Superiority

Seeing ourselves as the one species at the pinnacle of evolution is as wrong-headed as seeing our planet at the center of the universe.

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Until 400 years ago, people believed that the Earth was at the center of the universe. Galileo, with his telescope, famously learned that our moon is not a smooth sphere but has mountains, pits, and other Earth-like features; Jupiter has moons; Saturn has rings; and Venus orbits around the sun, not around the Earth. His work also supported what Copernicus had learned, that Earth itself revolves around the sun. Copernicus, perhaps wisely, didn’t publish his work or disseminate it beyond a small circle of family and colleagues until just before his death. Galileo was more open about his discoveries, and in 1633, he was tried for heresy, threatened with torture, and condemned, his sentence commuted to house arrest for the remainder of his life.

By the time Darwin arrived on the scene, most educated people accepted that our planet, and even our sun, were not at the center of the universe, but it was hard to shake the equally anthropocentric, non-scientific belief that our species stood uniquely at the apex of creation. For much more than a century, the scientific community believed that evolution was a progressive process culminating in Homo sapiens.

Even as the Catholic Church started accepting astronomical science, they accepted evolution only with caveats. The seventh-grade science teacher in my Catholic elementary school in the early 1960s, a nun, said that humans did come to be via evolution, which was consistent with Catholic teachings because the “days” in Genesis could have been metaphorical, representing eons. But she said Catholics believe that God stepped in at some point and gave our species, uniquely, a soul. I took comfort in the fact that my favorite saint, Francis of Assisi, believed that at least some animals also have souls.

Before our Confirmation in sixth grade, we memorized huge swaths of the Baltimore Catechism, including the sentence that is perhaps the ultimate expression of anthropocentrism: “Man was created in the image and likeness of God.” (Ironically, the most religiously anti-science people today seem pretty selective about which individual people were created in the image and likeness of God and which were not.)

Even in the secular world, people clung to the belief that we were the only animals with intelligence. On the after-school TV show, "The Mickey Mouse Club," Jiminy Cricket sang a song, “You Are a Human Animal” with the lyrics, “You are the only animal who can think, who can reason, who can read!” Our family dog and cat could outsmart us in many ways, but somehow, we were the smart ones.

In 1973, my college ethology professor was very clear that no animals had emotions or intelligence—they might respond behaviorally and/or physiologically in the exact same way a human might to a physical injury, a dangerous situation, attracting a mate, or the birth or death of an offspring, but in the animal’s case, this was a simple physical or behavioral response, not pain, fear, love, joy, or sorrow. We might share a few “animal instincts,” but the difference between our species and all other animals was “unquestionable.” I could not wrap my head around that. Wasn’t asking questions the very essence of science? As Carl Sagan famously said,

We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and our willingness to embrace what's true rather than what feels good.

Dr. Irene Pepperberg demonstrated that her African Gray Parrot Alex could identify by name 50 different objects, recognize quantities up to six, distinguish and name seven colors and five shapes, understand the concepts of bigger, smaller, same, and different, and recognize object permanence. Alex first learned the color gray when he looked in a mirror and asked the question, “What color?” When told he was gray, he immediately started recognizing the color gray in other objects. Alex could describe and even create names for novel objects based on words and concepts he already knew.

Alex. Photo from Wikipedia

Yet mainstream biologists pooh-poohed Pepperberg’s work for decades, because of course non-human animals were not intelligent and couldn’t possibly have any kind of a language. Pepperberg was careful to say Alex used a “two-way communication code” rather than “language,” but that smoothed only a few ruffled scientific feathers. And even as scientists started accepting her work, many of them saw Alex as a bizarre anomaly rather than representative of his species, even though he came into Pepperberg’s life randomly when she bought him at a pet shop.

When I learned about evolution in high school and college, it was represented as a “tree of life,” with humans at the very top.

Modern scientists have a more nuanced understanding of evolutionary biology.

From research by the Texas A&M School of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences

Yet even today, in 2024, it’s easier emotionally for scientists to reduce birds to their reptilian ancestors than to reduce us to ours. It’s in vogue right now for people to say birds are dinosaurs. Yes, theropod dinosaurs are the most recent known common ancestor of birds, but tree shrews are the most recent known common ancestor of primates, and primitive eutherians are the most recent common ancestor of placental mammals, yet never once have I heard a scientist say we people, or we primates, are tree shrews or primitive eutherians.

We human beings may be the only species who can count among our numbers rocket scientists and brain surgeons, but we’re also the only species who needs a warning on our cars’ windshield sun-blocking screens saying in big letters, “Don’t drive with windshield covered.”

We take so much pride in our intelligence because, other than that, there really isn’t much to recommend us in the animal kingdom, especially compared to birds, who can see a broader spectrum; hear a wider range of frequencies; spot predators or prey from enormous distances; sense the earth’s magnetism and recognize star patterns well enough that within a few months of hatching, they can navigate hundreds or thousands of miles to a winter destination and, months later, find their way back again. Oh—and birds can fly.

I’m not suggesting that birds are superior to mammals, much less us humans specifically—well, except maybe chickadees. And corvids. And hummingbirds. Really, the concept of superiority is meaningless on a species level when natural selection is the driving force—every species on the planet at this very moment is here via the exact same evolutionary forces, from coelacanths and cockroaches to Pileated Woodpeckers and Blue Jays and us.

Instead of thinking of ourselves at the center of the universe, we need to see ourselves within the interconnected community of life on earth. Henry Beston wrote in The Outermost House:

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creatures through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.