lives and minds
| Reading thread | |
|---|---|
| An Anthropologist on Mars | Oliver Sacks |
| Beautiful Minds: The Parallel Lives of Great Apes and Dolphins | Maddalena Bearzi & Craig B. Stanford |
| The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence | Carl Sagan |
| The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How they Communicate | Peter Wohlleben |
| “What is it like to be a bat?” | Thomas Nagel |
Two books I’ve thrown on the pile that belong in this thread, both with deliciously questioning titles:
- are we smart enough to know how smart animals are? by Frans de Waal. Via Alan Jacobs, linked below.
- what would animals say if we asked the right questions? by Vinciane Despret. Via Robin Sloan, “The Plunge”.
There’s evidently something in the air in this corner of the blogosphere I lurk about in…
I think many of us, and I count myself in this number, feel that all the discourse about human uniqueness hasn’t been good for us or for the rest of Creation. It’s not (this is what I would say anyway) that we need to deny human uniqueness — we are by any measure a very strange animal indeed, and with a distinctive role in God’s economy — but rather that we don’t seem to be able to talk about our uniqueness in ways that help us to live more wisely with one another or with the rest of Creation. And that’s a reminder that some things can be true and yet not always edifying to dwell on.
Alan Jacobs, “Uniqueness”
Not only not edifying, but often a non sequitur unrelated to the different point actually being made.
I once heard an m.d. commencement speaker who structured his whole address around what supposedly made humans unique among creatures — language, writing, tool use, self–awareness. For one thing, his science was embarassingly out of date. Even then we knew that these things are not unique to humans but shared with (at least) apes and dolphins. We now know that some of them are not even limited to animals: trees can communicate, tell time, and have individual personalities.
But for another, why did he feel the need to justify to these new doctors the value of their field by comparison to other animals? Was he worried that some of them would jump ship at the last minute, throw off their white coats, and join the veterinarians? Healing is a noble art, a useful and needful service to people. Surely that’s justification enough.
We’re unique, sure — in the way that all species are unique: similar enough to each other to produce fertile offspring together; different enough from all others to not.
To me it is not in the least demeaning that consciousness and intelligence are the result of “mere” matter sufficiently complexly arranged; on the contrary, it is an exalting tribute to the subtlety of matter and the laws of Nature.Carl Sagan, the dragons of eden, p. 221
fauna flora jacobs-alan mind nonseq reading sagan