Humans: just incredibly awesome Animals

Reading a post by my friend Rob, I couldn't help but be struck at the unwitting revelation of a sentence of his: "The paths of insensitivity and self-delusion this conceit [that humans aren't animals] has led to are so enormous, a comprehensive study of the subject would be all the human history one would need to read." The indication being, of course, that anything about human history worth knowing has involved humans acting like we weren't animals. Think about that for a minute.

I actually really love the aspiration of humans to transcend animal nature. I realize that it is an aspiration rather than a reality and that it could be viewed as a quaint ambition, but it's only quaint when you exclude from consideration all the incredible things that we have done as animals, aided by a philosophy that we are different. We are, of course, very different. No other animal has even approached our impact, our control over our surroundings, or our understanding of ourselves. We've driven more species to extinction than anything short of a natural catastrophe. I also can't think of a single species on whom so many other species are dependent-- we are the most crucial of all keystone species in this modern ecology.

There is no species more altruistic than us or more cooperative. It boggles my mind that we continue to expand our population logarithmically (for the last 15,000 years at least), drastically change our means of living, habitation and social organization and somehow we don't all kill each other like rats. In spite of these pressures, not to mention the availability of incredibly lethal weapons, we instead continue kill each other less, year after year, decade after decade, century after century. In spite of our incredible population density we're also getting sick less and in spite of the incredible resource load we represent on the world we're permitting relatively fewer and fewer of our fellow humans to go hungry.

"Denial of our animal nature" is just an ungenerous rewording of "aspiring higher than the rest of the animal kingdom". We don't think of ourselves as animals, not because we're not animals, but because we have found that it is in what distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom that makes us wonderful, that makes us worth reading about.