Confronting Human Exceptionalism

Human Supremacy

Feb 24

Written By Population Balance

The myth of human exceptionalism casts humans as separate from and superior to the rest of life. Primatologist Christine Webb, author of The Arrogant Ape, dismantles this belief, showing how science and culture sustain human exceptionalism - and why replacing it with awe and empathy for the natural world is essential to life’s future on Earth. Highlights include:

How an early experience with Bear the baboon led Christine to a deep insight about nonhuman animals' complex theory of mind - the ability to know what others know;
How human exceptionalism is deeply rooted in Western thought from Aristotle through medieval Christianity to the Enlightenment and modern science;
How human exceptionalism influences both the research questions asked and the methods used in primate research and science in general - such as using symbolic language tests on captive animals that privilege human cognition, and self-recognition mirror tests that privilege visually dominant animals like humans and disadvantage animals like dogs that 'see' with their sense of smell;
Why animals should be studied in their natural habitats, taking seriously each species’ worldview, and developing relationships with individual animals grounded in mutual accommodation and trust which allows them to show who they really are;
How many Indigenous societies have long understood animals as individuals with agency and autonomy who structure their own societies - a relational understanding Western science has only recently begun to recognize;
Why empathy, the attempt to understand the “minded life of another being”, must be "un-tabooed" in Western science;
How human population pressure, in addition to driving animal depopulation and extinction, also reduces the complexity of animals’ social relationships and cultural diversity;
Why “human exemptionalism”, the belief that technology will save humanity from environmental limits, is a delusional form of human exceptionalism;
How her book ultimately calls us to resist the inherited role of the “arrogant ape” through everyday awe practices, such as “slow-looking” practices in nature that shift our perspective toward deeper understanding and appreciation of the more-than-human world.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Christine Webb (00:00:00):
Empathy is simply a recognition of the minded life of another being. And I think that's such an important starting point for science. We're not testing whether other animals are conscious or self-aware or capable of X, Y, Z. We're testing more in the manner in which they are, how does it manifest in their lives? What is important to them? And that should be grounds for curiosity and further inquiry and investigation. So I think empathy is so taboo in science in that it's part of what creates our own identity as scientists against other disciplines, which is very concerning because science is the method that many of us have come to trust for understanding the world and understanding our place in the world. I think we tend to assume that science is somehow unbiased or immune.
Alan Ware (00:00:47):
That was primatologist and animal studies professor, Christine Webb. On today's episode of OVERSHOOT, Christine discusses her recent book, The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters.
Nandita Bajaj (00:01:09):
Welcome to OVERSHOOT, where we tackle today's interlocking social and ecological crises driven by humanity's excessive population and consumption. On this podcast, we explore needed narrative, behavioral, and system shifts for recreating human life in balance with all life on Earth. I'm Nandita Bajaj, co-host of the podcast and executive director of Population Balance.
Alan Ware (00:01:34):
I'm Alan Ware, co-host of the podcast and researcher with Population Balance. With expert guests covering a range of topics, we examine the forces underlying overshoot, the patriarchal pronatalism that fuels overpopulation, the growth-obsessed economic systems that drive consumerism and social injustice, and the dominant worldview of human supremacy that subjugates animals and nature. Our vision of shrinking toward abundance inspires us to seek pathways of transformation that go beyond technological fixes toward a new humanity that honors our interconnectedness with all of life. And now on to today's guest.
(00:02:12):
Christine Webb is an assistant professor in New York University's Department of Environmental Studies where she's part of the animal studies program. She's a broadly trained primatologist with expertise in social behavior, culture, cognition, and emotion. Her research also explores how contemporary norms and institutions shape scientific knowledge of other animals in the environment with a critical emphasis on human exceptionalism. Her debut book, The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters was published in 2025 and is being translated into 17 languages. And now on to today's interview.
Nandita Bajaj (00:02:52):
Hi, Christine, welcome to the OVERSHOOT Podcast. Thank you for joining us. We are thrilled to have you.
Christine Webb (00:02:58):
Thank you so much. I'm very happy to be here.
Nandita Bajaj (00:03:00):
And we are excited to chat with you about your new book, The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters. As you will have noted, confronting human supremacy is one of the three main pillars of our work at Population Balance, and your work fits perfectly with ours. In fact, three of our previous podcast guests, Marc Bekoff, Carl Safina, and Eileen Crist, who is also our advisor, gave this book high praise. We resonate deeply with the idea that human exceptionalism is at the root of our ecological crisis, as you write, and why we must abandon this worldview and embrace a real species-level humility to address this crisis. So Christine, it's clear from reading your book that you've been aware of the prevalence and pervasiveness of human exceptionalism for a long time. What were some of the childhood and early professional experiences that led you to start questioning human exceptionalism so deeply?
Christine Webb (00:04:06):
Yeah, I was lucky enough to grow up with a dog, and I am an only child, so the companion animals who lived in our home were like my siblings and I treated them as such. And the dog who I really grew up with, her name was Amber, a Shetland sheep dog. And she taught me so much about the unique ways that other animals experience the world and all of the ways in which their ability surpass ours'. For dogs, it's through their sense of smell. And I remember going on walks with Amber in our neighborhood and well before I would see them, she would smell deer and start barking. And I would say, what are you barking at? I can't see anyone. I have no idea. And it's because she had smelled the deer far before me. And that was also true of human strangers. And in that way, I always felt very safe with her because she could perceive other beings' presence or their recent presence in an area that I was really ignorant of.
(00:05:09):
And yeah, I think for anybody who has the privilege of living with dogs, they'll know this well. So I've always been an animal lover, and I also fell in love with Darwinian theory when I entered high school and started reading about natural selection and evolution and the origin of species. And it occurred to me at that time that many of the practices that we were engaged in, even as scientists in those high school classes like animal dissections, were at odds with what resonated so much with me about Darwin's theory that differences between species are not qualitatively meaningful, that we're on a spectrum and we're all related to one another. And that sort of sense of kinship with other animals that I felt growing up was yeah, at odds with many of the scientific practices. And then as I was becoming a primatologist, it was always the animals themselves who were challenging my assumptions of human exceptionalism.
(00:06:13):
I share many stories in the book about other animals who made me rethink my own values and beliefs, and one of those animals was Bear. So I'll share a story about Bear who at the time was a juvenile baboon in the Namib desert where I was doing field work and as many juvenile male baboons do, he was causing a lot of trouble both within his own social group and with the team of field researchers who were following this troop of baboons. And one day his antics got a little out of hand. We're not sure exactly what happened, but he instigated a mobbing event where a bunch of baboons and Bear surrounded my colleague, and they were barking really loud and slapping her legs. And the tension escalated very quickly. It was very scary for everybody, and everybody was okay in the end. Nobody was badly injured, but it was so tense that we considered as a field team, maybe we shouldn't follow these baboons anymore.
(00:07:15):
Nonetheless, the next day we decided to follow them, but at a much greater distance. And so I was with the same troop and I was keeping my distance from them because I was worried about a repeat incident when over the ridge comes Bear and his entourage of baboons, and this time they're making a beeline for me. I am in a very precarious position because I'm wobbling down a steep rocky incline and I can't easily get out of their way. And Bear keeps approaching, I'm terrified, but on the surface, I remain as calm as I possibly can look. And as he gets closer, he puts his hand in between my hiking boots and he looks up at me and he bares his teeth into this really awkward forced grimace. And I remember it so clearly because his teeth were so white and square, and I've never seen baboon teeth that up close before.
(00:08:05):
And, as a primatologist, I know that this is a pacifying gesture. This is something baboons do to avert conflict with one another, to reconcile with one another, to submit and to show friendly intentions with one another. And in that moment, Bear not only was empathizing with me, right, he knew that I was afraid and was trying to appease me, but he also had to know that I knew what had happened the day before and try to make amends for it. And this is something we call theory of mind, the ability to know what others know. At the time, I had thought only humans are capable of theory of mind. That is what I had learned, only humans have this ability, but Bear showed not only could he do this, he could do it for a member of another species. So in that sense, and in many other cases, it's been the animals themselves who have taught me to challenge and question my own assumptions about human exceptionalism.
Nandita Bajaj (00:09:00):
That's a very powerful story. Loved what you've described about the theory of mind, and you've talked quite at length about how this worldview of human exceptionalism is a form of social conditioning that we get conditioned from an early age, and then it's generation after generation through education or media, mainstream culture, our treatment of animals. It becomes so deeply embedded that we come to see it as a truth. But there have been so many other studies about how really young children don't show that kind of bias toward animals. And you've written about some of these hypothetical studies that were done, like the trolley problems or the lifeboat problems. Can you give a few of those examples of what you noticed about children and their treatment or their bias?
Christine Webb (00:09:51):
Sure. Yeah. This was a question that often came up in my classes where students would ask, well, isn't human exceptionalism just inevitable given that we're humans, right? Isn't it something innate that we just prioritize and privilege members of our own species over other forms of life? And I've been really fortunate that there have been a host of studies in developmental and also in cross-cultural psychology in recent years that test that very assumption. And so in one of the studies that comes to mind, researchers at Yale presented young children, I believe they were five to nine years old in the US, American children and American adults with moral dilemma scenarios that pitted varying numbers of humans against varying numbers of dogs and pigs. Basically, the scenarios depicted two sinking ships with different numbers of passengers, some maybe one ship contained two human passengers, and the other ship contained one dog.
(00:10:51):
And they asked participants, okay, you can only choose one of these boats to save. Which one do you save? And whereas American adults almost always prioritized the life of one human over even 100 dogs or pigs, American children did not have that human bias. They often opted to save the life of one dog over the life of one human. And the study has now been replicated in several other countries, I believe, both in Europe, but it's powerful evidence that this notion that humans deserve special moral attention over other animals is not inborn or innate. It's not a lens we come into the world wearing, but it's something that we acquire culturally. And the researchers of that study argue that it's something that children or adolescents learn as they get a bit older, enter the kind of main social fabric of a society and start to see all of the ways that humans around them are using and exploiting other animals.
Alan Ware (00:11:59):
And you go into the book quite thoroughly how that human exceptionalism became entrenched in western culture and also within western scientific thinking. Could you give us some of that overview here?
Christine Webb (00:12:12):
Sure. Yeah. It's so hard to trace historical origin. Some scholars trace the origin of human exceptionalism back to domestication. And when we started controlling animals and plants in our environments and separating ourselves from nature, right, sort of human culture separate from the realm of nature. And Eileen Crist, who's been on your show, she would argue that perhaps that agricultural revolution preconditioned the human mind favorably towards notions of human exceptionalism, which would come later, particularly in Western thought, through Aristotle's notion of a scala naturae, this scale or ladder of life, which ranked beings with humans at the top, followed by large mammals who looked like us, followed by other animals like fishes and reptiles and birds. Still lower in the ladder were plants and fungi and still lower than that, rocks and other inanimate, inorganic matter. And this notion of a hierarchy of nature was adopted within medieval Christian thought, The Great Chain of Being, which is very similar to the scala naturae, but instead of humans at the top, gods and spirits and angels are at the top of the hierarchy. Humans are just below them, followed by other forms of life.
(00:13:33):
And humans alone were thought to kind of bridge these two worlds, the mind, right, the soul, which was God, and the body, the material realm of the animal and other forms of life. And this divide, this hierarchical cosmology or worldview that has played out so much in Western thought and the enlightenment. But since your question was also about science, I think it's really important to emphasize, and this is a big part of the book, that human exceptionalism today gets reinforced through science, which is very concerning because science is the method that many of us have come to trust for understanding the world and understanding our place in the world. And yet, I think we tend to assume that science operates in isolation from our society and from the cultural values that we have, and from the history of ideas, that science is somehow neutral and objective.
(00:14:31):
But in fact, science, just like any method in enterprise, is shaped by our cultural values and norms. And because human exceptionalism has played such a big role in Western thought, science is not immune to that. Many of these assumed hierarchical divisions between human and animal, between mind and body are still at the heart of the questions that scientists ask, the methods that they devise to address those questions and the conclusions that are drawn. And so I'm sure we'll get into it. I think there are many ways in which human exceptionalism still shapes science, but it's just to say, just because it's science doesn't mean that it's unbiased or immune.
Alan Ware (00:15:12):
Yeah. I think in the book you give an example of how general social ideas influence scientific thinking with Darwinism emerging at the same time as industrial capitalism and this survival of the fittest of Herbert Spencer, the Darwinian capitalist competitive struggle, which then kind of leads into the theory becoming all about competition and downplaying cooperation.
Christine Webb (00:15:36):
Precisely. And it's not that competition doesn't happen in nature, but that it's only one piece of a much bigger story that got emphasized as a result of the timing of the publication of his work.
Nandita Bajaj (00:15:47):
And you've also talked about how Darwin questioned this notion of linear progressive view of evolution and emphasized adaptation through natural selection rather than this notion that we start out at the most basic or primitive level, and then we're progressing toward these more advanced stages, and we are at the epitome of evolution or the endpoint of evolution. But rather you argued and others have argued that it's more of like a web of diversification and complexity rather than this hierarchy.
Christine Webb (00:16:23):
Yeah, this is true even among scientists who are devout believers in evolution. If you look at a textbook on evolution and a classic image will show hunched over ape-like figures slowly becoming more upright and eventuating in Homo sapiens. And that image, which is everywhere, it's iconic, it's so readily misinterpreted as this progressive linear, or what scientists call orthogenic view of evolution, that it's somehow proceeding towards closer and closer versions of humanness. And I think this idea of a ladder of nature and Greek philosophy and much of western thought, Darwin really revolutionized with his theory of evolution by natural selection. And the ladder became a tree of life, right, with branches that are constantly diversifying and reaching outward. And all species who are alive today are evolving in parallel. There's nothing that's lesser or more advanced than, but I worry a little bit about the tree metaphor too, because in some ways it comes back to this notion of competition and individualism - that beings are just vying for differentiation and competing with one another and continuing to diversify as the evolutionary tree branches outward. And that's why I and many other scholars prefer the metaphor of a web or a net, right? Because it shows that cooperation is also a big part of it, that there's also all of these co-evolutionary processes. It's not that species are just growing further and further apart, but that they are shaping one another and that we are all enmeshed and entangled with one another. Darwin writes a lot about entanglement and the entangled bank, but I think somehow the tree metaphor doesn't convey that entanglement as much as something like a web or a net.
Nandita Bajaj (00:18:14):
Yeah, definitely way more powerful to visualize. And you just started speaking about some of the research methods that are prevalent in science that are heavily influenced by the worldview of human exceptionalism. Can you speak to how that worldview of human exceptionalism has biased scientific research in general, but also specifically your field of primate research - from the research questions that are asked to the methods that are being used by researchers to conduct these experiments?
Christine Webb (00:18:47):
Sure. Yeah. As a general point, one way in which this hierarchical worldview has seeped into science is thinking about something as seemingly straightforward as food chains, who eats whom and how that was originally seen as a chain, a hierarchy. But actually as any ecologist will tell you, it's a food web. It's not a food chain. It's a food web. And that beings impose constraints on each other. If a predator species consumes all of their prey, then they're not going to have anybody to consume anymore. So prey can also have evolutionary power over predators, and it's not a hierarchy in terms of who eats whom. It's more of a food web. And what's so interesting is that humans actually were not even put as part of the food web for a long time. It was like, oh, humans, we're not nature. We do our own thing over here. But how it's actually really important to be placing humans in food webs for understanding all of the relationships that are going on. And I was just having a great conversation the other day with someone about how other animals view members of the human category as predators and how we are the worst predators, the most dangerous predators, and how that's really important for understanding animal ecology. And so if we've taken ourselves out of those webs, then we're really limiting our understanding.
(00:20:13):
And then in terms of how human exceptionalism has shaped my own field as a primatologist, I write a lot about this in the book. There are so many examples, but I think one of the most telling examples comes from research on comparative cognition, which is basically comparing the cognitive abilities of humans, and often our closest living primate relatives, the great apes, so maybe chimpanzees or bonobos side by side. And these studies will often compare the cognitive abilities of captive chimpanzees. So those who live in highly restricted manmade environments in zoos or in labs, right? We'll compare their cognitive abilities with the cognitive performance of fully autonomous human beings, often young children who are sitting on their parents' lap during the study. The chimpanzees and the humans are being tested on human tasks and materials, so using computer touchscreens or plastic toys and puzzle boxes to measure their cognition. The chimpanzees are often separated from the group during testing, not to mention from their biological mothers from birth. The experimenter is human, whereas in the human case, the experimenter is also human, but at least that's a member of your own species. So there's just all of these confounds in these experiments that often and unsurprisingly conclude that humans are exceptional in some cooperative or cognitive ability. So one of the studies that comes to mind are studies measuring altruism in humans and in chimpanzees and looking at, okay, do they help the experimenter?
(00:21:49):
If the experimenter is struggling with a particular task, does the participant help? And children are more likely to help than chimpanzees, but this shouldn't surprise us given the glaring methodological discrepancies between these two samples. And I should also note that in the same way that these chimpanzees are not representative of chimpanzees on the whole, these humans are not necessarily representative of humanity on the whole either, right? It's a particular group of humans, often university students or the university professors' children who are the participants in these studies, not representative of human psychology on the whole. Nonetheless, I think the only way that we deem this a valid scientific comparison is if we assume that social and physical environments and experiences don't play much of a role in shaping who chimpanzees are. I mean, it would be a bit like studying individuals who are incarcerated and have very little autonomy and a lot of social stress and deeming them representative of human cognition on the whole. And that's what we do when we study other animals in captive settings like that. And it's not permissible ethically in my view, but it's also really bad science.
Nandita Bajaj (00:23:02):
And you also talk at length about, and again, this has been talked about before, this measurement of just using humans as yardsticks of all forms of cognition, even in this comparative cognitive studies, right?
Christine Webb (00:23:17):
Yeah. I think one of the best examples of this bias comes from research on self-awareness, which is the capacity to kind of recognize the self as distinct from others. And the way that we have traditionally tested for this capacity in other animals is through the mirror self-recognition task where you present a participant with a mirror and see whether they orient towards their reflection. Do they try to remove marks that have been sort of secretly placed on their face or on their body? Do they orient towards those marks? Do they try to remove it, which is evidence that they recognize themselves in the mirror, and it's traditionally seen as evidence that they are therefore self-aware. There's lots of problems with this task, but one comes from the fact that, okay, well, humans and many other primates species succeeded in passing the mirror test. Dogs have notoriously failed the mirror self-recognition task, which has led people to wonder, okay, well, are dogs not self-aware?
(00:24:19):
Most people who live with dogs think their dog is pretty self-aware and can recognize themselves as distinct from others. But of course, as I was talking about with my experiences, my childhood dog, Amber, growing up, dogs navigate the world primarily through their sense of smell, not through visual modalities, right? And the mirror self- recognition task prioritizes human and let's say primate abilities. We're a more visually dominant species and order. But when researchers devised a comparable task that's based on an olfactory mirror task, which essentially looks at can dogs recognize their own urine from urine that has been slightly modified with another odor. And of course they do, right? As anybody who's ever walked a dog by a fire hydrant or park could have already told you. But it's a really good example of how we had to move beyond the human yardstick for understanding this cognitive ability.
(00:25:16):
If we're only focused on sight, then we're ignoring a host of other senses and ways of navigating and being in the world, and we're stacking the deck against other species being able to show us who they are and how incredible their imaginations are. And it's telling that in the dog cognition literature today, the vast majority of studies rely on visual test paradigms and they ignore olfaction or they don't control for olfactory cues. So this is another way I think, in which human exceptionalism has infiltrated the sciences and therefore shapes what we know about other animals in their minds.
Nandita Bajaj (00:25:56):
Right. Since we're on the question of scientific research, I wonder if you could talk about what are the types of research questions and methodologies that are more likely to yield valid and useful results in primate studies, but also in animal behavior studies in general?
Christine Webb (00:26:14):
Yeah. I think as a starting point, if we're interested in cognition, which is one of the areas I'm interested in how animals think and how animals feel, then we need to study them in the context in which their cognition evolved, which would mean in the wild, in their natural habitats, dealing with the problems that they've evolved to solve, not the ones that we think they should know how to solve, but the ones that over thousands if not millions of years, in some cases, these animals have evolved to solve. So in the same way that a giraffe's neck has evolved to suit a particular ecological niche to reach leaves that are high up in the tree canopy, although I think someone told me that also their necks are there for fighting with other giraffes, but regardless, long necks have evolved for a particular evolutionary function. We shouldn't just have that approach for physical characteristics like neck length.
(00:27:13):
We should also have that same ecologically-oriented approach and evolutionarily- oriented approach for psychological characteristics. So it would begin with studying animals in the habitats where they live naturally and taking seriously their umwelt, this German word, which means environment, right, the sensory environment and world of that animal. How do they live in the world? Is it through echolocation, through smell, through sight, through touch? And I believe as a scientist, through recognizing them as individuals, through forming relationships with them that are based on mutual accommodation and trust so that they are not afraid of you when you're studying them, and they're not afraid maybe to show you who they really are. And these get into broader questions about the way that science is practiced today that I deal with in the book, and maybe we'll get there, but I think it really comes from a level of respect for who they are and studying them in circumstances where they are comfortable, a humility and an open mind, letting them show you who they are, letting yourself be surprised and some expertise based on people who have studied them and lived among them before to really know, okay, what matters to them and how can we study them in a way that honors those interests and needs? I think that those are big things, but they're at the core of any good science of other animals and other forms of life more generally.
Alan Ware (00:28:46):
That reminded me as a kid, I think I had heard that rats and mice would hit a lever to get heroin and cocaine until they die. They would rather have that than food. And then hearing about Rat Park where this guy designed a place where they could socially interact and physically play, and the level of addiction just crashed, it went way down. So that was a great better understanding of what the animal needs and how we relate to them.
Christine Webb (00:29:14):
And then we get better knowledge when we take those needs and interests seriously.
Alan Ware (00:29:19):
And who are some of the scientists along the way? You mentioned Darwin that inspired you by challenging human exceptionalism in Western science, and how do they help us see things differently?
Christine Webb (00:29:30):
There've been so many. The book is dedicated to my late mentor, Frans de Waal, a primatologist who I was so fortunate to encounter as an undergraduate and really set me off in my career in primatology. He's written a lot about animal minds and emotions, but also on how we study them. He has a book called Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? So really challenging anthropocentric ideas and scientific conventions. Another scientist who springs to mind is Barbara Smuts, a primatologist who I work with today, and who I wrote about in the book. She knows so much about baboons and has gained that knowledge through time spent living with them and relating to them as individuals with interests and idiosyncrasies of their own. And I think really challenging some of the standard detachment between scientists and the study systems they work with to develop a really nuanced and fuller picture of who baboons are.
(00:30:39):
And then, yeah, going beyond primatologists, of course, there's Monica Gagliano, a plant scientist who has had the courage to talk about intelligence and the mental lives and maybe even consciousness of plants, and doing really amazing studies to test their memory, their learning, their intelligence. And I'll just name one more who I write about in the book, Lynn Margolis, Robin Wall Kimmerer is another one, both in their own ways and in their own fields have been, again, just challenging conventional views of what other forms of life are capable of and conventional narratives about science and about evolution and how nature works. These people have all been so influential on me and also given me permission, I would say, as a scientist to think about things differently and to write about things in a way that might challenge sort of establish scientific orthodoxy. They've given me courage to do that.
Alan Ware (00:31:36):
Seeing the interconnections, and it made me think of Linnaeus and the categorization project of western biology, that there were so many species, so there was some value in chunking them into categories, but in the process, we definitely lose sense of the individuality within the species, their connections between the species. And as you were getting at with Robin Wall Kimmerer, we know that indigenous people have built up through place-based longitudinal experience an understanding of these interconnections. What do you think we can learn from traditional indigenous knowledge and how can we meld that with the best of Western science?
Christine Webb (00:32:16):
Sure. Yeah. And just to say something quickly on Linnaeus and taxonomy, which I always felt that taxonomy of all the sciences was the most concrete, but taxonomy changes all the time. And I've taught primatology classes numerous times, and every time I have to update my primate taxonomy because it completely changes. I was reading somewhere that even the whole system is sort of biased towards Europe and towards Sweden in particular where Linnaeus was from. So it's like, again, you have this assumption that of all the things that are going to be not biased in science, it would be taxonomy. But of course, it's heavily biased.
(00:32:55):
And yeah coming to this point about indigenous sciences and traditions, I mean, it's been my experience lately as a scientist that first of all, so many things that we think we're discovering in science have been so well known to indigenous communities for thousands and thousands of years. One of the examples I give in the book, and this is not to denigrate Jane Goodall and her legacy and her work, I mean, she would be another person who's had a huge impact on me. But Jane Goodall is often credited with discovering chimpanzee cooperative hunting and tool use. But of course, indigenous African communities knew about these behaviors in chimpanzees and reported them to colonists hundreds of years prior to her work. So all of these things that we take to be these revolutionary discoveries in western science seem to have been known for much longer time in many indigenous communities. And then when we think about science as a method of gaining knowledge about or with the rest of nature, so much of what I have been thinking about in my work lately about the need to rethink the detachment between the scientist and the participant, all of the ways in which empathy can play a really important pivotal role in understanding other beings, because we have to be in a mutual trusting relationship, I think, to really understand them best, taking seriously the perspectives and the interests of other animals, their own sensory worlds and needs, and all of these things that I think are sort of at the cutting edge of science and really changing and challenging the way we do science.
(00:34:34):
They've been embedded in indigenous cultures in terms of how you come to know an animal for as long as can be. I mean, taking seriously the notion that animals are individuals who have agency and autonomy, who are minded, who can play a role in structuring societies, their own societies, but also multi-species societies. I mean, all of these things, again, that are really front and center in philosophy and scientific debate right now, they're just old news. I mean, it's just a given in much of the literature I've read by indigenous scholars and thinkers. So yeah, that's been my experience is that none of it feels so very new. It's all rooted in much older, deeper ways of knowing other animals and the environment more generally.
Alan Ware (00:35:18):
And I appreciate the indigenous view that we're the little brother or little sister to all of these other creatures. We evolved much more recently and have many fewer years of embodied evolutionary intelligence.
Christine Webb (00:35:31):
Absolutely. And we're kind of acting like it, right?
Nandita Bajaj (00:35:37):
Yeah. And you mentioned how this notion of the newness, or it's like, oh, it's so remarkable. Look what we've discovered about this species or that animal or that bird. And I think a couple of weeks ago, it was all over the news that a cow was seen using a tool to scratch her back or something, and it was portrayed as the most remarkable thing ever, and why now cows maybe deserve our moral concern? And I don't study animals, but I knew enough that it was not remarkable. Why were people so surprised? And I think we don't expect much from them. And this is the very heart of human supremacy is the self-fulfilling prophecy.
Christine Webb (00:36:23):
It's confirmation bias. I had the same reaction that you did about Veronica, this tool-using cow, of like, oh, every time a headline like this comes out. I'm like, do we really? And I'm asked to review papers all the time, like, oh, bonobos can now do this. They can think about thoughts and they can count to 10, or it's just, these seem to not be the interesting findings anymore. These things should not surprise us. And then on the other hand, I'm happy that they're doing more research on farmed animals because there's so much research on primates and other wild animals. We need to learn more about the lives of cows and pigs and chickens and bring those to the forefront of the conversation. And yeah, Veronica, the videos of her using these tools are pretty delightful in some respects to watch.
(00:37:10):
But I agree with you. I'm very conflicted about the sort of novelty of these "new discoveries". And I think it comes back to the null hypothesis in science, right? This is another way in which human exceptionalism has seeped into science. Why is the null hypothesis that animals can't do these things? It doesn't mean that zero or that animals should lack something. The null hypothesis simply means what scientists should expect to be the norm based on evidence. And against that, they're going to test for statistically significant discrepancies. So the fact that the null hypothesis in science is that cows can't use tools or they don't have theory of mind, they don't have mathematical sensibilities or whatever. That is a null hypothesis that is not random. That is a null hypothesis that you can trace back to Cartesian dualism, to Aristotle's scala naturae, to The Great Chain of Being, to this hierarchy of nature, that null hypothesis in science that assumes that animals lack this thing and that they have to prove it to us. That's not a neutral starting point for science. And I think that's a really powerful, again, something as seemingly benign or harmless as, okay, what are we setting as our null hypothesis? But that matters a lot for the science that we do and what we find.
Nandita Bajaj (00:38:28):
Totally. The burden of proof is always on the animal to show to us that they are capable and worthy. And not to put the burden of proof on the animals to express their fantastical abilities, but you've noticed and written at length about different creatures' fantastical abilities and why humans and our supposed exceptionalism might not be so amazing after all. I wonder if you could share some of your favorite examples of nonhuman abilities, and what do they add to the whole discussion of this really problematic concept of intelligence?
Christine Webb (00:39:08):
My favorite examples of animals' intelligence and abilities always come from ones that humble me and make me think, okay, I really don't even, I have such a narrow slice of the world and reality at my disposal. So I've talked about and written about pronghorn antelopes, who are these amazing endurance athletes? They can run the equivalent of a marathon, I think three times faster than even the fastest human runner. They can metabolize oxygen in extraordinary way, but they also have incredible vision, 10 times the sort of vision of humans, which I've asked a bunch of people, there are sort of contested views on the veracity of what I'm about to say, but let's just go with it for a moment that if they have 10 times human vision, this means that on a clear night they can see the rings of Saturn.
(00:39:59):
For me, that's just incredible. It's like we have all these telescopes. We have to devise these things that are destroying the environment, and I still can't use a telescope properly, so I can't do that even with the most refined human tool to do that. And pronghorn antelopes can see the rings of Saturn. It's so cool thinking about owls and how they can hear the heartbeat of a mouse who's 20, 30 feet away. And when I'm walking and now I hear an owl, I'm like, does that owl hear my heartbeat? Does the owl know that I am tired or nervous or, so I love those examples. And then I also, I love these examples of just the amazing tools that animals themselves build to solve tasks like these strided herons who basically go fishing. They drop damsel flies and other little twigs and things into ponds where they hang out in order to lure fish into their zone of attack.
(00:40:58):
And this is just an incredible example of tool use because it's not just picking up something in the environment and using it for something that's close by. It's like it really requires a certain kind of foresight and calculus and thought, and maybe even empathy or theory of mind, like understanding, okay, that the fish are going to think that this damsel fly is for them, but it's actually my bait or my lure. Yeah, there are endless examples. And then really, I like to go beyond other animals too, and thinking about, for instance, mosses. So Robin Wall Kimmerer, the indigenous botanist I mentioned earlier, she writes about plants and mosses and their amazing abilities and how mosses have been around for hundreds of millions of years, in part because of their extraordinary ability to create and sustain thriving multi-species communities. So they transport nutrients and water from trees to soil, and they're just creating these very resilient, healthy, multi-species communities cooperating with the different forms of life around them.
(00:42:04):
And they've been here for 500 million years or something. And what if we measured evolutionary success and intelligence on that ability, the ability to create sustainable, resilient, interspecies communities, not on the ability to dominate or compete. And I think that comes back to this broader definition of intelligence, which is such a tricky term to define even within human beings. I think we have 60 definitions of intelligence. Is it emotional intelligence or spatial intelligence or what we conventionally call IQ, like on a conventional test of reason and logic and problem solving. There's so many different forms of intelligence, and we often emphasize maybe one particular version of that, or we consider beings to be evolutionarily successful in so far as they've managed to do X, Y, and Z, when that's only one story and one way of being successful maybe or intelligence. And that, yeah, we stand to gain so much if we just broaden the frame to take into account all the different ways of being intelligent and successful.
Alan Ware (00:43:11):
Even human intelligence gets measured by language and mathematical, symbolic ability and not so much kinesthetic, physical, musical, spatial, all the other forms of human intelligence. And then we test animals on symbolic ability.
Christine Webb (00:43:25):
Yeah, absolutely. And I ask my students this all the time. I say, who do you think is more intelligent than Dalai Lama or, I dunno, Stephen Hawking. And they all look at me like, that's a ridiculous question. It depends on what kind of intelligence we're talking about here, but we don't often ask that same question for other animals, and we should be asking that even more.
Alan Ware (00:43:46):
And you talk at length about what the role that empathy plays in extending that worldview to other species. Could you elaborate on the role of empathy?
Christine Webb (00:43:55):
I mean, empathy has different meanings in different fields. I like to approach empathy from the standpoint of phenomenology, the sort of philosophical study of experience. And basically phenomenologists have argued that empathy is simply a recognition of the minded life of another being. So it doesn't necessarily mean that I feel the same way as another being, that they're sad and that I become sad. I would say that's more sympathy. But again, it's all definitions. But I think it's a useful distinction because empathy allows for the recognition of the minded life of an individual along lines of similarity and difference. So it's not like, oh, that individual has to think and feel exactly like I feel in order to be recognized as thinking and feeling, but just that they have a subjective self, a life, an interior world. It might be very different from mine, it might be very similar to mine, but there is a subjective life there.
(00:44:51):
There's someone home. And I think that's such an important starting point for science, right? Because then again, we're not testing whether other animals are conscious or self-aware or capable of X, Y, Z. We're more in the manner in which they are, how does it manifest in their lives? What is important to them? And empathy plays such a role in that because again, it's recognizing that they are minded beings, but their mentality doesn't have to be the same as mine could be different from mine, and that should be grounds for curiosity and further inquiry and investigation. So I think empathy is so taboo in science, and I mean a real taboo in that it's part of what creates our own identity as scientists against other disciplines. But I've written a bit about the need to un-taboo empathy and see its place in science. And many of the scientists I've mentioned, including Darwin, I think were modeling the utility of empathy.
Nandita Bajaj (00:45:50):
And you spoke about your own experience in the science classroom, and I used to teach science and also just as a science student, I had kind of this aversion to dissection. And I've seen students have aversion to dissection. And the consistent message that I was given, and they are still often being given, is you need to thicken your skin because this is what real science looks like. And if you want to be a real scientist, you can't be so sensitive or empathetic. To me, it feels like carving out a whole part of who they are and asking them to disengage that part to then become, I don't know, a machine in some way in how you look at the world. But as you've described so eloquently, nothing in this world exists in isolation. Everything is a relationship and everything is relational. So the way we respond and observe and empathize and use theory of mind is all relational as well. So how could it ever be possible to conduct science without using all of who we are and observing all of who they are?
Christine Webb (00:47:02):
Which makes me think, going back to your example that when we desensitize and detach from these dissections or harmful things we're doing to other animals, we're not removing ourselves. We're still in relationship. We're in a relationship of exploitation and domination. It's a very unhealthy relationship that we're in. And sociologists have written about dissection in early elementary education as a rite of passage into the scientific community because it actually seems to me less about anatomy and learning about all the different organs and how they fit together and way more about this desensitization as a rite of passage into science. And when you ask, so many students today, I am really surprised many of them had to dissect frogs or pigs. And what they remember is nothing about anatomy, but about the ethical desensitization that they experienced. That seems to be the pedagogical goal, especially now that alternatives exist. And they've done studies comparing the learning outcomes of virtual versus real animal dissections. They're not different.
Alan Ware (00:48:12):
So you've written about the fact that as human populations grow, more and more species will live in environments characterized by severe anthropogenic disturbance. What are some of the findings about human population pressure, how it affects primates and other species?
Christine Webb (00:48:27):
Yeah, I like this question because it gives me an opportunity to talk about not just the loss of biodiversity, but of social and cultural diversity and other animals. Well, and I'll explain what I mean by that. So there's been all sorts of research about how anthropogenic disturbance causes biodiversity loss through loss of habitats, disease transmission as we encroach into animals, territories and lives, their population numbers are suffering. And that is the main reason for the biodiversity crisis in which we find ourselves. But I think my work has been really interested in thinking about how we shouldn't just be thinking about the loss of biodiversity because that's the loss of literally biological individuals. We should also be thinking about how anthropogenic disturbance affects the social relationships amongst a group and the cultural habits and behaviors of that group. So there's been some really interesting work published in recent years about how anthropogenic disturbance impacts not just chimpanzee biodiversity, but also social and cultural diversity, meaning that chimpanzee populations who live closer to areas characterized by high anthropogenic disturbance have less complex behavioral repertoires.
(00:49:50):
So I think about this a lot. Okay, we're destroying animal habitats. That means that they have to spend much more time finding new habitats, finding food, finding mates. They have so much less time that they can devote towards establishing meaningful relationships one another, learning from each other, enjoying each other, right? It breaks my heart when I think about it because these are the things that I'm most interested in learning about other animals - how they form relationships one another, how they experience those relationships and enjoy those relationships. And we're taking away not just their habitats, but their opportunities to engage in those activities and their opportunities for social learning. And chimpanzees are a great example of social and cultural diversity, because we know so much about their social and cultural lives. We know that different groups of chimpanzees have different cultural norms, right, different materials, tools that they use in their environments, different social norms, different ways of interacting with one another, and how as human-caused disruptions encroach on their lives, their behaviors are just becoming less complex because they're having to focus everything on finding suitable habitat or other ways of surviving and not on the things that really, I think make them interesting in who they are.
(00:51:11):
So again, it's just a call to really think not just about the loss of biodiversity, but the loss of all of the different aspects of their lives and ways of being. And it comes back again to this self-fulfilling prophecy too. It's like, well, no wonder we think nature is all competitive and red tooth and claw. We're making it that way. We're making it so that all animals have to just find food and vie for dominance and resources because we're taking it all away from them.
Alan Ware (00:51:41):
When you explained that their behavior's becoming more similar, and I was wondering why, and then you said, yeah, the foraging, the habitat. Where are we going to sleep tonight? Where are we going to get food? And you just imagine a human community if it's living in the woods and it's under constant threat, certain behaviors, we've got to move camp. There's no time for play, kids move along, or there are a lot of behaviors that we would lose when we're under constant threat. So it totally makes sense.
Christine Webb (00:52:08):
Absolutely. And the good news at least, is that this is being taken seriously by conservation organizations who are now have initiatives to not just preserve biological diversity, but also social and cultural diversity as well, like having kind of cultural heritage sites where chimpanzees live and have innovated for so many years that they deserve a certain designation because of their cultural value, not to humans, but to themselves.
Nandita Bajaj (00:52:34):
And we've appreciated that you've identified human population pressure as one of the direct causes of a lot of this loss of both biodiversity in the populations, but also the complexity of the characteristics they express. There has been so much denial in culture around human population pressures, and we see it exactly as a form of human exceptionalism when we say that No, we can continue to grow our population and our technosphere and our consumption, and somehow we can still have biodiversity, expansiveness, et cetera. So we just wanted to say we appreciate that you are not afraid to mention that. And along that line, you referred to a variation of human exceptionalism called human exemptionalism, the belief that humans are not bound by environmental limits, and that we can rely on technology to save us, kind of an extension of population denial as well. What do you think human exceptionalism gets wrong, and why does that matter?
Christine Webb (00:53:44):
I'll share a little story about this. I was previously at Harvard, and while I was there, I attended a number of talks by David Keith, who is a scientist who is at the forefront of solar geoengineering efforts, this idea that we're going to be pumping aerosols into the atmosphere to dim the sun, to mitigate the consequences of global warming. And that while a necessary evil, this might actually be necessary according to some, that this will be the sort of last resort, but may well be necessary to avert the catastrophic consequences of a warming planet. And at one of these talks I asked, so given that solar geoengineering would dim the sun, Elizabeth Kolbert has a book Under a White Sky that talks in detail about this. If anyone wants to read more of it, Under a White Sky, because the sky would look white and we would dim the sun.
(00:54:43):
What about pollinator species who rely on the precise angle of sunlight into their hive or as they're navigating to migrate and to locate food sources? What effect would dimming the sun have on pollinator species? And I never got a good answer to this. It was my understanding and is still my understanding, although I would love for please someone prove me wrong and send me a bunch of articles that have been written about this, about the effects of solar geoengineering on pollinators, I really want to know that someone is taking this seriously. Because even if we take a very anthropocentric standpoint on all of this, our food system relies on pollinators. And if by doing something like dimming the sun is going to prevent pollinators from migrating and communicating with one another where food is, then our food system collapses. And I think it's a good example of this point of human exemptionalism and this question is that we assume that somehow humans are exempt from environmental forces and limits, and that technology, all we have to do is always keep innovating and developing these new technologies, and they will save the day.
(00:55:54):
And Eileen Crist, who's also been on your podcast, she's written about solar geoengineering as it's just revving up the human factor even more. It's not actually scaling down the human impact and input, it's just revving it up even further. And is that really the solution right now, is that really the answer we need? And I'm completely aligned with her on that. And again, thinking if we're only thinking about revving up the human impact and not questioning all of the ways in which it's going to affect not just the human community on the whole, right? Because there's also going to be disproportionate effects on the global north versus global south that aren't taken seriously. And then if we're not broadening out to consider the multi-species habitats and communities we're a part of, and how dimming the sun's going to affect that, it's a hubristic mindset because it's actually going to lead to our own demise and downfall, right? So yeah, I think it's again, the sort of faith that we have in technology and human ingenuity and innovation to save us that also, I guess, minimizes our concern about overpopulation or that, okay, we will just innovate our way out of that too, is a big part of human exceptionalism. It's been inculcated in all of us. It doesn't get talked about at all enough in the mainstream climate and environmental discourse. I mean, certainly not these days. So thank you for your podcast, which is filling a really important gap.
Nandita Bajaj (00:57:12):
Yeah, thanks for saying that. Technological fundamentalism is another word that we use for it. And again, it's part of our educational systems where science and innovation and technology are privileged over any of the other studies that are such huge parts of our own cultures and our own communities and expressions, let alone all the other species out there.
Christine Webb (00:57:37):
And even within the sciences too, I was told as an undergrad, you should maybe pursue neuroscience. Don't think you're going to be like Jane Goodall and go out and study animals and get to know animals in the wild and in their natural habitats. And it's like, why should those kinds of sciences be privileged and seen as harder sciences or more rigorous sciences than behavioral observations and studying animals in their natural habitats? There's a bias across disciplines and within.
Alan Ware (00:58:06):
And a lot of that exceptionalism and exemptionalism feeds into your course title and the book title, The Arrogant Ape - that we are these arrogant, hubristic, ignorant species often. And wondering, you've talked about it some in the book, how students respond to this, how they change, how they see the world from taking your course and what you talk about.
Christine Webb (00:58:29):
Yeah, actually, the other day, one of my students put it really well because we were talking about who the arrogant ape is and how I'm not making a claim about humanity on the whole, or even about a particular culture or group of humans such as, let's say, western society or culture on the whole. That's not the arrogant ape either. In the book I talk about the arrogant ape as being like a character in a Greek tragedy of his own making, having hubris and not taking cues from nature and the Greek tragic tradition Nemesis, the goddess of nature, into account. And so I see the arrogant ape as this character, this script, this cultural role that many of us have inherited. And my student the other day, she put it really well. She's like, it's a way of being. It's a way of being that we can easily slip into if we are attending to certain things, if we're ignorant and arrogant towards the beings who live around us.
(00:59:27):
And I think through my class, what students learn is first of all, to see that that role is something that they've inherited. Again, human exceptionalism is so normalized in our society that we often can't even see it. We don't question it at all. It's invisible. And so the class makes it visible, makes students see that they actually even might have this bias in all of the ways. It shapes their understanding of the world. And then through making it visible, they want to question it and challenge it. And I would like to think, and I feel this is part of what motivated me to write the book, is that my students, many of them, can have a transformative experience in unlearning human exceptionalism. It seems to tap into something in their heart, they already know to be true, but maybe they had forgotten or hadn't fully been able to articulate or develop logical arguments around, and so in an academic environment they didn't feel comfortable speaking to, but that the world becomes alive again and they can return to a more childlike sense of wonder and respect and appreciation for the beings around them.
(01:00:31):
I think a big part of it is attention. We talk a lot about our world today and all of the competing demands on our attention and just the things that they notice every day shifts. Even myself, every time I teach the course, I notice that I start to attend to other beings in the environment in a different way. I just start to notice things differently. And that's so necessary in our world of screens and social media and technology. So I think and I hope that the course in the book also just in addition to sort of unlearning human exceptionalism and because they recognize that it exists and how much it shapes their perspective on the world, and then changing that perspective to really attend to other beings in their environments and all of the amazing things they can do and ways that they can relate to them as individuals and how they can continue to unlearn human exceptionalism through those relationships with other forms of life.
Nandita Bajaj (01:01:25):
And you talk about part of that unlearning is also embracing the role of awe in helping to humble ourselves is embracing humility. And what are the ways in which we can engage in such a practice?
Christine Webb (01:01:40):
When I was working on the book, I had an editor, I think, very astutely, point out that my book was actually about awe. And I didn't realize that at the time when I was writing it. But I liked that and I hoped that would be the effect it could have on people. And I think awe, psychologists describe it as an experience of vastness that requires us to shift our perspective and rethink our general understanding of the world. I think we tend to think that vastness means that it has to be grand and large and powerful in that sense, like a volcano erupting or a shooting star, or as I write about in the book, getting charged by a male silverback gorilla, which was a pretty awe-inducing experience. But I think awe, it can also happen in the everyday very small experiences, the microscopic world, what you can attend to just walking down the street and comes back to this point of attention where I have students engage in a slow-looking exercise every semester, which is where they learn to, for a greater part of their day than they usually would spend, spend time with another being a plant and an animal and just spend time with them, 10 minutes, 20 minutes a day and see how that intimacy changes the things you're curious about, your whole perception of the day and what you notice afterwards and the relationships you notice amongst entities. And basically a lot of them, they can be a seemingly mundane object or entity in their environment, and after spending some more time with it, they come away with an experience of awe. Something that they hadn't considered, the lichen on a rock and how long that lichen has been there and all of the relationships that are happening at that level, and so I like this idea of everyday awe. If we can try to cultivate that in our lives every day by just spending 10 more minutes or 20 more minutes in deep attention beyond the manmade environment, like looking at another plant or spending time with a tree or, I think, I mean, there's a lot of power there. I see it in my students and I see it in myself. It's seemingly small, but in aggregate, I think it can be pretty transformative.
Nandita Bajaj (01:03:56):
We agree. This is such a powerful way to conclude a very, very amazing interview. Thank you so much, Christine, for taking so much of your time to do all of this incredible research and to make it accessible to all of us, giving so many great everyday examples, challenging so many deep dogmas of human exceptionalism and adding to the depth and breadth of this research. Thanks so much for your time today. It was a really superb interview.
Alan Ware (01:04:28):
Thank you, Christine.
Christine Webb (01:04:30):
Thank you both so much for having me and for your great questions. I really enjoyed it.
Alan Ware (01:04:34):
That's all for this edition of OVERSHOOT. Visit populationbalance.org to learn more. To share feedback or guest recommendations, write to us using the contact form on our site or by emailing us at podcast@populationbalance.org. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. We couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you and hope that you'll consider a one-time or a recurring donation.
Nandita Bajaj (01:05:01):
Until next time, I'm Nandita Bajaj. thanking you for your interest in our work and for helping to advance our vision of shrinking toward abundance.