The Anthropic Shift – Learning to be Human from Geese and Fishes and Rats

There is a special moment in many works on animal behavior where the author switches from their account of chimps, bees, fishes, geese, rats or another favored organism and tells us what it means to be human.  I call this the anthropic shift.  The behavior of the human animal need not be an area of particular expertise for the author; the switch is presumed to be validated by the evolutionary continuity of humans with other animals.

Animals will have both generic similarities with their evolutionary relatives as well as having attributes that are specific to them alone. Not all behaviors will therefore have direct homologues in species-to-species comparisons.  Humans don’t, for instance, have a direct equivalent to the waggle-dance that bees use to share foraging information with hive-members, nevertheless, since humans also forage and share information symbolically, insight into waggling can be, not implausibly, regarded as useful in speculating about the evolutionary roots of certain human behaviors.  In addition to such general comparisons, studies on animal homologues of quite specific human behaviors are often of particular interest.  The specifics of human mating systems and family structure have been analyzed comparatively with that of related species, chimps, baboons, and macaques for instance. It is in the light of an anthropic shift from apes and monkeys to humans that debates about the “naturalness” of human family arrangements are often assessed, though often irresolvably.  

One of the distinctions of classical ethological research was that its practitioners took the behavior of a wide range of vertebrates very seriously on their own terms (see here for more on classical ethology).   Though it may have been the case that the work was motivated in part by the prospect of an anthropic shift to human behavioral situations, it is nonetheless clear in the work of Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, the disciplinary founders of ethology, that they were naturalists of an evolutionary bent first and foremost.  The anthropic shift in ethology was armed with years’ worth of cross-species research on specific behavioral processes.  Since their work oftentimes focused on species at some genetic remove from humans, the application to our own predicament is fairly coarse-grained in terms of the behavioral category, e.g. aggressive drives, learning, communication and so on.   That it not to say that their recommendations on the amelioration of less delightful human behaviors, war, for example, is not quite specific, merely that a strength of ethology emerged from its examining a general behavior in the context of its evolution development in a broad range of species.

Spat out of Nature by Nature: Konrad Lorenz and the Rise and Fall of Ethology

Jackdaws (Corvus monedula), widespread crows throughout Ireland, make delightful pets.  A school friend of mine in Dublin, Sean Farrell, kept one for a few months back in the late 1970s when we were both in our early teens.  The bird had broken its wing and Sean nursed it back to health.  The jackdaw was a noisy fellow and had his species' penchant for shiny things.  Sometime later I was happy to read that Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989), the Austrian ethologist, published a behavioral study of a colony of Jackdaws that he maintained and included an account of the birds in his charming book King Solomon’s Ring.  King Solomon’s Ring, (the title is taken from the legend that Solomon had a ring that allowed him to talk to the animals), was a popularization of the emerging science of ethology, that is, the biological study of behaviour, and was perhaps the first book that confirmed to me that there was a to make a living out of what I happened to like to do.

I progressed from the lighter but nonetheless delightful accounts of animal behavior in King Solomon’s Ring and in Niko Tinbergen’s Curious Naturalists to the greater heft of Lorenz’s classic On Aggression (1966) which I read as a zoology undergrad at University College Dublin in the 1980s.  In this book, published later in his career when he was in his sixties, Lorenz shared his mature analysis of how insights from the study of the instinctual behaviour of animals can be helpful in thinking about the human condition.  As we shall see, as a good Darwinian he regarded human conduct as revealing much about our essentially animal nature, but unlike other animals we posses, he argued, a characteristic of being able to overcome this legacy.  In fact, he deemed it critical to our species survival that we simultaneously evaluate the evolution of aggressiveness in a clear-headed way while we find cultural solutions to discharging these unavoidable tendencies in a harmless way.  More harmless than war, that is.  Lorenz had lived through a war and he was committed to helping humanity avoid another one on that scale.

Before looking at the details of Lorenz’s analysis of human nature (in the post to follow this one) a word or two about the science of ethology which emerged as biological subdiscipline in the 20^th Century under Lorenz’s and Tinbergen’s influence.  Together with Karl von Frisch, who worked out the details on the so-called “waggle-dance” of honeybees that allowed the hive to share information on the location of a food source, Lorenz and Tinbergen shared the Nobel Prize (in medicine) in 1973.  A primary task of ethology was to place questions about the behaviour of animals in an evolutionary context.  How does the behavior function to increase the success of the animal; what are the triggers for the expression of that behavior, how does the behavior develop in the life of that individual; and, finally, what was the pattern in the evolutionary development of the behavior?[1],[2]  Some regarded it as a strength of the discipline that it simultaneously asked questions about the adaptive nature of the behavior, the mechanism by which the behavior is displayed, and how functions in the ecology of the organism. Critics, however, saw in this the danger that teleological thinking could creep into the analysis: the assumption that behavior developed to the point of ever increasing perfection as the behavior reached a preordained goal.

Apocalypse and Utopia in Equal Measure

In an essay entitled Mechanism of Utopia Emil Cioran (1911-1995), the notoriously pessimistic Romanian philosopher, declared his surprise that “riots do not break out every day: massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos.”[1]  It is not, he concluded, that our hatred for each other is insufficient; rather, we are saved by the being too mediocre to fully act upon our mutual odium.  The balance of these opposing propensities permits us to soldier on.  More affably, one might just as well wonder why peace and kindredness are not more stable and enduring.  Certainly we profess to desiring them.  Sunnier times do not prevail, one suspects, not merely because our baser natures assert themselves and we disincline to tame them, but because the better and worse aspects of our natures are blended through the human mix, rather like the fruit in a Christmas pudding.  A sultana in every forkful; a little bit of anger, or condescension, or pride in every charitable act.

Utopian visions are born of destitution, in the depths of which one feels there is a better world just within reach.  And when this destitution is at its most profound, the utopian wants everything to change.  “Air annoys you.” Cioran wrote, “let it be transformed.”  The utopian imagines that all can, in fact, be changed, even herself!  That is, her view is that human nature is such that the rages of our bruter natures can be quelled.  Apocalyptic visions are utopias without the swaggering self-confidence in the unbounded mutability of our natures.  The Apocalyptic looks at her derelict conditions and sees only ruination.   

Ecological utopias have two complementary dimensions: one orients towards a better place, the other towards a better time.  That better place may be one that is currently blasted, but now re-imagined by ecological and social engineers (the sustainable city), or alternatively, that better place can turn away from the contemporary landscape, desiring to build elsewhere: the rural commune (the sustainable subdivision), or the planetary escape (Mars Now!).  Utopias models themselves upon a different age, former times or an imagined future.  In this sense utopia (without place) can also be utemporalis (without a time).  The “without” in both terms represent the absence of this particular here and now – utopia imagining a place that is not here, utemporalis imagine a time that has passed or is yet to come.  Ecological utopias can be restorative, a hankering after a historical Gold Age (for ecologists it will not be the world of the Athenian citizen rather the world of the plains hunter).  Alternatively, utopia it can be directed towards a bright new future, a non-analogue future where the principles of sound design conceive a world that has never been seen before.