Image by enriquelopezgarre from Pixabay
Luxuriating in my warm bed on a rainy Saturday, surrounded by familiar sounds and smells, I was reading Rabih Alameddine’s essay ‘Comforting Myths’ in the 2019 edition of The Best American Essays edited by Rebecca Solnit and series editor Robert Atwan. It led me to think about the myths around science, and the dangerous myth of Human Exceptionalism.
Nearly every feature of human existence is out performed by other species. According to Ernst Mayer from 1995, if we look at biological success, modern humans have existed for around 100,000- 200,000 years compared with the many millions of years for simple beetles and bacteria. As Noam Chomsky suggests in Hegemony or Survival, being smart may not be favored by natural selection, and that the next few years ‘may provide an answer to the question of whether it is better to be smart than stupid’.
Human language abilities are often described in terms of exceptionalism. An article in science called Evolution of vocal learning and spoken language states: ‘language, and therefore spoken language or speech, is often considered unique to humans’ but ‘a modern, evolution-based synthesis of… studies, from behavioral to molecular levels of analyses’ shows ‘that components of spoken language are continuous between species, and that the vocal learning component is the most specialized and rarest and evolved by brain pathway duplication from an ancient motor learning pathway.’ So our language, as complex and as wonderful as it is, shares its many components with many other species.
And it’s not just language. As I say in my book How the Brain Thinks, ‘over 90% of our genome is present in lizard DNA, and bees can learn, and birds can speak, as we have just seen, and mice can think using emotion.’ Also, our brain structure is very similar to many other species. We are essentially ‘lizards with a cortex.’
This exceptionalism is dangerous to us and our other flatmates on this planet. As reported in Science, there has been a loss of 3 billion, yes 3 billion, birds across North America since 1970. Silent Spring indeed.
So, you other humans. How long do you think we will survive, and how do you think we’re going to do it?
Good luck, and goodnight.
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