The anthropomorphism of animalists

Flag of the animals in
Animal Farm, by George Orwell

A year ago I published an article in which I showed with multiple arguments that man is not just an animal, despite attempts by materialists to reduce us to that level. In fact, many animalists seem to do exactly the opposite: they inadvertently raise the animals to the human level. They do this even with insects, as when they speak of the horror suffered by a caterpillar being devoured by a hymenopter larva, although they reserve their special compassion for the higher animals: birds and mammals.

In their campaign against animal acts in circuses, animalists use the following motto:

A circus is a prison

They usually say the same of zoos, even though modern zoos have little resemblance to those of the early twentieth century, the so-called menageries.

Is man just an animal?

Theodosius Dobzhansky

Modern biologists frequently say that man is not special, that we are just a species among many. Thus, for instance, Colin Tudge writes this:

Phylogenetically we are an outpost, a tiny figment of life, just as Earth is a cosmological nonentity that no other intelligent life-form in the Universe would bother to put in their celestial maps.

(The variety of life, Oxford University Press, 2000).

This is just the indiscriminate application of a pseudo-scientific dogma that few biologists would dare contradict, which can be expressed in one of the following equivalent ways:

• All species of living beings are equivalent; no one is superior to the others.
• There are no criteria that make it possible to compare the importance of different species.
• Man is not superior to chimps, ants, bacteria...
• Evolution has no direction.

About religious and thought intolerance

A photo-gram in film Intolerance (1916)

We can hear frequently people stating that cultures and civilizations in ancient times were respectful and tolerant with other religions, in such a way that all beliefs lived together in peace and harmony. This turned to religious intolerance and religious wars when monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) dominated a great part of the world during the latest 2000 years.

The supposed tolerance of paganism has prevailed as a myth in our modern mindset, but is not true. To see it, we should remember that all the wars in pagan countries (Egyptians against Hittites, Assyrians against Syrians, Babylonians and Egyptians, and so forth) were always considered as conflicts between their gods. The victors attributed their victory to their own gods, and felt a religious right to act cruelly against the losers. Just remember the pyramids the Assyrians built when they conquered a city with the heads of all the men and boys living there; women and small children were just deported as slaves. Or just remember that the death sentence against Socrates was really a case of religious persecution, for he was incorrectly accused of teaching atheism to the youth.

Cultural evolution and biological evolution

Cultural and biological evolution are similar because natural selection acts in both cases. Cultural productions compete against one another and many become extinct. As in the case of living beings, not always the best win. Chance has an influence. In this way, for instance, Windows-95 threw OS-2 out of the market, even though at that time the second operating system was better. Another example is the result of the war between the three competing models of video recording: Betamax, 2000 and VHS.

In the same way that living beings exhibit genetic variability (many varieties of the same gene co-existing in the same population), there is also a cultural variability, represented by the co-existence of old and new makes and models of the same product. At times of big change in the environment (we are just now experiencing one) a cultural product may escape extinction thanks to its variability, by combining versions and producing something new, better adapted to the new circumstances.

The parallel is quite impressive. What we call a species in the biological world, may be considered similar to a civilization. But there are also deep differences between both phenomena.

While studies about biological evolution get back in time to one century and a half ago, those about cultural evolution are more recent: not even half a century. One of its pioneers, Richard Dawkins (who invented the term meme for cultural elements equivalent to genes) made the mistake of considering biological and cultural evolution as identical processes, forgetting their differences. Cultural evolution is almost exclusively typical of man and exhibits new phenomena, emergent features that make it quite different from biological evolution:

What is man?

Since about one century ago, after the consolidation of evolutionist theories, and getting from them philosophical consequences without a scientific basis, many biologists assert that man is an animal like any other, one between millions of species of living beings, and it would be impossible to set criteria to help us decide if one species is more advanced or more important than any other.

Is this true? I think it is evident that those criteria do exist, that we should not be denied the ability to compare and judge, two capabilities that have made our technological advances possible. I’ll mention just two of those criteria:

·         The origin of life, about 4000 million years ago, did not have an immediately observable impact on the physical aspect of the earth. Just a few changes in the water hue, or the apparition of cyanobacteria reefs. Nonetheless, the action of life on Earth continued slowly and culminated about 1000 million years ago in a new composition of the atmosphere with about 20 percent oxygen, which made respiration possible.

Multi-cellular living beings changed deeply the physical appearance of the Earth: the dominant color of continents turned green. Of the three kingdoms at this level of life, plant produced the largest impact, while fungi and animals are practically imperceptible from outer space.

In the last centuries, the situation has changed: for good or evil, the human species by itself has modified the aspect of our planet. The surface of the tropical forests is decreasing; many living species are in danger; holes in the ozonosphere turn up; the night sky is full of light; and, for the first time in history, the Earth has become an emitter of low frequency electromagnetic waves (radio and microwave), which makes our existence detectable by hypothetical extraterrestrial intelligences. A single species has done this in a terrifically short time, compared to the history of the Earth.

·         On the other hand, in very recent years, most members of the human species have become able to access a huge amount of information, an ever growing amount, over one quintillion bits (10¹⁸). Compare this figure with the information accessed by the members of any other species, from bacteria to chimpanzees: between one million and 200 million bits, seven to twelve orders of magnitude below ours. The information at our disposal may already be higher than the total amount of information accumulated by all the hundred million species of living beings considered to have existed from the origin of life, assuming that it makes sense to add it all together.

Is man a species like any other? No. For some biologists, biological classifications should give man at least the rank of a kingdom of nature, for it is very different to all the other species. Man was considered different during most of the history of mankind, until some biologists in the twentieth century started their continuous and surreptitious work of undermining human dignity.

Spanish version of this article
Thematic thread on What Is Man: Next

Manuel Alfonseca