance or ignoring her presence, Goodall later discovered that infanticide, warfare, and murder were not behaviors unique solely to humans, but existed among chimpanzees as well. Such discoveries, in addition to the genetic confirmation of our evolutionary closeness to chimpanzees, are crucial for any informed discussion of human nature and identity.
In the 1960s and 1970s, researchers began to pioneer the genetic sciences and technologies that would prove crucial for an adequate understanding of human evolution. Linnaeus, Darwin, and others recognized that humans have significant physical and structural similarities with chimpanzees and gorillas, and on morphological grounds belong in the same general grouping. DNA analysis established just how close we are to the great apes, showing that humans and chimpanzees shared a common ape ancestor, and diverged from one another along different evolution paths some five to seven million years ago. Through genetic science, scientists have established that humans share 95-98 percent of their genes with chimpanzees, such that chimpanzees are biologically closer to us than they are to orangutans and gorillas.
Scientists started understanding the details of our genetic relationships to apes, and in 1975 molecular genetics determined that chimps and humans are at least 96 percent alike in their DNA (and 99 percent alike for genes that encode proteins). In 2002, these findings were verified by the Human Genome Project, which decoded the human genetic structure. In an important 2003 study scientists at Wayne State University provided new genetic evidence that humans and chimpanzees diverged so recently that chimps should be reclassified as Homo troglodytes.[14] This change would make them full-fledged members of our Genus, Homo, such that they would reside with Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Neanderthals, and other “proto”-human types. Geographer Jared Diamond rightly categorized humans as the “third chimpanzee,” along with common chimpanzees and bonobos.[15] Humans do not constitute a distinct Family, or even a singular Genus, but rather belong in the same Genus as chimpanzees and bonobos. If we think without our speciesist blinders, Diamond suggests, we can recognize that there are today three ¯ not one ¯ existing Homo species (with two in imminent danger of extinction because of the actions of the third). It may be disconcerting to Western Christian and Cartesian conceptions of humans as disembodied, eternal, singular substances, but we are not only “like” apes, we are apes, and African apes at that. Without an accurate comparative basis to our closest biological relative, we could not have produced an adequate understanding of ourselves, and we have been living in the “shadows of forgotten ancestors” (Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan).
In 1993, Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri founded the “Great Ape Project.”[16] The goal of the international project was to win basic legal rights for apes (life, liberty, and the prohibition of torture) and to free them from the status of property. They advocated a United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Great Apes which would grant them rights to liberty and would free all captive great apes (over 3,000 are currently held in research laboratories in the US alone). In addition to the genetic similarities between great apes and humans, they emphasized their commonality with us as “persons” who possess complex emotions, rationality, self-awareness, and awareness of themselves as distinct beings with a past and future, and argued that chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans belonged in a “community of equals” with humans. Indeed, as I write, there are cases pending in international courts that could officially recognize great apes as persons.
The Conceptual Revolution of Cognitive Ethology
–Charles Darwin
Thus, since the opening of modernity five centuries ago, human beings have had to confront (for starters) four major discontinuities which problematized their alleged radical uniqueness and special status in the universe. In each case, “rational man” had to rethink human identity ¯ his species identity common to all other humans, or rather, all those counted as “human” and as part of the valuer’s community. In quick succession, the reflexive members of Homo sapiens had to overcome scientific and philosophical false dichotomies and illusions of separation from the infinite cosmos, the animal world, the unconscious, and machines. Humans had to engage, even if to deflect, the theoretical developments that increasingly decentered their place in a Platonic perfect unchanging universe allegedly constructed for them to lay down culture and “civilization” over nature, which has meaning only when seized for human purposes.
Those possessing the virtue (celebrated by Nietzsche) of “intellectual honesty” had to begin digesting the nauseating knowledge that the glorious celestial empire was not created in their honor. Rather, it gradually became clear, humans inhabited a small speck of infinite space on a miniscule planet floating in the cold darkness without inherent purpose. Irrepressibly, evidence mounted that humans emerged 5-8 million years ago from a diverse primate family. They co-evolved with other species, with their animality grounded in biological dynamics from which consciousness emerges. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it began to dawn on growing numbers of humans that there are other kinds of minds in the universe, both organic (animals) and inorganic (machines).
While Mazlish ably describes four major challenges to human identity from the sixteenth century to the contemporary era, there are many additional developments in the decentering process and human identity formation that are important to highlight and thematize[9]. Many of the conceptual breakthroughs and revolutions in the last half century relate to a deepening understanding of animal minds and our own animality. After the four major blows to anthropocentric and speciesist identities inflicted by Copernicus, Darwin, Freud, and cybernetics, Richard Ryder ¯ the English philosopher who coined the term “speciesism” ¯ believes that, “We must now continue this process by discarding speciesism along with our other delusions or grandeur, and accept our natural place in the universe.”[10]
The fact is that only since 1859 has humanity begun to understand the forces of life and their origins and nature at all. Mythology, religion, philosophy, and science all contributed to constructing myths, distortions, and false consciousness that failed to grasp the organic emergence of Homo sapiens in evolutionary processes. Archaeology dates back only to the late 1800s, and it did not become a systematic science until after World War II. Humans had virtually no conception of apes until the late nineteenth century, and accounts from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries describe gorillas as dangerous degenerates, beast-men, or monsters. In the eighteenth century writers such as Lord Monboddo believed that the great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans) were races of primitive people ignorant of the ways of speech. Growing acquaintance with their physiology and behaviors, however, began to subvert human belief in their own uniqueness as it became increasingly obvious that primates were our closest biological relatives and that humans were part of an animal continuum and evolutionary process. Increasing knowledge of ape anatomy and behavior “subverted a traditional form of human self-confidence (…) the apes undermined convictions of human peculiarity and privilege. Gradually or fitfully, the process has continued ever since.”[11]
Philosopher Raymond Corbey describes the threat and challenge posed to human identity with the discovery of the great apes:
Apart from a progressing modernisation and secularisation and the growing influence of the natural sciences, a crucial factor which led to the profound change in the North Atlantic way of seeing the world was the discovery and the study of the apes and the early apelike hominides. Finally, it was no longer theology with its creation story which gave humanity its position within nature but the development of evolution. These newly discovered creatures, similar to humans but yet animals, turned out to be our closest relatives and therefore threatened traditional and well loved beliefs of human God-likeness and uniqueness. Nevertheless, the sacrosanct boundary between humans and animals which determined who could be owned, who could be killed, who could be eaten was not given up but redrawn. The exclusively human area was vigorously defended and again and again redefined … [it is important to describe] the involuntary withdrawal from former beliefs of human uniqueness which have been challenged over and over again by debates on apes.[12]
“Ecology” did not emerge as an official science until 1866, when German Darwinist Earnest Haeckel coined the term. As the study of organisms in their relation to one another and their environment, ecology is an inherently holistic outlook that contextualizes the origin and nature of human animals within a larger web of life. Yet, whereas humans arrogantly assume they live in technological castles that hover above the natural world, ecology showed that they in fact are an extension and part of nature and are deeply interdependent on an inconceivably complex system of relationships. Ecology, indeed, is a humbling discipline, for it reveals that humans ¯ who conceive of themselves as the highest form of life ¯ are utterly dependent upon the smallest, “lowest,” and most “mundane” forms. The earthworm, dung beetle, butterfly, and bacteria are far more crucial for the dynamics of the Earth than humans who, indeed, at this critical point in their social evolution are a destructive and disruptive force threatening all life systems of the planet.
At the beginning of the twentieth century it was believed that a large brain was the initial step and driving force of human evolution, a falsehood encouraged with the hoax of the Piltdown man. Until 1924, when Raymond Dart discovered the “Taung child” fossil in South Africa and identified it as a new species, A. africanus, anthropologists wrongly assumed that humans evolved in Europe or Asia rather than Africa, and they falsely believed that large brains developed before bipedality. Only in the 1950s (and more fully in the 1970s) did anthropologists discover more australopithecine fossils in Africa and thereby begin to understand that our earliest ancestors were more like non-human primates than modern humans. Archaeology bears direct relation on the construction of species identity. The discovery of “Lucy,” for example, broadened the criteria of “human,” it significantly pushed our ancestral line back in time, and it set up a line-drawing problem established on the dilemma of a slippery slope. As Felipe Fernandez-Armesto notes, “if we can accept Lucy as an ancestress, it helps to stretch the elasticity of the embrace in which we clasp each other, regardless of colour or creed, outward appearance or mental resources or moral worth.”[13] But, he asks, why stop there? Why exclude still earlier generations of human ancestors? Why not include Ardepithecus ramidus, an apelike hominid capable of upright walking 4.4 million years ago, but nonetheless lived in trees? Or chimpanzees? How and where does one draw the line between human and nonhuman? Are there objective, non-arbitrary grounds for delineation?
Not until 1960, when Jane Goodall made her historic journey to Gombe National Park in Tanzania, Africa did human beings possess even a rudimentary understanding of the higher apes, specifically the chimpanzee. Using her pioneering method of “habituation,” of patient observation that invited eventual acceptance or ignoring her presence, Goodall later discovered that infanticide, warfare, and murder were not behaviors unique solely to humans, but existed among chimpanzees as well. Such discoveries, in addition to the genetic confirmation of our evolutionary closeness to chimpanzees, are crucial for any informed discussion of human nature and identity.
In the 1960s and 1970s, researchers began to pioneer the genetic sciences and technologies that would prove crucial for an adequate understanding of human evolution. Linnaeus, Darwin, and others recognized that humans have significant physical and structural similarities with chimpanzees and gorillas, and on morphological grounds belong in the same general grouping. DNA analysis established just how close we are to the great apes, showing that humans and chimpanzees shared a common ape ancestor, and diverged from one another along different evolution paths some five to seven million years ago. Through genetic science, scientists have established that humans share 95-98 percent of their genes with chimpanzees, such that chimpanzees are biologically closer to us than they are to orangutans and gorillas.
Scientists started understanding the details of our genetic relationships to apes, and in 1975 molecular genetics determined that chimps and humans are at least 96 percent alike in their DNA (and 99 percent alike for genes that encode proteins). In 2002, these findings were verified by the Human Genome Project, which decoded the human genetic structure. In an important 2003 study scientists at Wayne State University provided new genetic evidence that humans and chimpanzees diverged so recently that chimps should be reclassified as Homo troglodytes.[14] This change would make them full-fledged members of our Genus, Homo, such that they would reside with Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Neanderthals, and other “proto”-human types. Geographer Jared Diamond rightly categorized humans as the “third chimpanzee,” along with common chimpanzees and bonobos.[15] Humans do not constitute a distinct Family, or even a singular Genus, but rather belong in the same Genus as chimpanzees and bonobos. If we think without our speciesist blinders, Diamond suggests, we can recognize that there are today three ¯ not one ¯ existing Homo species (with two in imminent danger of extinction because of the actions of the third). It may be disconcerting to Western Christian and Cartesian conceptions of humans as disembodied, eternal, singular substances, but we are not only “like” apes, we are apes, and African apes at that. Without an accurate comparative basis to our closest biological relative, we could not have produced an adequate understanding of ourselves, and we have been living in the “shadows of forgotten ancestors” (Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan).
In 1993, Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri founded the “Great Ape Project.”[16] The goal of the international project was to win basic legal rights for apes (life, liberty, and the prohibition of torture) and to free them from the status of property. They advocated a United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Great Apes which would grant them rights to liberty and would free all captive great apes (over 3,000 are currently held in research laboratories in the US alone). In addition to the genetic similarities between great apes and humans, they emphasized their commonality with us as “persons” who possess complex emotions, rationality, self-awareness, and awareness of themselves as distinct beings with a past and future, and argued that chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans belonged in a “community of equals” with humans. Indeed, as I write, there are cases pending in international courts that could officially recognize great apes as persons.
The Conceptual Revolution of Cognitive Ethology
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