Darwin | The Casual Blog

September 6, 2023

Wild horses, and a proposal for new thinking about animals

Last week we had a family vacation at Corolla, a community on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Early every morning I went for a drive on the beach to look for the wild horses that live there. Most days I didn’t see any, but one day I did. Here are a few images of them.

I wanted to share a few more of my photos of bears and other creatures from my recent Alaska trip, so I made a short (4 minute) slide show of some of my favorites and put it on YouTube. You can find it here.

One of the things I value about wildlife photography is getting to know the animals better. Of course, it’s very rewarding to spend time in the field with other creatures. But also, reviewing the still images, I always get some new insights into the lives they live, and I hope others do, too.

Non-human animals have hard lives, and in general humans make their existence harder. Part of the problem, I think, is the widespread failure to see members of other species as more than mere objects to be exploited. I hope my photography helps to challenge that view, and suggests how we might see each creature as worthy of respect and compassion.

I’m afraid that in general, people don’t have much interest in non-human animals, unless they can be eaten or exploited for profit or amusement. This has been true for a long time. This way of thinking is problematic for people as well as other animals, and I’ve been thinking a lot about why it is so pervasive, and how it might change.

It seems natural to enjoy being with other creatures, and indeed, young children bond easily with them. But from an early age, we are taught that they are essentially different from us, and inferior. The lesson is pounded in, over and over: humans are not animals, and animals are inferior to humans.

The idea that humans are not animals is not only questionable – it’s wrong. It has nothing in science or reason to back it up. Darwin debunked it more than a century and a half ago, and his basic theory has been repeatedly tested and confirmed. From an evolutionary perspective, all living animal species, including homo sapiens, are closely related to each other.

Moreover, as scientific knowledge has expanded, it’s obvious that non-humans have many similar sensory capacities to humans, and some have vision, hearing, smell, touch, or other unusual senses that are vastly more acute.

There have been various qualities we once supposed made humans unique, including reasoning ability, memory, tool use, planning, and problem solving. But one by one, with more studies of more species, those ideas have turned out to be the product of our ignorance, as first one and then many creatures demonstrate such capacities in various degrees.

So why do homo sapiens persist in believing that we’re separate and apart, and superior? It’s plainly a flattering thought – we’re number one! And if we’re confident that non-humans are vastly inferior, we can justify eating them and otherwise treating them with indifference and terrible cruelty. It’s convenient.

But I’m coming to think that the notion that privileges humans over non-human animals is part of a pervasive, and deeply flawed, thought system. Our various ideas of inherent superiority and inherent inferiority are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. They form a powerful network that limits our appreciation of each other and the natural world.

Beliefs that one race is superior to another, that men are superior to women, or that straight is superior to gay, are all without any scientific basis. The same is true for holding Ivy League grads to be fundamentally superior to non-Ivies, white collars over blue collars, or homeowners over homeless. The list of our arbitrary and baseless hierarchical gradations goes on and on.

Nevertheless, they are so deeply ingrained in our consciousness as to seem part of nature. Like the belief in the superiority of humans over other animals, they’re part of our habitual way of thinking – that is, our culture.

Hierarchical thinking – deeming one group inferior to another – is more advantageous to some than others, but even those lower in the caste system accept at least some of it as natural and good. An example is poor working whites, who historically have found solace in the baseless notion that they are at least superior to Blacks. And racial and religious minorities have their own within-group grading systems based on skin color, wealth, education, and other factors.

As for non-human animals, almost all humans put them at the bottom of their hierarchies. They are still the standard metaphor for those who are most frightening and least deserving, as in “those awful [insert group name here] are animals”! We rank some animals over others, such as our dogs over pigs, but even the favored species members are usually deemed expendable objects, rather than beings with inherent dignity.

The fundamental problem with such hierarchical thinking is that it is divisive. Human hierarchies divide us from each other, and make it difficult to appreciate and bond with others. Even those high up in hierarchies are emotionally limited and morally depleted by the system. The hierarchies foster defensiveness, paranoia, and hate. At the same time, they lessen the opportunities for loving connection.

Our delusions of natural hierarchies do enormous damage, but they haven’t destroyed all our intuitions of fairness or our ability to perceive individuals. Though deeply embedded, those notions are subject to change.

In my lifetime, we’ve managed to revise for the better some of our worst prejudices on race, patriarchy, and minority sexuality. There’s even been progress in seeing animals as more than mere objects. For example, we’ve reduced the slaughter of whales, elephants, and certain other creatures, and acknowledged the injustice of our driving various species to extinction.

But there’s a lot of work still to be done, both for disfavored humans and non-humans. I don’t have a comprehensive solution, but I do have an idea for where to start: respect and compassion. These are attitudes we all know something about. Most all of us have respect and compassion for at least a few others, and to get started we can build on that.

I propose the following experiment. For each being we encounter, let us try saying to ourselves, “Although we are different, I respect you as an individual and wish you well.” This reorientated attitude would change us, in a small way, and multiplied enough times, would make a vast change.

I’ve been doing this experiment, and I think it has changed me and my surroundings a bit for the better. Recently a family of deer with two spotted fawns has been quietly visiting our yard to graze. While admiring their beauty and grace, I’ve been consciously seeing them as individuals with their own concerns. It’s hard to tell what they think, but they’ve certainly noticed me, and don’t run away. They definitely like our grass.

January 2, 2012

Diving in the Galapagos Islands

Sally at Darwin's Arch, Galapagos

On Christmas day, we did our third day of scuba diving in the Galapagos Islands, some 600 miles west of the coast of Ecuador, at the foot of Darwin’s Arch. There was a strong current, and so we spent most of the fifty-minute dive clinging to barnacle-covered rocks. There were many patrolling hammerhead sharks, as well as a couple of large Galapagos sharks. We saw many large sea turtles and fine spotted moray eels. There were hundreds of small colorful tropical fish, such as Moorish idols, king angelfish, trumpetfish razor surgeonfish, Guineafowl puffers, barberfish and parrotfish, as well as huge schools of creolefish. It was fantastic!

After the dive, we hoisted ourselves over the side of the inflatable dingy (or panga) and returned to the mother ship, the Galapagos Aggressor II. It was Sally’s hundredth dive. The crew presented her with a certificate, and our fellow divers gave her congratulations and hugs.

The Galapagos Aggressor II

From the boat, we watched hundreds of flying boobies (large sea birds that resemble gulls with webbed feet) (Nazcas, red-footeds, and a few blue-footeds), frigate birds, swallow-tailed gulls, and storm petrols. Groups of dolphins came by periodically. Later that day, we did some snorkeling a few yards off of Darwin Island. The dolphins weren’t very interested in us, although I swam briefly with a group of six. We had better luck with a group of sea lions, who were curious about us, and came close by doing flips and loops.

Sally and a curious juvenile boobie (red footed, I think)

Darwin, like all of the islands we visited during the week, was the remains of a volcano that originated four or five million years ago — a mere babe in geological terms. It was mostly gray rock wall rising sharply several hundred feet to a plateau on top. It was very stark, but also thrumming with bird and sea life. We saw no other humans. It felt like the earth was brand new. The creativity and resourcefulness of nature was awe inspiring.

On the panga

During the trip, I finished reading The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker. Pinker’s theseis is that human violence has declined dramatically over the course of history, and he explores the possible reasons for this. The book covers a lot of territory (all of human history) using a lot of tools (history, philosophy, statistics, biology, psychology), and still manages to be surprisingly lively and readable. Part of the book examines the increase in the last century of concerns for animal welfare — the sense that mindless cruelty to animals is unacceptable, and the suffering of animals is a moral concern. As with most violence, we’re ordinarily concerned with (and overgeneralize from) the violence and cruelty we observe, and tend to ignore examples of kindness and decency. It was cheering to learn of a trend toward greater respect for animal rights, and to consider that the trend could continue.

In our group of 11 divers, Sally and I were the only ones who did not dive with cameras. They were a cheerful, intelligent, and sociable group of folks, and all significantly more experienced at diving than we were. I’d taken the view that I’d prefer to look hard at what was in front of me without the distraction and intermediation of a camera, but especially after viewing some of their pictures, I was a little sorry that I didn’t get pictures of some of the amazing, strange, and beautiful things we saw under water. Perhaps next time. Here are some other above-water pictures from our trip.

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January 20, 2011

Your brain on music

Why do we love music? The question has always bothered me. There’s no doubt that music is a powerful force, but how does it work? It seems like a fundamental human activity, practiced in every society now and as far back as we have knowledge. As a thoroughgoing Darwinist, I assume musical activity must confer some evolutionary advantage, like being able to throw a spear well or make a fire. But it’s by no means obvious what music contributes to survival, or even what it does to make us happier.

For a philosophically inclined musician, that’s troubling. The question has a moral aspect. We can use our limited energy in various ways, with various positive or negative outputs. We can, for example, help feed the poor, ignore the poor, or rob the poor, and the choice partially defines us. If we’re making music, and not feeding the poor or doing some equally valuable thing, how can we justify it?

Last week I learned of a study that gave a new perspective on these questions. Neurologists at McGill University did brain imaging using PET and fMRI techniques that established that the music can cause the neurotransmitter dopamine to be released in the brian. http://tiny.cc/38ko7 Dopamine is part of the deep reward system involving the limbic system. It makes it pleasurable for individuals to do things that are good for the species, like eating and having sex. In other words, dopamine is connected to key behaviors, and drives those behaviors.

So in some sense, music is as significant as eating and sex. We can do without any of those things, at least for a while, but they are fundamental to human animals as a whole. This doesn’t answer the basic why questions of music, but it suggests the possibility of an answer. At any rate, it shows that music can be something powerful.

The McGill researchers found that dopamine release levels vary with different kinds of music, and related those variations to the what they called “chills,” and I call goosebumps. So not all music is created equal. I’ve developed as my own test for when music is most effective the monitor of when it makes a lot of goosebumps. Thanks to the neurologists for a new way of thinking about this amazing thing.