We want to be here. We want to be here long term, and we want it to be beautiful. Beginning with an honest appraisal of precisely who and what we are, we can make that happen.
For millennia, our cultural origin stories have served as the familiar foundations for our overall self-conception. From Abraham to Aristotle, from the secular to the sacred, they have shaped our understanding of who we are, why we are here, and our overall nature and purpose. Yet while these old stories tend to concern themselves with important matters of fact, they are in only the slimmest sense based upon fact or upon the careful application of our reasoning capacities. They are, instead, rooted in less-rational sources: our instincts, cognitive biases, superstition, mythology, or the ever-vivid human imagination. As such, they are pseudoscientific in nature.
Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. It introduced a new, empirically verifiable origin story, one that represented a radical departure from the conception of human nature held for thousands of years prior. Origin laid out the very process that created Homo sapiens, describing humans as animals and clearly explaining the process whereby we came to acquire our form, our content, and our very nature itself.
Instead of acknowledging Darwin’s all-natural, value-neutral view of human beings, we have retained the value-laden conceptions of old. These are characterized by human exceptionalism, arrogance, and hubris—and the adulation, indeed the literal deification—of all things Homo sapiens. To this day, 160 years after Darwin published his masterwork, even the secular, the humanists, the Nones, the science-friendly, and the otherwise irreligious all continue to suffer from an entrenched and universal belief in human exceptionalism. This widespread misinterpretation represents a significant failure to appreciate the revolutionary implications of Darwin’s new account.
The irrational, instinctive, and antiquated origin myths nonetheless still serve as the foundation for much of our thinking regarding both our nature and our overall place within the wider cosmic schema. Our current understanding of human nature is thus born of a time, mind-set, and epistemological perspective far less sophisticated, far less accurate, than our own. It is skewed by the cognitive biases and irrational forces of a bygone era.
Why does any of this matter? It matters simply because getting it right always matters. The truth matters for its own sake. But human exceptionalism and our misunderstanding of evolution has enormous implications for humanity and is intricately bound up with many of the real-world problems we now share, from violence and warfare to the environmental crises looming over us all.
Getting It Wrong: The Great Chain of Being
One of the primary characteristics shared by our origin myths, secular or religious, is that they are hierarchic. They emphasize an understanding of the universe that makes a value-laden distinction between natural and supernatural realms. Whether it be the god of Abraham or Plato’s essentialist Forms, our origin stories reinforce this fundamental qualitative distinction between the natural and the supernatural. Not only is the supernatural, spiritual, divine realm imagined to be distinct from the worldly and natural, it is assumed to be inherently superior as well.
One of the strongest illustrations of this qualitative, value-laden interpretation of our universe was codified in the sixteenth century. This Great Chain of Being, as it has become known, is depicted as a hierarchic triangle, a ladder, or sometimes a stairway to heaven. God is at the top. Under him are all manner of supernatural, divine beings. Below them, straddling the line between the superior divine and the inferior natural, stands humanity, one foot metaphorically in each realm. Below us are the “higher” animals, essentially meaning those creatures with traits similar to our own. This scala naturae continues downward, from mammals to reptiles, then amphibians, insects, plants, and finally inanimate objects.
The key thing to recognize about these pseudoscientific origin myths is that we humans are understood to be separate from and superior to the rest of nature. According to Abrahamic dualism, we are partly natural, and this is bad: a stain upon us, our original sin. At the same time, unlike the other natural beings, we are partly supernatural and divine. Human beings are thus unique and superior to the rest of nature. We are, in fact, the whole point of things, according to such perspectives. The world was made for us, we are central components in God’s plan, and our role is to dominate nature.
The religious are by no means the only guilty attendees at the soirée. There are a variety of secular positions depicting Homo sapiens as distinct and superior. Plato claimed that any given instance of a rock, tree, or person was but a limited expression, whereas the essence of Rock, Tree, and Person existed in a higher, more perfect manner he referred to as the Forms. Popular science magazines and videos today frequently refer to Homo sapiens as the dominant species.
Our language is replete with this inherent bias. We refer to our cities, products, and creations as artificial rather than natural. Body/brain is considered distinct from mind. My anti-theistic father pontificated on human genius, arguing that the minds of people such as Leonardo Da Vinci, Wolfgang Mozart, and Albert Einstein were somehow preternaturally extraordinary.
Consciously or not, many today still imagine a value-laden hierarchy composed of the spiritual as superior to the “merely” material, while the most influential of these enduring pseudoscientific origin stories continue to be those of Christianity and Islam.
Getting It Wrong: Darwin and Evolution
Just as the improved science of Copernicus and Galileo served to supplant the old geocentric model of the solar system with the more accurate heliocentric version, Darwin’s work should have served to remove Homo sapiens from our self-proclaimed dominance: our metaphoric, if not literal, place at the center of the universe. It did not.
Quoting Stephen Jay Gould:
Evolution still floats in the limbo of our unwillingness to face the implications of Darwinism for the cosmic estate of Homo sapiens. … All thinking people accept the biological fact of our descent from the animal world. But the second stage, mental accommodation toward pedestal smashing, has scarcely begun … we have managed to retain an interpretation of human importance scarcely different in many crucial respects from the exalted state we occupied as the supposed products of direct creation in god’s image.
Human dominance is replete throughout Abrahamic scripture. We are supposed to dominate over infidels, nonbelievers, blasphemers, and the natural environment as well. But what does it mean to dominate? In what sense are we dominant? When we try to pin down this concept, it proves elusive.
In biblical times, admonishing us to be fruitful and multiply seemed like a good idea. Homo sapiens had often faced hard times, with genetic bottlenecks even threatening extinction. But, as everyone is painfully aware, the problem of human abundance is now the precise opposite of what it was. Yet surely this notion of teeming throngs cannot be what our bible-era predecessors had in mind. Can it? Besides, there are more ants in my backyard than there are humans on this whole planet.
In terms of pure fecundity, humanity scarcely holds a candle to the plants, whose nuts, seeds, and burrowing roots regularly sprout amid twelve-lane super-highways, immediately after nuclear explosions, or following millennia desiccated in Egyptian tombs or frozen Siberian permafrost.
How about overall mass? No, there are certainly more insects, both in number and weight, than there are humans. The biomass of land plants alone is 1,000 times greater than that of all animals combined. So, that’s out.
It’s hard to be dominant if you’re a land animal on a water world. Water covers over 70 percent of the Earth. It’s where life got started. For most of Earth’s history, life has remained exclusively a water thing. Plankton dominates more so than any other living organism, while the whales certainly have us beat in the size department.
If species survival is the metric for dominance, Homo sapiens pales beside the sponge, jellyfish, or horseshoe crab, each of which has been around for hundreds of millions of years. In fact, we would not even rate near the top 100 in this particular category.
Then how about individual longevity? Might that be the way in which our dominance is demonstrable, measurable, or falsifiable? No; there are Galapagos tortoises alive today who personally met Charles Darwin. Bowhead whales often exceed two hundred years in age, while some jellyfish may even be immortal.
How about overall adaptability? The urban myth is that the rats and roaches will be in charge in the post-apocalypse; there may be some truth to that. But they will have plenty of competition from a vast coterie of other insects and the various micro-organisms who thrive when larger critters such as us face mass extinction. The lowly little tardigrade is a common favorite.
The infamous water bear can do outer space sans spacesuit, then lay viable eggs upon its return; survive the Himalayas and the scalding insides of geothermal hot springs; thrive under extreme high pressure at the bottom of the ocean; and survive radiation levels fatal to us “dominant” hominids. Clearly, they have us significantly outclassed in this particular category.
There is a definite sense in which we are merely hosts for the numerous microbes and bacteria living within and upon us. Many of these came before us. Many we could not survive without. In some very genuine respects, our bodies are more accurately described as ecosystems than as individuals.
Perhaps what we have in mind concerns our ability to manage or control the environment. But any such claim regarding human dominance just brings to mind images of environmental degradation and destruction or, at best, strip malls, McDonalds, and Taco Bell.
Consider a family of elephants. Imagine a group of, say, fifteen or twenty. Now picture that family confined within a limited space, say, the size of a football field or rugby pitch. At first, the pachyderms will experience stress and anxiety. However luscious and verdant that little strip was to begin with, it will quickly become overrun. It will be trampled, despoiled, and completely consumed. This is what it looks like for an animal to dominate its environment.
What elephants need to thrive is a vast area over which they can continually roam. They will certainly consume vast swathes of greenery, even knock over a tree or two. But then they will move on. That’s what they do. That’s how they roll. While they meander, flora and fauna that have adapted to thrive in this particular dynamic will fill in the niches.
Properly balanced in space and numbers, the environment will have time to re-grow before they cycle back in their wide-ranging, elephantine meanderings. This is long-term interdependence. Dominating an environment is not the same as living sustainably, interconnected, in a long-term interrelationship. Our beloved elephants will be much happier too once they get out of that pen and stop dominating. This is another lesson we have yet to learn from Darwin: the benefits of being animals rather than gods.
Gould’s second stage, “smashing the pedestal,” begins with us recognizing that none of these reasons serves to justify claims of human dominance. In no sense are we unarguably dominant, nor is dominance something to which we should aspire. Rather, claims of human dominance are merely pseudoscientific assertions demonstrating our subjective sense of self-importance.
Getting It Right: Darwin and Evolution
When contrasted with Abrahamic dualism and the Great Chain of Being, Ernst Haeckel’s Pedigree of Man illustrates our improving understanding. This post-Darwinian model is devoid of supernatural elements, which represents progress toward a more genuinely scientific perspective. However, Haeckel still places us atop a hierarchic, value-laden conception, thereby reinforcing human exceptionalism. We remain evolution’s finest achievement, its apex, even its goal, its purpose, its raison d’être. No longer the “crown of creation,” we have simply recast ourselves as the “pinnacle of evolution.” However, as Ian Tattersall rightly observes in The Rickety Cossack (2015), the truth is: “We are the pinnacle of nothing.”
Where does this belief in human value come from? It brings to mind the naturalistic fallacy, in which matters of value are randomly injected into arguments otherwise entirely concerning matters of fact only, entirely without preamble, explanation, or justifying argument. As David Hume famously observed in 1739’s A Treatise of Human Nature:
the author … makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.
Of course, dear Professor Hume was over one hundred years too early to benefit from a Darwinian conception of valuing as an evolved trait. Value is something that biological organisms have evolved the capacity to experience. Human beings value. No doubt other animals also experience valuing. Dolphins and chimpanzees undoubtedly value companionship. Bonobos value sex. Elephants value complex multi-modal communication, as do we humans. The human experience of valuing shares characteristics with that of the bonobos, bats, and bottlenose dolphins. At the same time, valuing undoubtedly differs significantly between species.
But nature itself is value neutral. There is no good reason to think that a mountain, river, planet, galaxy, bonobo, mosquito, bacterium, or Homo sapiens has intrinsic value. All value resides in and only in the valuer, within the organism that has evolved the capacity to experience value or valuing in some sense. It’s like “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” only a tad deeper.
This twenty-first century diagram avoids both the supernatural elements and the human exceptionalist biases of old. It’s just missing that You Are Here arrow such as appears on those maps at airports. For Homo sapiens, the little red arrow would be pointing into that green extension on the lower right with all the other Eukaryotes.
These contemporary diagrams are far more value neutral and scientifically accurate. However, while the well-informed embrace such genuinely scientific perspectives, most people today still cling to the problematic pseudoscience of eras long past.
Cosmically speaking, there is no evidence that we have this grand value that is often asserted in terms of human beings having a divine or cosmic purpose in God’s master plan. Darwin wisely said nothing either way along such lines. But the implications of his work are clear. There is no viable, evidence-based justification for thinking that human beings have purpose, meaning, or value above or beyond that of any other evolved organism. We are of no greater importance than is the long-whiskered catfish, the old-world swallowtail, or the African forest elephant. We, and they, exist simply because we evolved into existence. There are no grounds for thinking that any of this happened for a reason or has a purpose. We do not exist for a reason, or toward an end. We simply exist.
This grates upon our sensibilities for the simple reason that we have evolved a sense of purpose. But it is nothing more than that. It is nothing more than instinct, cognitive bias, or feeling. If you have a sense that we have a purpose, you are not alone. It is a sensation with which evolution has certainly endowed Homo sapiens. We experience fulfillment, have meaningful lives, value, and are valued in return. In other words, we are more than capable of satisfying the itch for purpose. But we do not require grandiose cosmic purpose or divine importance. Thinking that we do is neither accurate nor beneficial. On the contrary, it would appear to be leading us entirely astray.
The animal Homo sapiens values teamwork, fellow Homo sapiens, and how teamwork rewards these other Homo sapiens as well. All bring our lives a sense of purpose and meaning. But this form of worth is less sweeping and universally significant, far more humble and localized, than the traditional stories suggest. Good science and accurate and objective origin stories can tell us much. But they will never place us back at the center of the universe—nor should they.
Homo sapiens has evolved an instinct to interpret the world teleologically, that is, in a teleo-functional manner. Teleology simply refers to purpose, our thinking in terms of purpose. A small child sees an apple and instinctively thinks the apple is for something. The apple does not simply exist. It exists for the deer to eat or for the person to bake some apple turnovers.
Our teleo-functional form of intelligence has obvious evolutionary value. The inclination to, upon seeing a piece of wood, think “we could use that to catch food, construct a shelter, ignite a fire, carve out a canoe” would result in greater fitness, make beings more likely to survive and successfully reproduce. Thus, teleo-functional thinking was hardwired into the human mind. However, we place the cart before the horse when we believe anything was, or is, placed here for our use. Teleological thinking may be evolutionarily useful, but it does not answer questions such as “Why does X exist?”
Neither the apple nor Homo sapiens exist for a reason, for a purpose. We are not that important. Such purpose is a cognitive phenomenon, a characteristic of thought only, not a characteristic of nature, of things in-and-of-themselves. All this stems logically from an understanding of Darwin’s work. This modern, scientific understanding differs from that of the old pseudoscientific origin stories and helps us to better understand our true nature, as well as our relationship with the rest of the cosmos.
The modern, post-Darwinian perspective suggests a far more scaled-down, humble account of value, meaning, and purpose than the old anthropocentric stories. Yet this stacks up nicely in regard to our subjective experience. It may be true that, in the big picture, I am no more important than any given worm or paramecium—but my family and friends, and perhaps one or two readers, feel otherwise. Well, at least my dogs do.
To be continued.