We are animals

A reminder from Greta Christina

This is the point I want to make. It's a point that most of us know and understand consciously... and yet it's a point that we have a striking tendency to forget.

We are animals.

I'll say that again:

We. Are. Animals.

We are an animal species: in the primate order, in the mammalian class, in the vertebrate sub-phylum. We are a product of evolution; a product of nature.

Yes, we're animals with an unusual ability to shape our environment. But it's an unusual ability -- not a unique one. Other living things have made dramatic physical impacts on the planet as well. Coral, for instance. Earthworms. And, of course, plants. Plants breathing in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen made a huge, radical change to the atmosphere of the planet. (A change that, so I've read, was a serious ecological threat to plant life, until animals came along and re-balanced the ecosystem.)

And yes, humans are the dominant life form on the planet right now. But even that doesn't make us special. Other life forms have been dominant in the past: trilobites, for instance, and dinosaurs. They were around for tens of millions of years. We've been the dominant species for what -- ten thousand years? Less? In geological terms, we're not even a blip.

It's so easy to think of human beings as somehow apart from nature. It's deeply woven into our language and our way of thinking. Nature versus nurture. Nature versus culture. Natural versus man-made. Is such- and- such plant a native, or was it brought to this region by people? Is X (global warming, homosexuality, the tendency of twenty- something human males to get into stupid accidents) caused by human beings and human culture, or is it natural? It's a way of thinking that's very pervasive. Even among people who aren't talking about religion. Even among atheists.

When people talk about evolution, for instance, they -- we -- often do it as if human beings were evolution's pinnacle, the goal it's been inexorably moving towards... as opposed to just one tiny, short-lived twig on an enormously huge, four- billion- year- old tree. Ditto when we talk about the food chain. There's a decided tendency to talk about the food chain as if it all headed straight into our mouths.

And it's a way of thinking that shows up a lot when science collides with politics or morality. When the question comes up of whether human gender roles are born or learned or both, we tend to forget that we are animals -- and that most animals have some sort of innate gender- differentiated behavior when it comes to sex and reproduction. When the question comes up of whether human homosexuality is born or learned or both, we tend to forget that we are animals -- and that homosexual behavior has been observed in hundreds upon hundreds of other animal species. We don't think of zoology as applying to us. We think of ourselves as different.