Homo inflatabus

                                                    Homo inflatabus

                                                   by Marco M. Pardi

Note: All comments are appreciated, read, and responded to accordingly.  The comments sections for all previous articles have been opened for use.  I will certainly look forward to your comments.

 “Joy in looking and comprehending is Nature’s most beautiful gift. ” Albert Einstein.

Most of us remember our primary school organic science classes and the introduction to Carl Linnaeus’ Binomial Nomenclature.  We were treated to a dyad of Plant Kingdom and Animal Kingdom.  Eager to find our place in the scheme of things, we discovered ourselves at the apex of the animal kingdom pyramid.  There being nowhere else to go, we were atop that kingdom.  At least, on the chart.  The chart clearly showed that.  And charts don’t lie.

But then something happened.  Yes, the delivery was different from one classroom to another, but the message was the same.  We, as in Homo (Man) sapiens (the wise) were set apart from all else in the animal kingdom. In fact, we were Homo sapiens sapiens, Man the wise the wise.  Oh yes, we are flesh and blood.  But we are different, specially created by some unknowable entity and, more telling still, given “dominion over” all else on this planet.  After all, we are intelligent.  

But what is intelligence? And how do we know only we have it?  The answers were not forthcoming in those early classes.  After all, the classes were geared to learning, not thinking.  Those of us who had the opportunity looked for the answers outside the classroom, away from the text book pages we had only to memorize.  Out in the real world we took every opportunity to become, without realizing it, budding ethologists – a field I did not formally hear of until in college years later.

And so, in class, we absorbed the glib dictums, the received wisdom which told us of the Law of the Jungle, the tooth and claw, the kill or be killed, the instincts which made of every other animal in the kingdom a mere automaton reacting unthinkingly and involuntarily to biological controls.  When we discussed animal life in class we learned, in one way or another, the term animal is reserved for non-humans; bad humans “acted like animals” and being accused of that was nothing to be proud of.  When speaking of instincts we learned that humans had instincts, such as “mother love”, but more often than not the term was reserved for behaviors that were somehow less than approved.  Approved behaviors were virtues, qualities, volitional processes arising from our “higher nature”.

The best ethological definition of instinct I have used is: A species specific complex behavior pattern that must be elicited given the appropriate stimulus. An exception disproves the rule, and there are plenty of exceptions if one only looks. Do humans or other Primates have instincts? No. Do they have reflexes? Yes, but thinking quickly takes over. Some readers may – reflexively – ask, “But what about…(fill in the blank)?” Hundreds of thousands of pages have been devoted to explaining this and I will not reprise them here.

Another unfortunate meme is, Fear of Man.  Again, ethology helps us to understand that, for example, hunters by definition are omnivores with a heavy intake of meat.  As they move about in search of prey they reek of digesting meat; they signal they are looking for meat to eat.  They often try to disguise themselves with ointments simulating the musk of the animals they seek, but the larger effect is simply the obscuring of their meat eating odor.  And, upright posture is seen almost universally among mammals as an aggressive posture. Even the best intentioned nature observer signals he is looking for a fight as he walks around. 

People who see the predator take a kill and ascribe it to the violence of Nature fail to see the symbiosis of populations being held in balance.  The predator takes the old, the sick, and the superfluous young, thus strengthening the prey population.  Yet there are those who say our ability to kill anything is proof of our superior intelligence.  I’ve seen people who were dumb as a box of nails (my apologies to naildom) and were excellent killers.  

Misunderstanding our signals is common. One of my dogs was super defensive of her household.  Any guest coming in had to be seated before I could let her out to examine him.  But I always cautioned, don’t stand up – some dogs bark or sniff, mine takes a blood test.  So, there are actions one must be mindful of. On a television segment of a nature oriented program a woman journalist was seated next to a cheetah.  All was going well, until she made the mistake of raising one arm to chest level, an aggressive gesture.  The cheetah instantly attacked.  This is a dangerous problem with children, as they tend to throw up their arms when engaging with a strange non-human animal.

I could easily spot a person who knew little or nothing about horses as they approached a horse to ride.  Horses evolved escaping predators by outrunning them, not by engaging in frontal fist fights. The corpus callosum, the bundle of nerve fibers connecting the two hemispheres of the brain, is different in animals that outrun their predators. Horses have excellent side and rear vision, with lesser frontal vision; they need to be able to run forward while keeping their predator clearly in sight behind or along side.  A person introducing herself to a horse must approach one side of the head and speak gently, then approach the other side of the head and do the same. This integrates the person into the mind of the horse – a wise thing to do before attempting to mount.  Someone with no understanding of horses, who see them only as objects, will walk up and attempt to mount.

So my issue is not whether non-human animals are qualitatively different from Man, whether they can communicate with each other, whether they make tools in advance of their need, whether they engage in conceptual thought.  They do all that. Again, hundreds of thousands of pages in ethology already explain these.         

My issue is with the mysterious process by which Man separated himself from the rest of Nature.  It is too easy to look at the garbled, out of order nonsense of the Genesis account and assign it the blame. Even taking it allegorically, which would be more appropriate culturally, it still fails the title of Myth That Screwed the World.  Written thousands of years after the transitional events giving rise to and more deserving of that title, it is simply the codified post hoc justification of the process of transitioning from symbiotic food procurement to parasitic food production; it is the fabricated Authorization of Man’s removal from Nature to a place of authority over Nature, a process which had long been underway with or without imaginary divine beings.

As Man transitioned from the symbiotic food adaptation of Gathering/Scavenging/Hunting to the parasitic food adaptation of  Controlling/Domesticating/Producing he objectified the entirety of his planetary context, his biosphere. He inflated himself to a position outside of and above all else.     

It is this cognitive separation which enables us to, without thinking, develop mechanized agriculture, “factory farms” of millions of sentient non-human animals crammed together into a manmade paradigm of feed input – meat output, gestation crates for pigs and calves straight from Medieval torture chambers, abattoirs for the live skinning of dogs and cats for leather and fur products, “science lab” providers so our children in those aforementioned biology classes can each have an animal to dissect before sitting down in the school cafeteria to a meal of hamburger alongside a carton of factory produced milk telling them Elsie the Cow loves them.  Of course, Elsie, who must be kept in a constant state of lactation until she is dragged out and slaughtered for hamburger, never gets to see her own children she has been forced to produce in order to keep lactating.

It is also this cognitive separation that enables us to drill deeply into the earth, poisoning millions of cubic miles of fresh and salt water, triggering earthquakes, and burning the extracted materials while poisoning millions of cubic miles of atmosphere and killing record numbers of species throughout the biosphere.

So, we stand atop and apart from Nature? We have all heard the joke about the man who grew so fat he hasn’t seen his feet in years. Our feet, as well as the rest of us, are firmly in Nature, not on Nature.

Pardon me if I don’t swell with pride at being a member of this species.