We’re Not So Special: a New Book Challenges Human Exceptionalism

Intelligent life is exceptional by itself, but human life doubly so because we have the cognitive ability to do a lot more than the majority of our intelligent counterparts in the animal kingdom, which is feed-fight-fuck. This isn’t a pejorative phrase, but a concept in biology.

Bacteria can indeed survive in extreme conditions, but what’s the point? It can never understand anything about the universe or nature of reality as it lacks the cognitive tools required to do so. Why is knowing anything about the universe important? Animal curiosity has been a major driver of many evolutionary processes, including cultural evolution.

To your last point. Every era seems like the end of the world to the people living in that time, but I think that’s just a trick of the mind played on us due to our mortality. Regardless, I didn’t make up these ideas on my own—better people than me have said them in much better ways. Hope is an important psychological trick for troubled times because otherwise there’s only defeat or death. Honestly, things are not that hopeless, there’s almost always a course correction any time things get too extreme, and that’s fine.

This is why many assumptions about the future are simply incorrect. For instance people think humanity will become more secular because it has through most of our lifetimes so surely that trend must continue on into the future? But secularity is inversely correlated with fertility. So all that we're going to see happen is secular folks disproportionately remove themselves from the gene pool while religious folks take an ever larger share - now think about what the children of this new gene pool will, on average, be like.

It's also why the concept of us reaching a 'max population' is rather silly. We will reach a point where the population begins to decline due to certain groups removing themselves from the gene pool, but as the other groups continue to reproduce and produce children who, in turn, reproduce, that population will stabilize and then eventually go up, up, and away again. In other words it's just a local max.

Fear can be understood as simply wiring that influences the behavior so that an organism is less likely to die. That's how I see fear of death. But sometimes death of an individual is a better solution for the group, or even for the organism itself. The problem with humans is that we have somehow developed a view that death is the ultimately worst thing to happen, and we evade it with all our imagination, trying to find elixirs of immortality since we are aware what's going on, no matter what, not matter the cost other species pay for us.

We don't see our limits and that's our problem, because we think we're exceptional and we deserve everything because of it. And it's very, very egocentric.

We are not exceptional, in the sense that we don't automatically deserve more because we can paint pictures or compose music. We value ourselves based on things that don't even matter to other species. Instead, what we should do is to accept the responsibility that comes with the effectiveness of our brains, and figure out how it fits in the bigger picture of the ecosystem we're living in. But all we do with it is we exploit everything, making it serve us, because "we're exceptional and we deserve it".

Even in this thread it's visible, people don't even spend a minute to consider this: 'whhatt?? humans not exceptional? i don't see any animals thinking about their exceptionalism, haha!'

As opposed to a trait. Let's take writing: most humans for most of human history simply couldn't read or write. At some point, we educated humans to be able to read and write.

Now, you're correct in that we've not taught animals to read or write at the level of a human but that's also a question: is there a fundamental trait that humans have that allow for this? Do we have a part of our brain that no other animal has, or could have, that means we can become literate and no other animal ever could?

Or, is this a hyper-specialisation of other traits that are shared but we have more of it? Is it a result of traits like pattern recognition, socialisation, communication and fine motor skills that combined and specialised to turn into reading and writing? Literacy then becomes an outcome of combining those traits in a certain way. We know that other animals have these traits, just not in the same way.

The reason I say this makes it not sufficient is because it reduces "exceptional" to just mean "things humans can do," without trying to look deeper than the surface level things we see. Dolphins being able to see your organs by clicking is pretty fucking exceptional. But because humans can't do it, it's not "exceptional."

When we ask "what makes us exceptional," we're asking "what makes us different from animals?" The fact that our combined traits allowed for different outcomes doesn't make us fundamentally different any more than a frog is different to a cat.

What's meant by "human exceptionalism" is something more like "humans' longstanding habit of regarding ourselves as the apex of a strict hierarchy of species, a worldview which has had profound consequences for ourselves and others". That is a complex thing worth exploring, and what the work in the article is about. A critique from that level would be more interesting. But to do this, one would have to take in a larger working set of information.

Comments that engage with only the title of an article or the tip of its iceberg tend to be rather boring, and also reflexive/indignant. On HN, a good comment is reflective rather than reflexive [1], and engages with specifics rather than just being a generic reaction to a generic claim (like "humans are/aren't exceptional") [2].

One way to "engage with specifics" is to dig beneath the top of the abstraction heap (i.e. the title or top-level claim) until you hit a layer of substance of the relevant work or argument. In this case that's pretty easy to do: there are two paragraphs which, in their first sentences, get more specific:

  * when we assess other animals, we use human beings as the baseline

  * our tests of the abilities of nonhuman animals [...] study them under highly artificial conditions

To me the noteworthy thing in this HN thread is how rapid the reflex is to wholly dismiss the article (and the research it's about) and also how shallow that reflex is—how little information is processed before doing the dismissal. Strong emotional conditioning means little information can be tolerated before a reaction needs expressing. This thread is such a clear a case of that, that it points to how deeply what is called "human exceptionalism" lives in us.

Edit: actually, I was describing what I saw in the thread last night. Having looked it over again, there are a least some more substantive subthreads. That's good, and it's also common for those to take longer to appear, as described at [1] and [3].

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Apes are also not whales.

> that we can recognize

And there we go. That's an us problem and not a them problem.

> but their curiosity and capacity for communication stops at immediate needs like hunger and danger.

There are several interviews with native tribes who still practice hunting and gathering and that's the exact thing they worry about. Those humans are identical to us. But by your argument, "civilized" humans are more exceptional than these groups of humans?

Humans still have these basic needs and worries and thoughts. Just because we layer meta-societal pieces on top of that doesn't make them go away.

What makes humans different is technology. That does not make us different in an inherently exceptional way.