AS FAR AS WE KNOW, THE CLAIM THAT HUMANS ARE unexceptional—and arrogant for thinking otherwise—was first made by Darwin. He asked in a notebook over twenty years beforeThe Originwas published: “Why is thought[,] being a secretion of brain, more wonderful than gravity[,] a property of matter? It is our arrogance, it [is] our admiration of ourselves.”1
And in the same notebook: “Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy [of] the interposition of a deity. More humble & I believe truer to consider him created from animals.”2
He speculated that grinning began with baboons baring their “great canine teeth,” and that “Laughing [was] modified barking, smiling modified laughing.” Barking itself may have started out as a way of signaling the “discovery of prey.” Darwin allowed that “crying is a puzzler.”3He never changed his opinion. InThe Descent of Man(1871) he said that his object was “to shew that there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.”4What about language? “With respect to animals,” he said, “I have already endeavoured to show that they have this power, at least in a rude and incipient degree.”5
Darwin repeatedly adopted this strategy of minimizing the difference between the mental powers of humans and animals. In another variation on this theme, he claimed that some humans are mere “savages” or “barbarians.” The Fuegians at the tip of South America, for example, “rank amongst the lowest barbarians.”6They and other such are little removed from the “higher animals.” Any remaining gap could then easily be bridged by Darwin’s all-purpose mechanism, natural selection.
For his followers, the alleged ordinariness of human beings was little more than a deduction from common descent. His supporter Thomas Huxley wrote in 1863:
Is man a peculiar organism? Does he originate in a wholly different way from a dog, bird, frog, or fish? And does he thereby justify those who assert that he has no place in nature, and no real relationship with the lower world of animal life? Or does he develop from a similar embryo, and undergo the same slow and gradual progressive modifications?
The answer is not for an instant doubtful, and has not been doubtful for the last thirty years. The mode of man’s origin and the earlier stages of his development are undoubtedly identical with those of the animals standing directly below him in the scale; without the slightest doubt, he stands in this respect nearer the ape than the ape does to the dog.7It didn’t seem to occur to Huxley that even though human development in the womb may resemble that of other animals, the end-product is quite different.
Darwin’s accusation of “arrogance” was changed to a charge of “vanity” by Huxley, for whom ridicule was the preferred weapon: “It is not I who seek to base Man’s dignity upon his great toe, or insinuate that we are lost if an Ape has a hippocampus minor.”
On the contrary [Huxley added], I have done my best to sweep away this vanity. I have endeavored to show that no absolute structural line of demarcation, wider than that between the animals which immediately succeed us in the scale, can be drawn between the animal world and ourselves.8To be sure, inThe Uniqueness of Man(1951), Thomas Huxley’s grandson Julian did acknowledge uniquely human features, among them language, conceptual thought, and the transmission of knowledge by writing. But the theme of “arrogance” took hold, and has been regularly repeated since. Here is Stephen Jay Gould inEver Since Darwin(1977):
Chimps and gorillas have long been the battleground of our search for uniqueness; for if we could establish an unambiguous distinction—of kind rather than of degree—between ourselves and our closest relatives, we might gain the justification long-sought for our cosmic arrogance. The battle shifted long ago from a simple debate about evolution: educated people now accept the evolutionary continuity between humans and apes.
But we are so tied to our philosophical and religious heritage that we still seek a criterion for strict division between our abilities and those of chimpanzees. For as the Psalmist sang: ‘what is man, that thou art mindful of him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and has crowned him with glory and honor.’9The accusation of arrogance is self-defeating on its face. Only humans are capable of arrogance or of seeing themselves as superior to other animals. Animals cannot rise to that level of abstraction. Do cats or dogs think themselves superior to humans? (Well, dogs don’t, but I’m not so sure about cats.) The criticism of arrogance itself rests on human exceptionalism. Meanwhile Gould, who lost his own faith—as Darwin did his—saw himself as someone who had lost nothing but his arrogance.
The University of Washington biologist and liberal activist David P. Barash introduced a variation on the same theme. In theNew York Timeshe denied the uniqueness of human moral values:Before Darwin, one could believe that human beings were distinct from other life-forms, chips off the old divine block. No more. The most potent take-home message of evolution is the not-so-simple fact that, even though species are identifiable (just as individuals generally are), there is an underlying linkage among them—literally and phylogenetically, via traceable historical connectedness.10
He added that “no literally supernatural trait has ever been found in Homo sapiens; we are perfectly good animals, natural as can be and indistinguishable from the rest of the living world at the level of structure.”
But at the level of structure, what would a good materialist like Barash expect to find? Seraphic wings? Looking for supernatural traits at the natural level is as illogical as hunting for the mind in brain cells.
Human Exceptionalism versus Darwinism
SENTIMENT FOR human exceptionalism is inversely related to Darwinism. If we regard humans as exceptional, we are likely to reject Darwin’s theory. In his bookCreated from Animals(1990), James Rachels (1941–2003) claimed that after Darwin, “we can no longer think of ourselves as occupying a special place in creation—instead, we must realize that we are products of the same evolutionary forces, working blindly and without purpose, that shaped the rest of the animal kingdom.”11An animal rights activist, Rachels was also a supporter of “active” euthanasia.
Here’s a conventional-wisdom update fromNew Scientist:
For much of our existence on Earth, we humans thought of ourselves as a pretty big deal. Then along came science and taught us how utterly insignificant we are. We aren’t the center of the universe. We aren’t special. We are just a species of ape living on a smallish planet orbiting an unremarkable star in one galaxy among billions in a universe that had been around for 13.8 billion years without us.12But wait; there was a correction. “Maybe we were too hasty to write ourselves off,” the editorial continued:
There is a sense in which we are still the center of the universe. Science also teaches us that the laws of physics are ridiculously, almost unbelievably ‘fine-tuned’ for you and me. Take the electromagnetic force. It has a value that is perfectly set for getting stars to bind protons and neutrons to create carbon—the building block of life as we know it. Or the strong nuclear force, which binds the insides of protons and neutrons. If it were even a tiny bit stronger, the whole world would be made of hydrogen; if it were weaker, there would be no hydrogen at all. In either case, life as we know it wouldn’t be possible.13A more elaborate version of that revisionist argument was made by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards inThe Privileged Planet(2004).
The ancient (and modern) claim that humans display a unique intelligence has been met with a search for it elsewhere: within the solar system or outside it; in our machines, in the form of artificial intelligence; or in other animals—most commonly chimpanzees.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, artificial intelligence, or chimp-talk thus constitutes a three-pronged search for what humans possess by the age of four. They are looking for something that evolutionists are convinced should be there, so they keep on looking. The un-stated goal is to justify Darwinism by denying human uniqueness.
Chimp Talk
THE ASPECT of human uniqueness that Darwin might have examined more closely is language. We can talk to one another; animals can’t. We can put words on paper and others can read them. Darwin did discuss “articulate language” inThe Descent of Man, and he allowed that it is “peculiar to man”—but with his own reservations. Humans, “like the lower animals,” make inarticulate cries “to express their meaning, aided by gestures,” he said.14Darwin used such observations to convince himself that the gap between animals and humans is not so great after all.
He also noted “the tendency in our nearest allies, the monkeys, to imitate what they hear.” And “monkeys certainly understand much that is said to them by man.” (Not really, of course.) So it’s possible that “some unusually wise ape-like animal should have thought of imitating the growl of a beast of prey, so as to indicate to his fellow monkeys the nature of the expected danger.” This “would have been a first step in the formation of a language.”15And at that point Darwin seemed to imagine that his problem was all but solved.Earnest attempts to get chimpanzees—not monkeys—to communicate did not begin for about another 100 years. In the 1970s and later we heard about Lana, Moja, Kanzi, Washoe, Panbanisha, and maybe a dozen other chimpanzees. The most celebrated was Nim Chimpsky, a pun on Noam Chomsky. MIT’s Chomsky had earlier poured cold water on the project, saying that the ability to use language is an innately and uniquely human development. Nonetheless, Gould became so convinced by the chimp reports that he thought the only honest alternative to human exceptionalism was to admit
strict continuity in kind between ourselves and chimpanzees. And what do we lose thereby? Only an antiquated concept of soul to gain a more humble, even exalting vision of our oneness with nature… We are more nearly akin to the chimpanzee than even Huxley dared to think.16
Language was “the last bastion for potential differences in kind,” Gould wrote. True, “early experiments on teaching chimps to talk were notably unsuccessful.” But there was a simple explanation. “The vocal cords of chimpanzees are constructed in such a way that large repertories of articulated sounds cannot be produced.”17But as the linguist Noel Rude, an expert on Native American languages, has pointed out, parrots can accurately reproduce words with only a beak.18Next, Gould promoted sign language. When “Lana” of the Yerkes laboratory began to ask for the names of objects she had not previously seen, “can we any longer deny to chimps the capacity to conceptualize and to abstract?” Gould asked. “This is no mere Pavlovian conditioning.”19
Baby chimps began making recognizable signs, and their progress “is no slower than that of a human child,” Gould said. In short, we have seen “a striking demonstration of how we have underestimated our closest biological relatives.”20Likewise, primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, formerly with the Iowa Primate Learning Sanctuary, promoted a gradation of linguistic skills, from primates to humans.
But animal language research fell into disrepute when “talking” chimps like Washoe and Nim Chimpsky were exposed as unintentional frauds. Scientists found strong evidence that the chimps had simply learned to please their teachers by contorting their hands in various ways. The trainers, straining to find examples of linguistic communication, thought they saw words, “like children seeing pictures in the clouds.”21
Mark Seidenberg, a graduate student at Columbia during the Nim project, doubted whether chimp signing and human language were ever related. Animal rights activist Peter Singer cited results using the most generous possible interpretations. In deciding what Washoe or Koko meant when they signed “banana,” for example, researchers relied on what is called “rich interpretation.” They assumed that the ape possesses whatever knowledge a child possesses in using the same word. The real challenge—to determine whether ape and child do possess the same knowledge—was sidestepped. Seidenberg and others with no personal investment in particular outcomes challenged Singer’s account. Eventually much of the research funding was withdrawn because the science was not credible.
“In my mind, this kind of research is more analogous to the bears in the Moscow circus who are trained to ride unicycles,” said Dr. Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at MIT (later Harvard) who has studied language acquisition in children. “You can train animals to do all kinds of amazing things.” He doubted that the chimps learned anything more than how to press the right buttons in order to get humans “to cough up M & M’s, bananas and other tidbits of food.”22
Linguists have also noted how quickly children (but not chimps) can go from cobbling together two-word utterances to spinning out complex sentences with phrases embedded within phrases. Children can easily put together sentences that they never heard before and will never use again.
In the journalScience, Nim Chimpsky’s trainer Dr. Herbert Terrace, a Columbia University psychologist, asked: “Can an ape create a sentence?” He “reluctantly” concluded that the answer was no. There was no evidence that chimps had acquired a generative grammar—the ability to string words together into sentences of arbitrary length and complexity. Like Pinker, Terrace said that Kanzi, another trained chimp, was simply “going through a bag of tricks in order to get things.”23
Terrace rejected comparisons to human children. “If a child did exactly what the best chimpanzee did, the child would be thought of as disturbed.”24Helene Guldberg, editor of theSpiked Review of Books,wrote that, despite the dedication of a number of primatologists, “the cognitive and linguistic abilities of the great apes have never surpassed those of a two-year-old child.”25
From Chimps to the Stars
FIRST, I’LL briefly mention the mundane explanation for the ongoing search for intelligent life at the extraterrestrial level: funding. NASA keeps looking for extraterrestrial intelligence because it will greatly increase the agency’s popularity on Capitol Hill. Congress is far more likely to fund sorties to outposts of life than to barren rocks. Expeditions to planets outside the solar system are not remotely plausible, but maybe distant civilizations can be detected using short-wave radio receptors.
But the Copernican Principle, sometimes called the Mediocrity Principle, claiming that there was nothing special about the Earth, soon gave way to the Fermi Paradox. In 1950, at Los Alamos, the nuclear physicists Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, and others were discussing the latest ideas about the universe: it was much larger and older than had earlier been thought; it contained billions of stars evolving over billions of years, probably accompanied by more planets than stars; and the physical laws that apply here also applied out there.
So, “where is everybody?” Fermi famously asked. It became known as the Fermi Paradox.
Enter Frank Drake, a Cornell astronomer who responded in 1959. Using radio telescopes, scientists could listen for signals from aliens. Drake cobbled together the Drake Equation, hoping to estimate how many intelligent, communicating civilizations there are in our galaxy. The novelist Michael Crichton rightly complained that the equation was vacuous because it included no data. Cosmologists and evolutionists plugged in their own numbers anyway, and in their math, the probability of life—possibly intelligent, communicating life turned out to be a near certainty. All you needed was enough habitable platforms—planets—to work with. They are now finding some of those planets. But no extraterrestrial life—let alone intelligence—has yet been discovered.
Darwin speculated that life may have first appeared in a “warm little pond.”26No experiment has been able to generate life from non-life, and today life on Earth is the only life that we know. But Darwinians have theorized that given enough warm little ponds, life surely must have appeared somewhere else in the universe.
From Exceptionalism to Misanthropy
IN THE late twentieth century, a new element entered into our philosophy—disapproval of the human race. Misanthropy became fashionable, as it still is today. Gould jeered at our “need to see ourselves as separate and superior.”27“Exceptionalism” was now admitted, but in a different form: Human beings were exceptionally bad. For one thing, we were too numerous for our own or anything else’s good. And we did harmful things, exploding nuclear weapons and so on.In The Panda’s Thumb, reflecting on the extinction of the dodo, Gould wrote that “we who revel in nature’s diversity and feel instructed by every animal tend to brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since the Cretaceous extinction.”28Environmentalists today see humans as doing harm and little else. Meanwhile, they worry that nothing could be more exceptional than being alone in the Cosmos. So they keep looking for life somewhere else.
Religious Implications of Extraterrestrial Life
GOULD ONCE argued that “a positive result [finding extraterrestrial intelligence] would be the most cataclysmic event in our entire intellectual history.”29But why cataclysmic? He didn’t say. Maybe what he meant was that it would be cataclysmic not to find it.
The physicist Lawrence Krauss—like Gould an atheist—said that the discovery of extraterrestrial life would be “jolting” to “orthodox Christians.” Earlier, the “revelation that the Earth is not the center of the solar system” had delivered a similar jolt, he believed.30(Actually, it didn’t.)
Here is the columnist Charles Krauthammer on the same topic:
As the romance of manned space exploration has waned, the drive today is to find our living, thinking counterparts in the universe. For all the excitement, however, the search betrays a profound melancholy—a lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence. That silence is maddening. Not just because it compounds our feeling of cosmic isolation. But because it makes no sense. As we inevitably find more and more exo-planets where intelligent life can exist, why have we found no evidence—no signals, no radio waves—that intelligent life does exist?”31Maddening? Jolting? Cataclysmic? Maybe they sense that Darwin’s philosophy is at stake.
What lies beyond the solar system? Probably we’ll never know, unless extraterrestrials transmit that sequence of prime numbers that Carl Sagan and others hoped to see transmitted. Until then, a good case can be made for the uniqueness of life on Earth. And that would entail the uniqueness of intelligent, human life. The thought that life on Earth might in fact be unique is unpopular with materialists, because it raises the discomforting possibility that God was responsible for the origin of life and everything else.
The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg said inThe First Three Minutesthat humans are “just a more or less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes…”32He has also argued that if—if—“calculations showed” that the odds of a planet having the right gravity, temperature, and chemical composition were very small and “the earth on which we live were the only planet in the universe” then a “benevolent designer” might indeed “make sense.” For it would be difficult “without supposing divine intervention to understand our great good fortune in having come into being.”33 But, Weinberg added, we now know that “a good fraction of stars have planets.” So, “we need not be surprised that chance events governed by impersonal natural laws have produced intelligent life on at least one of the planets.”34Let’s just say that Weinberg was eager to avoid finding in favor of a Designer. He simply assumed that the probabilities support the case he wanted to make—that life arose accidentally and has no meaning. He has also called religion “an insult to human dignity.”35
Carl Sagan, one of the leading promoters of extraterrestrial intelligence, “believed in superior beings in space, creatures so intelligent, so powerful, as to resemble gods.”36Sagan had proposed that a new civilization is formed just in our galaxy every ten years. If so, Sagan concluded, “there are a million technical civilizations in the [Milky Way] galaxy.”37Surprisingly, Richard Dawkins has shown similar inclinations. He was quoted in theNew York Timesas saying, “It’s highly plausible that in the universe there are God-like creatures.” He was careful to stipulate that “these Gods came into being by an explicable scientific progression of incremental evolution.”38
But even if we do assume the existence of a “Goldilocks” planet—one that has the right size, temperature, and atmosphere to encourage the appearance of life—we still have no idea how likely it is that life will appear spontaneously, because we don’t know how to create life ourselves. Nor do we have any idea how likely it is that such life will evolve to the point where it can build radio telescopes.
Sagan’s faith in the widespread emergence of civilizations arose “because he believed uncritically in Progress,” said his biographer Keay Davidson.39It was the Enlightenment that had inculcated this faith. Darwin also embraced it. So did Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and a hundred other thinkers. But even as our modern-day misanthropy has been embraced, our assumption of progress has been discarded. And that puts our modern philosophy directly at odds with the evolutionist faith. I will take a closer look at this conflict in Chapter 21. Meanwhile, in the next chapter I shall examine the attempts to locate artificial intelligence within computers.
DARWIN’S HOUSE OF CARDS
A JOURNALIST’S ODYSSEY THROUGH THE DARWIN DEBATES
by
Tom Bethell
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