The Anti-Human Age: Not-So-Exceptionalism: On Emotion, Evolution, and the Myth of Exile

 

I watched a YouTube video by Casual Geographic about rhinoceroses (rhinoceri?), and it moved me to tears. Dude, hearing a baby rhino cry for their mother and grieve their moms when they lose them is heart-wrenching. In captivity, orphaned baby rhinos in rescue centers develop deep bonds with their human caretakers as well as other animals being rehabilitated alongside them. Rhinos, human foster parents, and whatever other little animal friends that are nearby sleep in a pile together at night because the little rhinos depend on their caretakers at night for emotional security and long-term psychological well-being. In the wild, they don’t have any predators to speak of. Instead of wandering the landscape with their sunglasses on like the baddest mothers around, they approach and play with other animal species on occasion who sometimes play back. The scene resembles two dogs meeting at the park, which is similar behavior to two human five year olds meeting on the playground. We’ve all been there. That’s why I cried. I saw myself in a living armored tank with a goddamn bayonet affixed to its snout.

We’re more similar to rhinos than conventional wisdom may hold.

Human exceptionalism is the belief that H. sapiens is fundamentally distinct from and morally superior to animals. This stance depends on distance, requiring animals to be psychological simpletons, plants to be chlorophyll distillation machines, and human beings to be walled off from the rest of the animal kingdom by big brains, opposable thumbs, and fucking goddamn shit curse words. Modern science’s march keeps forcing that position into territory that’s difficult to defend.

The obvious entry point for dismantling human exceptionalism is mammals. Mammalian emotional continuity is difficult to deny. We’re all linked to a recent common ancestor, speaking in geologic time, from rhinos to mountain gorillas to border collies to your best friend. If mammals share homologous brain structures, the simple conclusion is that most if not all emotional states and behaviors are evolutionarily ancient rather than uniquely human inventions. Why would they be? What a silly idea, right? There’s no way emotions emerged the day Homo sapiens took a firm grip on the planet. Anyone who lives with a dog, cat, or apparently a rhinoceros can tell you their behaviors reflect emotional states analogous to your mom’s. They love you when you love them. They play with you. They get pissed. Excited. Deliriously happy. Jealous. They grieve. Listen, I’d forgive you for worrying that I’m teetering on sentimentality or New Age spiritualism (after a brief period of bitter revenge fantasies), but what I’m talking about is attachment expressing itself through bodies and nervous systems in other branches of life. Not that other mammals' emotions are 100% identical to ours. I’m saying the separation isn’t as clean as we pretend. Evolution is not a straight line, it’s more like ever-widening systems of branching and converging rivers, tributaries, and streams. 

Mammals are cool and all, but let’s widen the lens in our efforts to dismantle human exceptionalism. Look up! Beware seagull shit! Birds matter in this conversation because their brains evolved along a different evolutionary waterway than ours while still producing tool use, vocal cultures, and problem solving. Now, dive from the air to the sea like an osprey for a fish, dude. Swim deeper with me. The depths shelter cephalopods such as octopuses (not octopi), squids, and cute Cthulhu-looking cuttlefish which complicate the picture even further because their intelligence evolved along an even more radical river from our own than birds did, yet they still exhibit curiosity, individual temperament, and likely affective states. Emotions may be as evolutionarily distant in time as the ocean surrounding Pangea, where our common ancestor to other mammals, birds, and cephalopods once swam. 

Which brings us to the genus Homo’s favorite card up our proverbially exceptional sleeve. Ah, language, the ace of spades of human exceptionalism.

I call the bluff. I see your humans, and I raise you cetaceans. Humans are not the only animals with language. The closer we put our scientific ear to biology’s wall, the more the old boundary blurs. To this point, while we’re already swimming with squid in the ocean, let’s take sperm whales as our example. Their communication behaviors are anathema to the concept of language being exclusive to humanity. The clicking patterns of sperm whales elicit legitimate comparisons to Mandarin Chinese. Sperm whales are talking to each other, and researchers are decoding their language, including regional dialects. No, I don’t think the spermies are using their PBS streaming subscriptions to watch Ni Hao, Kai-Lan to learn Chinese. I’m saying sperm whale clicks are structured in ways human beings can correlate with our own communication patterns.

All other whale species coordinate hunts, alert pods to predators, and use something like language to communicate in similar ways as sperm whales. The lives of humpbacks, orcas, and dolphins require social relationships and cooperation. Ride a dolphin to the surface of the ocean again, and we find that cetaceans are not lone examples, as similar communicative patterns emerge from animals that live on the water as well as underneath it. Leopard seals sing to their mates with cadences resembling nursery rhymes. 

Earth's oceans are alive with chatter above and below the surface. Oceans pour into rivers, streams, and tributaries, diverging, intersecting, and dead-ending like extinction. On the shores of one of those streams, human beings stand around a fire, trying to draw biological boundary lines on charts. The problem is, every time we draw the line around ourselves, life smudges it. 

Animal medicine is another way human exceptionalism falls apart. Orangutans have been documented in the wild using plant medicine. An orangutan male was documented by scientists as he treated a wound with a plant local humans have known to be medicinal for ages. Dude chewed it, applied the juice like a salve, and smudged the plant matter over the injury. Orangutans aren’t alone with their medicinal knowledge, either. Pregnant elephants will eat plants known to induce labor among humans. We could go on and on.

How the fuck do orangutans and elephants pass pharmaceutical information on?

Perhaps an individual tries every plant in the environment until something works. Or poisons them. Fingers crossed, dude. That makes life sound like an ongoing science experiment, so I don’t buy it. Knowledge does not have to be written down, spoken, or theorized to be transmitted. It can move through observation and repetition. If knowledge can be transmitted without language, then language is not a sole proof of mind. If animals can carry practical knowledge about plant medicine across generations, then the old boundary between instinct and cultural knowledge destabilizes.

Let’s dissolve the boundaries further. Grab a banana from the basket on your kitchen counter. No really, we’re using a lot of brain power here, some calories will do us good. I’ve got one too, see? Let’s peel these babies and take a bite. 

You monster! 

Humans share about 60% genetic similarity to bananas, so you may as well be devouring a distant cousin.

I don’t really have a banana myself, I was gaslighting you. 

Okay, 60% genetic similarity is a simplification that requires context, but it works for our argument here. The point is shared cellular ancestry. Life carries ancient machinery forward. Cells remember. Patterns persist. The distance between a person and a banana is enormous, yet not absolute. There’s a point in spacetime where an evolutionary convergence occurred. Because we share a mutual ancestor to plants as well as animals, plants share specific similarities with us. For example, they have photoreceptor cells called cryptochromes all over their forms. They sense light. They turn toward it and reach for it. They respond to day and night, direction, season, and intensity. Stare deeply into your lover’s eyes with enough microscopic depth, you’ll realize their eyes also utilize these cells to sense blue and UV light as well as regulate circadian rhythms. Human beings did not invent life’s relationship with light. We inherited a version of it.

Cryptochromes locked into place, I stand in reverent awe before nature. Reverence manifests within me when the hierarchy collapses into the ever-widening, branching system of truth. Rhinos play with gazelles. Birds coordinate. Cuttlefish solve mazes. Whales click into the dark. Orangutans treat wounds. Bananas share ancient genetic machinery with us. Plants turn toward the sun. Life is not a collection of isolated miracles. It’s one continuous miracle unfolding.

We’re more similar to the rest of the life we share this planet with than different. Human beings are not the peak, the point, or the explanation. We are a river in a system far bigger than we are. The process of evolution uncovers solutions. Some solutions have worked for millions, even billions of years, and we’re naught but downstream benefactors among benefactors. Perhaps crying for your mother is one of those solutions. This realization washes away human exceptionalism like tears, like a baptism washes away sin.