The Human Animal (Humans)

by dhw, Thursday, August 06, 2009, 14:53 (5587 days ago)

Many thanks to David, who continues to draw our attention to thought-provoking articles, the latest being one by Alison Gopnik on how children grow up ('In Conclusion...', 4 August at 14.57). - I've been following the thread on 'The Difference of Man' with great interest, but not having read Adler (how the heck do you folk have time to read all these books?), I didn't feel qualified to join in. However, this latest article seems to me to raise some interesting questions, and it may be that we can discuss them without having read Adler. - Alison Gopnik asks: "Where does our distinctively human intelligence come from?" She says that "comparisons across species usually underpin evolutionary arguments, yet there is only one species that does what we do." But in the very next paragraph she says: "However, the fundamental link between childhood and intelligence can be found across a striking variety of species." - I don't want to attack the article, but am interested in the inferences. The fact is that everything she tells us about the human baby is equally applicable to (other) animals, apart from our taking longer to mature than they do. She says human babies don't have to do "the work of [...] mating, fighting and fleeing, they can discover how the world works and explore the possibilities it offers." No babies, human or animal, are in a position to mate, fight and flee, and just like human babies, young animals discover how their world works by play, observation and imitation. The same accidental parallels run right through the article. Alison Gopnik simply takes it for granted that we are different. - In the Adler thread, the question has been asked whether humans are different from (other) animals by kind or by degree. I'm not sure whether this distinction really matters outside the sphere of religious dogmatism (i.e. that man is a special creation), but I would argue that it's a mixture. In terms of our behaviour, we follow the inevitable patterns of evolution: just like the animals from which we are descended, our priorities are survival, sex and reproduction, rearing our young, eating, drinking, protection against the elements and against our enemies, learning to live with one another (some members of the animal kingdom do this much more efficiently than we do), etc. All these are fundamental to their existence and ours, and in this context the distinction between human and animal is to my mind a false one. We ARE animals. There is no difference in kind between building a house and building a nest, between sending our kids to school and teaching the cubs to hunt, between eating a steak from the supermarket and munching it directly off the rump of the poor old cow. Sophistication and institutionalization don't alter the basic functions of housing, education and nutrition. - Where I think we are different in kind is in our culture, by which I mean our ability to store knowledge, to ask questions, to study our world and its history, to express ourselves through art, to examine our own behaviour, to think and use language abstractly, to master Nature through our astonishing technology, to devise and change the codes by which we live...You will no doubt have your own concepts of culture, so I needn't elaborate any further. - Our culture, though, is a product of our consciousness, reason, emotions, will, memory etc., and this is where we enter a grey area. I don't know (and would welcome other views) to what extent we can say that our faculties are different in kind from those of other animals. The degree of difference is clearly massive, but animals are capable of making decisions, solving problems, feeling emotions, taking precautions, remembering the past, helping one another etc., albeit normally within the framework of the basic activities listed above. I would say this also applies to human babies, although as they mature, their range of knowledge and activity broadens out over much wider fields to embrace our culture. - Another of Alison Gopnik's observations is: "One of the fundamental ideas of cognitive science is that our brains are in some senses like computers, created through evolution." Again this is in the context of humans, but is equally true of animals. And so I'm left wondering just how far we can and should take this idea of difference. At the back of my mind are the horrific consequences of man's sense of superiority. The principle of difference underlies some of humanity's most barbaric actions, and I'm not just talking about those directed against animals.