Meditations on animal intelligence and emotions (1)

A farewell to human superiority

Human intelligence and emotions did not just fall from the sky. We cannot win them in a lottery, nor can we buy them at the supermarket. Our intelligence and emotions have evolved.

They have evolved from forms of intelligence and emotions that were part and parcel of myriads of animal organisms belonging to all sorts of species that preceded the human one. These species were there before us in the long chain of evolutionary arrangements and rearrangements so characteristic of life adapting itself to the environmental conditions and contingencies of an ever-changing world. Intelligence and emotions may indeed be considered to be traits not only of humans, primates or mammals but of life in general.

It’s organic, emotional and intelligent. What is it?

There are as many expressions of intelligence and emotions as there are animal species and individuals within each species. All these intelligent and emotional expressions of life, all these intelligent and emotional forms of behaviour have one common basis, one common nature: it is organic. Intelligence and emotions hence are organic manifestations of life. They are most notable, although not exclusively, in the behaviour of organisms.

Man is not, as the Greek philosopher Protagoras thought, the measure of all things. Neither are his intelligence and emotions the measure of all forms of intelligence and emotions. To a dolphin, a tit, an alligator, an ant, a bee, a worm or even an amoeba, the human parameters of intelligence and emotions don’t mean a thing. From their point of view our intelligence and emotional behaviour are as little intelligible, perceptible or tangible as their intelligent and emotional behaviour is to us. They simply use their intelligence and their emotions to live their life and to survive just as much as we simply use our intelligence and emotions to do the same.

This view of life as an organic continuity is not new. In antiquity many oriental and occidental beliefs, religions, mythologies and popular cults took it for granted. Organic continuity, organic oneness were the most natural things on earth and most fascinating and humbling at that!

No soul! Tough Luck!

Things could have stayed that way had it not been for Aristotle who in the 4th century B.C. in his quite influential work ”The History of Animals” viewed humans as the only rational animals. He thus decreed a fundamental discontinuity between the human and all the other animal species. Humans, henceforth, were something special and belonging to their species was a privilege to be proud of. Speciesist elitism was born.

The Judeo-Christian tradition didn’t hesitate either to keep the human species on the pedestal of complacency and conceit. According to its belief humans were created in the image of God and destined, by divine election, to dominate or to take care of all creation, including animals that the Creator, for some obscure reason, had not endowed with a soul.

This antique apartheid system became the dominant model of our relationship with non-human animals. It has outlasted and withstood until today all religious and laic counter-currents that tried to consider humans and non-human animals on an egalitarian basis.

In the 17th century Descartes topped it off when he radicalised the speciesist stance. Animals, to him, were soulless machines, mechanisms that could not think or feel. Western culture now had its highly respected Cartesian licence to dominate, depreciate, exploit and kill non-human animals at its discretion.

The descent of man from ”below”

Darwin’s theory of evolution was the first major inroad in this paradigm of animal inferiority and insensitivity. Humans, so the theory goes, didn’t come from ”above” but from ”below”. All living organisms, including humans, that ever existed have a common origin and heritage. Admitting the unity of evolutionary processes also meant for Darwin accepting the mental capacities of superior animals to be different in degree but not in nature. Still, he kept thinking in terms of ”superior” and ”inferior” species. And in terms of ”differences in degree” when he compared mental capacities of species.

Yet, what counts as the only meaningful reference for animal intelligence and emotions is not their degree of complexity, flexibility or expression when compared to their human counterparts but their adaptive function and survival value within the specific ecological context they are meant for.

Being different and the difference it makes

No animal species is more developed, more advanced than any other; they have all developed and advanced differently. Some reached their ecologically ideal anatomy, physiology, behaviour, intelligence and emotions almost immediately and are still around. Other species have taken their time. Unable to adapt to environmental changes, many species have disappeared without leaving a trace. Others gave way to new ones able to cope differently with different circumstances. Evolution is not a matter of absolute progress irrespective of en vironmental conditions and contingencies; it is a matter of relative adaptation to them.

A more complex organism, say a dog or a human, has not evolved more than an amoeba. It has evolved differently to handle its life differently than simple life-forms. All organisms living today, be they bacteria, amoeba, rats, lizards, snakes, hawks, butterflies, chimps or humans, are at the same distance of time from the big bang. None is superior or more important than any other. None is more intelligent or more emotional than any other, either. They are all differently intelligent, differently emotional and, accordingly, behave differently. They all have the intelligence and the emotions to live their life according to the standards of their species and according to the requirements of their ecological context.

Superior to all? Superior to none!

All non-human animal species are functioning more or less perfectly in their respective environment just as we are in ours. The fact that we can kill, say, bacteria, doesn’t make us superior to them, just as much as the fact that bacteria can kill us doesn’t make them superior to us. Superiority is a notion invented by humans to appease their fears, to hide their ignorance and to comfort themselves. That’s why we value and hold on to our place on the pedestal of self-proclaimed superiority, a pedestal that nobody has erected for us. From the lofty heights of that pedestal it will be hard to accept the evidence that ethology (the science of animal behaviour), genetics and neurobiology are in the process of gathering, increasing and consolidating: namely that all animal organisms (including humans) function according to the same great principles, and that their behaviour, their intelligence and their emotions, as different as they may be, are but variations of the same great theme of life: survival.

There is nevertheless no reason to be ashamed of our origin, no reason to despise it, to ignore it or to deny it. If we proudly accept the facts, we can tear down the pedestal that sets us apart, be it only in our own fantasy, from the rest of the web of life.

We are one manifestation of the multifarious and extraordinary variety of life. We are the product of marvellous evolutionary mechanisms and we share the same genetic background with all the other species, including plants. We are neither the goal, nor the end, nor the top of evolution, just a transient but integral part of it, like any other organism. We have no other privilege than the one we share with all forms of life: the privilege to live.

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