Humans are animals. Religions should accept this fact.

Frans de Waal has written a fascinating book about animal intelligence, "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?"

I'm only a little ways into the book, but what I've read so far has gotten me to thinking about how religions view humans -- as animals, or as a non-animal species?

Here's a passage from the prologue that makes clear how de Waal looks upon this question.

In all this, we love to compare and contrast animal and human intelligence, taking ourselves as the touchstone. It is good to realize, though, that this is an outdated way of putting it.

The comparison is not between humans and animals but between one animal species -- ours -- and a vast array of others. Even though most of the time I will adopt the "animal" shorthand for the latter it is undeniable that humans are animals. 

We're not comparing two separate categories of intelligence, therefore, but rather are considering variation within a single one. I look at human cognition as a variety of animal cognition. 

Naturally this is true. Humans are indeed animals of the primate variety. We're close relatives to chimpanzees, with whom we shared a common ancestor about six million years ago. 

Genetically, we share more than 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees and bonobos. From this perspective, chimpanzees are mostly human and vice versa. But, in genetics, some changes matter more than others. That 1-plus percent of DNA that differs between our species has obviously led to some fairly significant changes.

Yet religions usually look upon humans as separate and distinct from other animals. Supposedly we are made in God's image, while chimps aren't, even though scientifically-minded religious believers have to grapple with the notion that God created chimps with 98% of our DNA.

As de Waal says in the passage above, there isn't human intelligence and animal intelligence. There is just intelligence, which comes in lots of different forms depending on what a species needs to know in order to survive and prosper. Here's another passage from the book. 

But why stop at the primates when we are considering cognition? Every species deals flexibly with the environment and develops solutions to the problems it poses. Each one does it differently.

We had better use the plural to refer to their capacities, therefore, and speak of intelligences and cognitions. 

This will help us avoid comparing cognition on a single scale modeled after Aristotle's scala naturae, which runs from God, then angels, and humans at the top, downward to other mammals, birds, fish, insects, and mollusks at the bottom. 

Comparisons up and down this vast ladder have been a popular pastime of cognitive science, but I cannot think of a single profound insight it has yielded. All it has done is make us measure animals by human standards, thus ignoring the immense variation in organisms' Umwelten [worldview].

It seems highly unfair to ask if a squirrel can count to ten if counting is not really what a squirrel's life is about. The squirrel is very good at retrieving hidden nuts, though, and some birds are absolute experts.

The Clark's nutcracker, in the fall, stores more than twenty thousand pine nuts, in hundreds of different locations distributed over many square miles; then in winter and spring it manages to recover the majority of them.

That we can't compete with squirrels and nutcrackers on this task -- I even forget where I parked my car -- is irrelevant, since our species does not need this kind of memory for survival the way forest animals braving a freezing winter do.

So we need to stop looking at animals as being inferior to humans. They are different from us, not inferior. This is one reason we shouldn't eat them.

I've been a vegetarian for over fifty years, with my last bite of another animal species coming when I looked at a prawn on my plate while I was in college and  realized, "That used to be swimming around in the ocean, enjoying its prawn life, until it was killed so I could eat it." 

At that moment I felt a kinship with my fellow animals that caused me to vow never to eat fish or meat again. Which, I haven't. 

Comments

[Um]

I wonder if animals feel that "kinship" when they, kill, eat other animals for their living.
Ism's like veganism are all to human.
And in psychology the definition of intelligence is ... that, what can be measured with an intelligence test.
And ... no other animals has the capacity to re-create its habitat ... go to the moon. That makes them more free than other animals and even more than trees ..... freedom of what.
Religion is a tool used by humans to survive .... it is not a cause ... And like any other tool it can be used with a variety of intentions ... some good, some bad.

[Sonia]

We just had this conversation in our house yesterday talking about our senile 16 year old cat and super intelligent dog (whose 5th birthday just happens to be today).

I agree, humans aren’t superior, just different. If you look at it from a Buddhist or Eastern Philosophy perspective, the squirrel in your yard might be your uncle from a past life. And that’s a really weird thing when you think about it from the perspective of certain traditions. I mean, if your dog or cat or cow was a human in a past life where they had a certain “level of consciousness” then are we to assume that mind or consciousness was lost??? Hmm 🤔 where did that consciousness go when they transmigrated?

Honestly I don’t know and I really don’t care. All I know is humans are responsible for taking care of all living creatures as best they can. Not so sure “God” really used the word “dominion”. I think humans conveniently and selfishly translated whatever was supposedly said into the Bible to justify eating meat after the great deluge.

No animal or human “deserves” to suffer. I’m horrified at the way humans treat animals. Absolutely horrified and disgusted.

OK, so I wasn’t there when the “dominion” conversation came up but I’m pretty sure it got lost in translation.

If I dropped of my kids at a daycare or school and told the teachers they were in charge and then came back later only to discover that they had eaten the children... things would end very badly.

[Dungeness]

@ Humans are indeed animals of the primate variety. We're close relatives to chimpanzees,
@ with whom we shared a common ancestor about six million years ago.

Monkeys beg to differ:

http://sunybgrad.tripod.com/evolution-monkeyview.htm

[manoj]

Some Humans can be way worse than animals, just take a quick look at (GSD and the rs cult) and some animals can behave alot better than Humans. We live in a very inexcusable earth in which we all have a responsibility towards life and its inhabitants. As the saying goes...
Live and Let Live GSD time to stop being the oppressing chimp.

[S]

This is precious https://youtu.be/iJPXhL5MdiU

[Sonia]

Dungeness—

Love that poem. Thanks for sharing!

[S]

I feel really bad for calling my 16 year old cat senile. He's actually hyperthyroid and really anxious because of his condition. We had to buy stuff to calm him down and are taking him to the vet to get proper medication for him. It's weird how the older and more frail he gets, the more adorable and precious he is to me.

[Tim Rimmer]

‘….there isn't human intelligence and animal intelligence. There is just intelligence, which comes in lots of different forms depending on what a species needs to know in order to survive and prosper…’

I’ve just started reading a book that appears to get right into this, only it’s about fungi and is called “Entangled Life” by Merlin Sheldrake a biologist.
I’m enjoying how he’s really questioning why we see things the way we do and have this tendency to anthropomorphise other life forms to somehow understand them. I believe he makes interesting parallels on pg 48:

‘Fungi may not have brains, but their many options entail decisions. Their fickle environments entail improvisation. Their trials entail errors. Whether in the homing response of hyphae within a mycelial network, the sexual attraction between two hyphae in separate mycelial networks, the vital fascination between a mycorrhizal hypha and a plant root, or the fatal attraction of a nematode to a fungal toxic droplet, fungi actively sense and interpret their worlds, even if we have no way of knowing what it is LIKE for a hypha to sense or interpret.’
(Hypha = growing fungal filamentous thread).
BFN

[S]

Hi Tim,

I’m a big fan of Sheldrake too. His ideas and lectures are fascinating. Isn’t thought basically viewed as sense perception by material reductionists? So, we perform “thinking” through cells that aren’t always in the brain. I’m not even sure if a thought can be quantified. Thought is awareness but there are no “thought cells” in the body, right?