Are We Unique?

     I recently read an editorial in the 03 March 2007 New Scientist that had the title, “We're not unique, just at one end of the spectrum.” The editorial pointed out that humans were long thought to be unique in their skills and accomplishments. Now, however, a variety of animals has been shown to use tools, to have some if not all of the elements of language, and to have cultural transmission of information. The editorial concludes that we are not unique, and this lack of uniqueness should give us more connectedness with all of life.

     I applaud the editorial. I think that this is an excellent re-orientation to our thinking. In the 1970s, humans were considered to be unique because we of all animals could make tools. Then along came Jane Goodall’s studies of chimps who could fashion tools that could be used to scoop termites out of their mounds. Suddenly there was a plethora of examples of animals using tools, including examples now of chimps using spears to hunt gazelles.

     Then in the 1980s, human were considered unique because we had culture, defined as information transmitted by learning from one generation to the next. But John Tyler Bonner’s book, The Evolution of Culture in Animals, showed that a number of animals could transmit information as well to other generations. The uniqueness of culture fell by the wayside.

     In the 1990s, language was considered to be just about the last bastion that separated us from the rest of the animal world. But then a variety of studies started to show that animals also had language. Vervet monkeys, Diana monkeys, and Campbell’s monkeys had different words for different predators. And lest you think that only primates were capable of this, studies have shown that prairie dogs have most of the design features found in human languages, and chickens have different calls for aerial and terrestrial predators.

     But I would like to add a word of caution about the interpretation that we humans are at one end of the spectrum. That smacks of the Aristotelian Scala Naturae or the Great Chain of Being, in which all animals were ranked in a linear chain, with humans (of course) at the top and the amoebas at the bottom. The Scala Naturae provided the justification for assuming that monkeys were incomplete copies of humans, and cats, dogs, rodents, and pigeons could be used to find out how humans learn and react physiologically. Yes, we all are related evolutionarily, and we all have certain evolutionary commonalities. But we each have our own species-specific differences, and if we humans were not writing with our anthropocentric perspective, it might be difficult to know where the end of the spectrum might lie.

     In fact, I argue that there is no end to the spectrum. We humans do some things extraordinarily well. But there are other things that we can’t do. We can’t hear in the ultrasonic range, the way that bats and dolphins can, and we cannot use ultrasonic information to form “mental pictures” of the objects that are out there in complete darkness. We can’t generate electricity the way that electric eels can, nor can we hear subsonic sounds the way that elephants can. We can’t even spread our wings and fly the way that a dragonfly can.

     Nature is a collection of unique species. Certainly, there are evolutionary connections, but there are specialized adaptations as well, that make every single animal and plant species unique. And where we draw the end of the spectrum depends on our point of view. Perhaps a better interpretation might be a cloud of points, like stars in our universe, with some points closer to others depending on their evolutionary connections, and no end to the spectrum, just like there is no end to the universe.

Comments

[Randall Johnson]

Although much of his work has been criticized, Dr. John C. Lilly began questioning our ‘unique’ status in the early 1960s by proposing that cetaceans have a predictive, descriptive language and an ocean-wide civilization, and that their intelligence might equal, or even surpass, our own, based on the size and internal structure of their brains. Interestingly, today’s researchers openly refer to whale and dolphin cultures. Dolphins’ cognitive abilities, as determined by formal experimentation, are, indeed, formidable and, with the exception of an individual signature whistle, the rest of their non-echolocation sounds still have not been deciphered. As for their brains, with a baffling mixture of primitive and sophisticated features, about all one can say with any degree of certainty is that they are the result of a very different evolutionary pathway from the one taken by terrestrial mammals.