Thesis #3: Humans are products of evolution
As we saw in the second thesis, natural selection is a tautology: anything that possesses some trait that makes it more likely to propogate itself, is more likely to propogate itself. Played out over a sufficiently long timeline, this can easily explain the origin of species. It was an explosive idea; not because it was theoretically lacking, nor even for lack of evidence. It was not even explosive for what it ruled out. Rather, it was explosive for what it allowed: namely, a world with no intelligent designer. The opposition came primarily from the most fundamentalist of religious organizations. Evolution does not preclude the existence of G-d, but neither does it require it. It was this that made it “evil,” because it removed the existence of life itself as a proof for the existence of G-d.
Yet it was not evolution in general that bothers these religious zealots. Many are even willing to concede “microevolution,” or the change of species over time. The laser-like focus of their ire has always been human evolution in particular.
This is not without reason, of course. These same religions teach a myth of humanity as a higher, nobler order of creation. Jews, Christians and Muslims all share the Genesis account, where humanity was the crown of creation–something made in G-d’s own image. “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’” (Genesis 1:26) In Islam (7:11-18)–as well as in Christian folklore and exegesis–Lucifer and his angels are cast from heaven because they refuse to bow to humanity, and accept their primacy as the greatest of G-d’s creation, superior even to the angels.
Such beliefs are widespread, if not universal. In Iroquois belief, humans were descended from the superhuman, utopian Sky People, while mere beasts already existed in the world. The Australian Aborigines believed humans were the children of the Morning Star and the Moon. The Sun Mother “made them superior to the animals because they had part of her mind and would never want to change their shape.” The Ju’/hoansi also make humanity special; first in our ability to master fire, and then in the fear that fire inspired in other animals, separating us from the rest of creation.
Ultimately, such stories are merely another iteration of ethnocentrism and tribalism, writ large. Rather than simply suggesting that one’s own group is superior to all others, this suggests that one’s own species is superior to all others. Such sentiments serve the same evolutionary function: they help maintain group cohesion. Enlightened self-interest and intolerable arrogance both serve equally well to keep individuals from straying off and dying alone in the wilderness. Social life is not always easy, and interpersonal problems arise even in the most idyllic of societies. When these things happen, a personal commitment to the group becomes necessary. Ethnocentrism is a universal among all human cultures; it helps keep them together as a culture. That said, its evolutionary usefulness speaks nothing to the sentiment’s basis in reality. It is a useful belief to hold, but is it true?
Starting with the Renaissance, our mythology of self-importance took a series of hard blows. First, Copernicus published his Revolutions of the Celestial Bodies posthumously, shattering the geocentric theory that the earth lay at the center of the universe. Copernicus’ heliocentric theory has been heralded as the beginning of the scientific revolution; indeed, it is from the title of his book that the term “revolution” took on its current meaning of an overthrow of established ways, ideas and governments. Galileo proved that not all heavenly bodies orbited the earth when he observed the largest four of Jupiter’s moons–known now as the Galilean moons. He was placed on trial for his heresy; on the possible threat of torture and execution, Galileo recanted, though legend says that he whispered under his breath, “*E pur si muove!*“–”But it does move!”
Just as we began to accept that the planet made for us was not the center of the universe, Darwin closed the vise even more, facing us with the idea that we were animals like any other, no better and no worse. Neither gods nor kings, angels nor demons, not the children of Sky People or the Divine Sun, but mere beasts as any other. Darwin challenged our dominion by suggesting that we were products of evolution, rather than the crown of creation. Ultimately, this is the root of the argument over evolution: are humans mere animals, or are we something better?
We’ve grasped at a lot of straws to prove that we’re special. The first was the soul. Of course, we can’t even prove we have souls, much less that other animals don’t, so the modern, scientific mind has locked onto a related concept: intelligence. The problem is that this supposedly unique human trait is not uniquely human. We’ve found significant intelligence among nearly all the great apes, dolphins, parrots, and crows. This intelligence even extends to tool use and communication, other traits we have variously used to define our unique status as “higher than the animals.”
Perhaps, then, we can find the key to our uniqueness in culture? When we define culture tautologically, then yes, of course, only humans have culture. But if we choose not to define “culture” as “what humans do,” but instead “things we learn,” then suddenly we see quite a few animal cultures. We know there are orangutan cultures, chimpanzee cultures, and even though he can’t prove it, George Dyson just can’t shake the notion of interspecies co-evolution of languages on the Northwest Coast.
During the years I spent kayaking along the coast of British Columbia and Southeast Alaska, I observed that the local raven populations spoke in distinct dialects, corresponding surprisingly closely to the geographic divisions between the indigenous human language groups. Ravens from Kwakiutl, Tsimshian, Haida, or Tlingit territory sounded different, especially in their characteristic “tok” and “tlik.”
Which brings us to communication. Surely humans are unique in language? Again, it all depends on how niggardly we define the word. It makes sense to consider only verbal communication, and so eliminate the complexity of bees’ dances and the pheramone waltz of ant colonies, but we routinely understate the complexity and nuance of chimpanzee calls, bird song, and other animal communication in order to elevate our own achievements. We denigrate these means of communication by insisting on the difference of our particular languages’ use of discrete elements and grammar, or by pointing out that chimpanzees do not use the same range of sounds humans do (though, no language uses the full range of possible human sounds, either). These criteria of “language” are selected specifically to dance around the fact that other animals also have very complicated means of communication, sufficiently complicated to bear some comparison to a crude, simple human language.
In each of these regards–intelligence, culture and language–humans have achieved a degree of nuance and sophistication that surpasses everything else in the animal kingdom. We are not the only intelligent creatures in the world, but we are certainly the most intelligent. We are not alone in possessing culture, but our cultures are the most far-reaching. All animals communicate, but ours is more nuanced and complex than any other. These are differences of degree, not kind. We are not unique in our possession of these traits, only in how much we have of them.
Every species is unique in some regard. They must be, in order to be species. If there was no trait that differentiated us from chimpanzees, then we would not be humans–we would be chimpanzees. That does not mean that any one of our unique traits are unique in the entire universe. Nor do these unique traits make us a different order of being, any more than the unique attributes of chimpanzees make them a different order of being.
The evidence for human evolution is incontrovertible. It is easy to see how insectivorous rodents simply moved their eye sockets forward to gain binocoluar vision and depth perception to climb up trees and exploit the insect colonies there. It is easy to see the changes in their physiology as some of them adapted to eat fruit. It is simple to trace the development of the great apes as they adapted to life in small communities, the rise of Australopithecus as a grasslands scavenger, and the development of our own genus as we came to rely on hunting. Darwin despaired of a “missing link,” a phrase still exploited by creationists. That link is no longer missing–we have an entire fossil continuum clearly outlining the descent of man.
Humans are quite clearly the products of evolution, like every other organism on this planet. Each of us is heir to a genetic heritage stretching back to the dawn of life a billion years ago. We are not gods or kings enthroned by a despotic, short-sighted deity, separated from our domain by the insulation of superiority. We are not damned to an icy tower under the burden of rulership, cut off from all life. We are part of this world, through and through. In a very real sense, everything that lives are siblings to one another, all descended from that first self-propogating protein. We are bound to one another in mutual dependence in complex networks and feedback systems, a system screaming with life. We are not apart from this. We can partake fully in what it means to live–and all it will cost is our illusion of dominion.