Humans Are Overrated (with Christine Webb)

Are humans the most intelligent species, or just the most arrogant? NYU primatologist Christine Webb, author of The Arrogant Ape, believes that human exceptionalism is a myth that does more harm than good. Listen as she speaks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about how research has skewed our understanding of animals' capabilities, the surprising inner lives of animals, and how a shift from dominance toward connection with the larger living world can help humanity.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  Today is July 27, 2025, and my guest is primatologist and author Christine Webb of New York University. She's the author of The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters, which is our topic for today. Christine, welcome to Econ Talk.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 0:55Speaker 00

  Why do you call human beings arrogant apes?

• 0:58Speaker 01

  So, the arrogant ape is a catchy phrase. I think there's alliteration there. So, there was a strategic move in making that the title. But the arrogant ape does not refer to all human beings. It doesn't even refer necessarily to a particular group of human beings, a particular culture, nor does it refer to an individual. For me, the arrogant ape represents a character. And I was inspired by the concept of hubris in Greek tragedy, this sort of arrogance that leads protagonists to their downfall, but they're often unaware

• 1:38Speaker 01

  that they even hold this arrogant worldview. And so, the arrogant ape is sort of this mask, this character, I think, that many humans inherit or don as a result of a worldview that sometimes they're not even aware that they have.

• 1:53Speaker 00

  And what price do we pay for that arrogance?

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Well, I would argue that arrogance is at the root of the ecological crisis. And I say at the root and not the root of, because I think the root of the ecological crisis is complicated. And I think, like root systems, there's many interlinked causes. But I think human exceptionalism is a big one.

• 2:18Speaker 00

  Why?

• 2:22Speaker 01

  I think that when we believe that we are separate from and superior to the rest of life on earth, it leads us to treat other beings and their environments as mere resources or objects to be exploited. It doesn't make us feel connected to them, a part of them. It doesn't make us feel like our well-being depends on the well-being of the rest of the living world. So placing ourselves outside of that world is part of what allows us to exploit it with abandon.

• 2:52Speaker 00

  I'm open about to that possibility, that how we treat the world is reflected by our culture, reflects our cultural baggage, inheritance, legacy, and so on. But what I found most interesting about the book is the impact of our arrogance on our ability to understand the world as opposed to how we treat it. And I thought you were very persuasive. I'm a bit of a skeptic about your fundamental thesis, but you made some headway with me, and that was because you really chronicle a lot of the different ways

• 3:37Speaker 00

  that human beings as scientists, by putting themselves at the center of things, excuse me, not the center, at the top of things, the arrogance part, have handicapped our ability to understand the natural world. So talk about that a little bit.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I suppose that would be a second answer to your question, that another way in which this worldview really comes back to hurt us and haunt us is that it limits our science. And in the book, I talk a lot about, you know, doing more ethical science that takes seriously the perspectives and the interests of the beings we're working with and that we're studying, and how that is not only more... Permissible from an ethical point of view, but therefore leads to richer science. So one of the examples that I always give has to do with research in comparative cognition, which is essentially where we're comparing the cognitive abilities

• 4:40Speaker 01

  of species. Typically, these studies look at the cognitive abilities of humans compared to our closest living primate relatives, chimpanzees or bonobos. And those kinds of cognitive comparisons are often biased from the start for a number of reasons. For one, they're typically comparing the abilities of chimpanzees who live in highly restricted man-made environments like labs or zoos. These chimpanzees have often been separated from their biological mothers at birth. They're separated from the group during testing protocols. They're tested on human tasks like

• 5:21Speaker 01

  plastic puzzles and touch, computer touchscreens, right? The human samples in these studies are typically fully autonomous Western humans. We often call them weird humans. We've heard of this acronym before. Weird stands for Western-educated, industrialized, rich democrats. And that's the subset of humankind that figures most prominently in psychology research. But they're highly unrepresentative of humanity on the whole, right? So the human samples are also highly unrepresentative of humans on the whole, just like the chimpanzee samples are highly unrepresentative of their sort of wild or natural counterparts.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  And so the humans, maybe their children, they come into the lab just for the day. At the end of the experiment, they return to their, their natural homes, often living with their families. During the study, they're often sitting on their parents' lap, right? They're in a very comfortable position. They're tested with other humans on human tasks with human materials. And then sometimes these studies will conclude that humans are superior on a particular cognitive ability, like, or social tendency, like prosociality, cooperation, altruism. But of course, The deck is stacked against them, right? This is not a valid comparison, and this is really an unscientific comparison. No one would think it's appropriate to study humans living in that environment and take them

• 6:49Speaker 01

  as the benchmark for human cognition in, in, let's say, in prisons, right? That would be the equivalent. So it's, it's striking to me that this is acceptable in science. And then the question is, okay, well, why would we accept this in science? And I think the assumption is that those difficult environments, those deprived environments, don't harm the chimpanzees as much as they would the humans. Otherwise, how is this a valid comparison? And I think that assumption that environments don't matter as much for other beings as they do for our own development and well-being is, is a problematic one, right? And it's a very human-centric one.

• 7:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I really like the idea of the choice of task. We do tend to pick tasks that we're really good at. I don't know, I, I don't view it as quite as sinister as you might, but I think the right analogy might be if, you know, Americans and Europeans both play football, but they mean something very different by football. So if you invite a great European football team to play American football, they're going to get crushed. And vice versa, if you invite a European, if the European team invited an American football team to play European football, they'd be crushed. And it wouldn't tell you much about anything, actually, because they're just, they're kind of orthogonal to each other.

• 8:14Speaker 00

  And talk about some examples from the animal world where, where animals either that you've witnessed or have read about and then written about achieve some impressive cognitive feats.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so one of the most amazing encounters I ever had with another animal uh happened in the desert. It was with a Chakma baboon, a desert adopted Chakma baboon. His name is Bear. And he was a juvenile at the time. Causing quite uh the ruckus like within his social group, but also amongst the human researchers. He was kind of always challenging us and um brooding us and getting our attention, climbing on people. It wasn't the best situation. Um, as you can imagine.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  And and one day I was in the field with a a colleague. You're always two people in the field following a particular troop of baboons. And things got more intense and scary than they had in previous altercations with Bear. So Bear and a bunch of other baboons surrounded her and they started um slapping her legs and and vocalizing and it was a just a very tense moment that could have escalated into something much worse. Fortunately, she wasn't hurt that bad. She just had some scratches on her legs. But it didn't escalate into a full on, you know, aggressive conflict. Anyways, she was terrified. I was terrified. It was a horrible experience.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  And um we were even questioning after that incident whether we should continue to follow this troop, whether it was safe. So the next day, uh I'm following the same troop again, but at a much greater distance. And over the ridge marches Bear and his entourage yet again. And this time they're making a beeline for me. And I was in this very awkward position, sort of wobbling down this very steep rocky incline and I could not easily get out of their way. And I didn't want to have a sudden movement or act scared at all. I wanted to act calm and measured. And so on the surface, I really did remain calm, but inside I was panicking. I was really, really scared.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Um, and as Bear continued to approach, he he came right up to me. He put his his hand in between my legs. And he looked up at me and he bared his teeth into this incredibly forced

• 10:58Speaker 01

  Grimace, this like baring all of his teeth and smiling at me in a way. But as a primatologist, I know that this this kind of bare teeth display is a pacifying gesture. It's something baboons do to appease one another and to ease tensions, right? And so in that moment, Bear was trying to show his benign intent, right? He was signaling to me that, okay, I'm not gonna do something bad. And it was an incredible moment for me because a baboon had never done this to me. I've never heard of a baboon doing this to other researchers, although it may well have happened before.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  And I was really trying to make sense of, okay, what was Bear doing? He was such a terror always, so why would he do this? And the most parsimonious explanation I kept returning to was that Bear knew what I knew. Bear knew that I had witnessed what had happened before, the day before. And he was trying to make amends. He was trying to say, that's not gonna happen today, that's not gonna happen to you. And scientists call this, have a have a proper name for this ability to to know what I was thinking and feeling, which is theory of mind. It's the capacity to know and understand what others are thinking. And I learned as a graduate student that humans were unique in their capacity for theory of mind, that we alone can know what another human is thinking or feeling.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  And not only did Bear show that ability, but he showed it for a member of another species, which was astounding to me. So that really challenged my assumptions about what separates humans from other animals and much of what I had been taught as the sort of cognitive markers of of human uniqueness. And I have I have many examples like that, but it often is from the animals themselves revealing something, showing me something in a moment of of trust and surprise.

• 12:55Speaker 00

  So I really learned a lot from the book about animal and, and a small part of the book is about plants, also their capabilities. And, and you do challenge the idea in many examples, like the one you just did, that, you know, man is the only animal that, fill in the blank, human beings are the only creatures that, fill in the blank. And maybe at the end, we'll talk about some of the ones that crossed my mind, but you didn't write about. But having said that, you know, I do feel like human beings are the dominant, or the, at the top, which you are very much an opponent of in this book. And you point

• 13:40Speaker 00

  out, I'm gonna, just an example, you, you say, quote, "We're not the biggest, fastest, or strongest. Blue whales, cheetahs, and rhinoceros beetles outdo us there. Nor are we the most numerous or long-lived ants and sea sponges, not to mention most bacteria and plant species easily have a speed there, too. Other species outperform humans in countless ways. Just try competing with eagles on vision tests, or dolphins on tests of echolocation." So we turn to our intellect. It was decided we must have the edge there, too. Now, end of quote. Now, I think we do have the edge on intellect. It's true that we have, what I learned from your book is we've probably grossly underestimated the capabilities of

• 14:23Speaker 00

  there, all kinds of species, to do all kinds of things that we thought we were really phenomenal at, communication, reasoning, these tools, and so on. But we are really good at this thinking thing. I think we're the only animal that has abstract thought. We're the only animal that writes books like this, like the arrogant ape. You couldn't imagine an ape complaining about their place in the scientific or, or physical world and publishing a book that tried to set the record straight. Only an arrogant ape like yourself

• 15:02Speaker 00

  would be capable of it. So, to some extent, well, I'll say it differently. You opened my eyes to a lot of things that I'm, and it makes the book extremely interesting. But have you gone too far? And let me just add one more thing.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  We honor ourselves, the best among ourselves, often using intellect, for better, for worse. It is the criterion we tend to use to judge each other, at least in 2025. In 1730, it might have been physical strength or physical speed, and in certain athletic contests, that's still important. But intellect's how humans rank ourselves, more or less. Understanding, of course, there's something foolish about it. Intellect is not a one-dimensional, even IQ. It's not a very good measure of how smart people are. But do you think you've gone too far?

• 16:04Speaker 01

  So these are great questions. And I appreciate, I mean, this reminds me of conversations that we would have in the classroom a lot. There was always at least one student who would have your perspective, and it made for a better conversation every week. And so, first of all, I think it depends on how we define intellect or intelligence. Right? There's so many different ways of defining intelligence. There's, we talk about emotional quotients now, right? Emotional intelligence, there's spatial intelligence. There's, you know, what we would formally call IQ, intelligence quotients. There's creativity, there's abstract reasoning. There's so many different kinds of intelligence. And so, how are we defining intelligence? And maybe on some measures

• 16:48Speaker 01

  or some definitions of intelligence, humans do excel compared to other species. But I would argue that other species excel on other metrics of intelligence. And perhaps most fundamentally, the definition of intelligence that many scientists in animal cognition and related fields use is the capacity to solve novel problems in one's environment. And when I think about what we're doing today... There we have a problem in our environment called the climate crisis. And we have solutions, but we're not enacting them. So we're not actually solving anything. In many cases, we're making it worse. And so, under that very basic definition of intelligence,

• 17:33Speaker 01

  I have a hard time believing, particularly at the current ecological moment, when we are in a fraught relationship with our environment that is begging for alternative solutions and actions. And they're not getting implemented. So I have a very hard time with the notion that humans are the most intelligent species under that definition alone. But to your point about taking it too far, one of the mistakes that I made in the beginning of thinking about these ideas was to assume that everything that humans do, other species can do in some way, shape, or form. And I don't believe that anymore. I don't, I'm not going to argue that, you know, a gorilla is out there contemplating what book

• 18:16Speaker 01

  he's gonna write about and then doing it, right? I, I think that humans are unique. And I think that all species are unique. And I think we should honor that uniqueness. And so, I do think it can be taken too far to assume that, you know, we're all the same or we're all so similar. I think humans have unique things about them, just like I think dragonflies have unique things about them that are, that are, make them interesting and worthy of moral concern in their own right.

• 18:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think the moral concern is, is powerful. And I, and I, I accept the critique that's the, is one of the themes of the book, that our treatment of the natural world stems from our feelings of superiority.

• 19:03Speaker 00

  And, and I think, I, I think that's, that's undeniably true. And I think your book makes a, you should, you know, makes you challenge, one challenge that, that presumption.

• 19:16Speaker 00

  And I love the idea that, that all species are unique.

• 19:20Speaker 00

  I don't think that climate change is an example of our stupidity.

• 19:27Speaker 00

  I don't think the problem, in fact, you could argue it's the opposite, that the problem of climate change and our impact on the environment through the production of carbon is because of our skill at pulling carbon out of the ground and using it to do extraordinary things that bring great pleasure to people. So it's hard to give that up. I don't think that's irrational. I think it's an incentive problem of, you know, collective, collective action, a problem of politics. Now, I don't know if animals, if it's, if animals do collectively

• 20:04Speaker 00

  foolish things, you know, overconsume a resource. I could imagine that they might struggle to look ahead to the future as well. But I'm quite curious to your thoughts on that.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking about this double edged sword idea that Justin Gregg writes about. There's this book called If Nietzsche Were a narwhal. He wrote this book that kind of deals with the trade offs that are involved in human intelligence, which I think is what you're pointing to, right? Like that, that our extractive capabilities are in some ways a sign of, of our superior intelligence, right?

• 20:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  And, and, and I don't completely disagree with that, but I would also agree that a sign of intelligence would be the ability to live in sustainable relation with the rest of nature. And we're not doing that, right? So it's, it's, I think that there are trade offs to all different forms of intelligence. And I wanna...

• 21:18Speaker 01

  There's a tendency in evolutionary biology to confound evolutionary success with ecological dominance. So when people talk about humans being the most evolutionarily successful species on Earth because they've managed to exactly spread all over the Earth and inhabit all of these different environments, you know, that could, that's one way of defining evolutionary success, for sure. But another way of defining evolutionary success, which Robin Wall Kimmerer does in her work and her writing on mosses, would be the ability to sustain thriving interspecies

• 22:03Speaker 01

  communities. I mean, mosses have been around for five or hundreds of millions of years, hundreds of millions of years, compared to humans, you know, 200,000. And so what if we measured evolutionary success or defined evolutionary success not as ecological dominance, but as sustainability, as the, you know, longevity over many, many generations? And then we would maybe consider, you know, that ability to live in balance with those around us, a measure of evolutionary success.

• 22:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, we might be in trouble on that, our longevity. This is where we are, I think, much more capable of destroying ourselves than most species are. I think, by the way, you know, the, we've spread to every corner of the globe and so on. I think the hubris of the human race is the species is that we've figured out stuff we didn't know before. And that's an aspect of our success that, that other, I think other species can't.

• 23:13Speaker 00

  Matched out. It's not a competition. It's kind of, the whole thing's kind of foolish. But the fact that human beings live somewhat comfortably around the center of the earth in, um, in the state of nature and not so well in, at the poles is something we've overcome. Uh, we can live in the polls. It's not easy, but it, we're good at that.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:39Speaker 00

  It's true that most animals are faster than humans, but we figured out a way to fly faster and move faster with cars and airplanes and rockets. I, I mean, I think the most, one of the most remarkable parts of the human experience is its dynamism. And other species, as far as I know, don't do that for what it's worth. I don't, I'm not gonna, again, I don't think there's this right to eat them. Uh, I, I, I'm a meat eater. I'm not proud of it. I think it's, it's a problematic viewpoint. I mean, a problematic lifestyle, but I think the, the, um, the ability of humans to, to make progress is something to celebrate, but it certainly doesn't give us the right to abuse animals or the environment.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  I think, yeah, we, we certainly agree that we should not, um, use those, uh, whatever metrics that we're using to call progress as, as justification for exploitation. Um, but I, I would just say that, I would add that in, in gaining a certain kind of knowledge, do we lose another kind of knowledge? So for instance, we might, I don't know, be good at, um, in, in, let's say, countries like the US, developing technologies like cars and airplanes and rockets, right? But, but what, what kind of knowledge have we lost?

• 25:10Speaker 01

  I mean, there's these stats about how kids and adults can recognize hundreds of corporate logos, but they can't tell you, you know, 10 species living in their local community. I mean, I think that that in and of itself, that's a form of sophisticated knowledge, right? That's not in any way less important or interesting or sophisticated. It is different form of of knowledge. But I think, you know, yes, we might have gained a lot of knowledge, but we've also lost certain kinds of knowledge. And I think that, you know, some of that, a lot of that knowledge is forever lost.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  Some of that knowledge is is being protected and modeled by certain human communities who are still alive today, which is, you know, coming back to this arrogant ape. Who is the arrogant ape? I don't think it's all of humankind, nor do I think it's even a particular culture necessarily. I think it's kind of this way of acting and moving and being in the world and that it's not, it's not necessarily true that an individual is an arrogant ape for their entire lives, right? It's people change. So, yeah, just to make the point that the arrogant ape is is not all of humankind. And I think it's really important to acknowledge that because, of course, those humans who are the most at risk of the worst consequences of the ecological crisis are often the ones

• 26:36Speaker 01

  who are the least responsible for causing it in the first place. And so there's just so much diverse experience across humans on many of the things we're talking about.

• 26:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think, I don't think knowledge of the natural world's lost. I think it's not accessed by most western, many western wealthy people. They're estranged. We are estranged from nature to a large extent. I don't think that, but I don't think that knowledge is lost. And that, you know, I think to a large extent, I mean, it's an interesting question. You might disagree with me, but I think a lot of the arrogance of, we'll just call it Western civilization for now, the arrogance of Western civilization.

• 27:29Speaker 00

  Help create many of the things that we understand about the world, including medicine, including science. And you could argue there's a trade off, that we would be better off living more in harmony with nature without some of the things we've discovered through the relentless application, say, of the scientific method. I think about Sebastian Junger's book Tribe on this program. He talked about how in colonial American times, people who were kidnapped by Native Americans often didn't want to come home after a while

• 28:13Speaker 00

  because they found themselves more having a more communal life that they valued, a life closer to nature. And they found many rewards to a less material lifestyle. And I think that's always been true in human experience. There's a certain romance about that, but some of that romance is well earned. You know, we'll talk maybe a little later about the feeling of belonging and certainly less advanced civilizations, peoples, nations, have compensation in the fact, less advanced, meaning materially less advanced, have, are often more advanced in their connection to the earth or their connection to each other.

• 28:58Speaker 00

  And so I don't want to minimize that. At the same time, I wouldn't want to romanticize some of the challenges of what we might call indigenous life, which is often nasty, brutish and short. And hard, hard, very hard. Whereas

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Because of the, the conditions in which they live or like because of ethnic and racial oppression?

• 29:27Speaker 00

  No, the conditions in which they live, the challenges of getting enough calories to live beyond the age of five, if you're a child, to survive childbirth, if you're a, a woman, to

• 29:43Speaker 00

  Repair yourself after an accident. Things that are effortlessly done in Western civilization, modern societies.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:54Speaker 00

  I think protein, collecting enough protein to get through the day, the week, the month in the year is not a small thing through most of human history. So that we have overcome that through the application of of our intellectual faculties is not a small thing. And you could argue, you could argue there's trade offs, meaning we lost something. And I'm open to that. That's what I'm, that's all I'm saying.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Right, right. And then also, there's this assumption that somehow these things that we've gained are applying to all humans equally, where there's, you know, food shortages. There, there's hunger crises in many parts of the world where, including in, I mean, in the United States, where many of these advancements took place in the first place. So I think, you know, the inequitable access in and of itself is, is a sign that like, oh, maybe these aren't as much of a, I don't want to call it, you're not calling it a panacea, but they're not as much of solutions or advancements as, as, as we thought they were. If, if it's only helping a certain subset of the population, right, at the expense maybe of others.

• 31:06Speaker 00

  Well, I don't think, I don't think that's true historically. It might be true to any one moment in time. I think the, the last 250 years are rather extraordinary improvement in living standards in almost every part of the world. There are exceptions, but, and it certainly there's inequality. Well, let's shift gears and come back to this if you want, but is there inequality in the, in the chimpanzee community and in the baboon community? Tell me what, in terms of the social structure, what do we know about that? And how do primatologists think about it?

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there are absolutely hierarchies within baboon, chimpanzee, and many other primate communities. I think it's really interesting that.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  I feel like we tend to have these two views of of nature and therefore of of of humans, like we're either fundamentally competitive, right, and hierarchical and conflict ridden driven, or we are fundamentally cooperative and peaceful and tolerant. And yeah, you see headlines all the time that will emphasize one of these stories over the other. Whereas in reality, I think most scientists, you know, who I know would agree that nature is always a interplay between, you know, conflict and hierarchy and cooperation. In fact, I mean, when I learned about dominance hierarchies in chimpanzees and baboons,

• 32:42Speaker 01

  I learned that they were a way of preventing conflicts, right? Because they help allocate the distribution of resources. Sure. You know that guy's gonna get first dibs, and so you don't have to get into a fight with him every time, right? So, yeah, in some ways, these sort of like hierarchical arrangements can be a way of of preventing conflicts in the first place. And I I I at the so at the same time, I think it's really important to emphasize that conflict and cooperation kind of go hand in hand, right? They're not like two different stories, they're very much part of same story. And there's many different examples of that, just to give one before I make a broader point is that, you know, in chimpanzees

• 33:27Speaker 01

  who I've worked with, it's often the most socially tense moments that facilitate cooperative acts. So it's those tense moments that necessitate cooperative acts like resource sharing and reassuring one another. And and then, you know, those individuals who form relationships that are based on some kind of friendliness, tolerance, reciprocity, those those relationships allow those individuals to outcompete others. And so, again, it's like, where do you where do you stop? They're they're always entangled cooperation and competition. But I just came across this this study yesterday, actually, an amazing study done in two thousand.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  Twenty, I believe, published in two thousand and twenty, that looked at all of the major journals in ecology and just did this kind of lexical analysis for, okay, what are they focused on? Are they more focused on competition and predation or on cooperation and mutualism? And despite the fact that competition and cooperation, predation, mutualism, these are equally abundant in nature. Right? It's not that one outshines the other. But I think it was in the journal Ecology,

• 34:49Speaker 01

  like, almost two thirds of the time, competition was mentioned and less than two percent of the time, the word cooperation or the theme of cooperation was mentioned. And this was, I think that was one of the most pronounced examples. But this was true. This was, this was true over many of the main journals of this field, right? That even though these are equally important forces in evolution, we tend to focus on

• 35:18Speaker 01

  the, the competition, the, you know, dominance, mastery, hierarchical narrative. And part of my work and that of my, my mentors, you know, has been to focus on the other side of the story too, just to even out this imbalance. Not to say it's all that, not to say it's all pretty and, and cooperative, but to balance out the, the narrative.

• 35:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:44Speaker 00

  I'm not sure what we learned from this, but NFL football is more popular than ultimate frisbee or less competitive forms frisbee. Let's put it, that's even better example. Ultimate frisbee is competitive, but it's less violent, I guess. So I guess that's another reason it struggles to attract people's attention. We're not just the arrogant ape. We're the competitive violent ape. So I, it doesn't surprise me that a lot of scientists find, find that more appealing.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:12Speaker 00

  What, what I really, I think one of the most powerful things about your book, I think I enjoyed the most and found most thought provoking, and I want you to elaborate on it, is What I would call the inner life of animals. You talked about a theory of mind of bear, the, the, um, Zebaboon.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:35Speaker 00

  But, you know, I think through most of human history, when we looked at, we've talked a lot about it, about primates, so I want to move away from primates. Most of human history, we look at dogs and cats, pets, cows, sheep, domesticated animals of various kinds, and then animals in the wild, wolves, coyotes, birds. It's hard for us to imagine that they imagine anything. And I think that's a shortcoming on our part. And I thought your book did a very provocative job of pointing out that, just for example,

• 37:16Speaker 00

  birds, which we think of as being stupid because their brains are tiny, pea-shaped, walnut-sized, if, you know, they're small.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:28Speaker 00

  And that that's a misunderstanding. And I think of their capabilities and maybe their inner life, which we have limited access to, as you point out many times in the book.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:38Speaker 00

  But I think what's powerful is that, I think your most of human history, we thought of animals as instinctual and us humans having agency. The idea of an animal playing, the idea of an animal enjoying something, the idea of an animal planning something, the idea of a bird communicating with a human and doing something more than just staying alive, was seen as a form of anthropomorphosis, anthropomorph, help me out, anthro-

• 38:17Speaker 01

  Anthropomorphism.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  That's the word, anthropomorphism. And your book makes the case, it's actually, uh-

• 38:26Speaker 00

  There's a lot of evidence that they have some kind, we don't have access to it directly, but some kind of inner life. So talk about that. You can talk about Len Howard if you want, which is an amazing story. I did not know about her. Are other examples from the animal kingdom that opened your eyes, opened one's eyes?

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I will start with the story of Len Howard and then jump into some of your questions. So Len Howard, she was a musician and also wanted to study birds. I think maybe had some formal training in studying birds, but I'm actually not quite sure about that. But she knew that she wanted to study birds and she knew that she wanted to understand them in a different way than the kind of governing scientific paradigm at the time, which was to study birds in captive settings, often when they're kind of terrified of humans,

• 39:26Speaker 01

  understandably, and see what they were capable of. And so Len, trying to move away from that paradigm, moved into this place called Bird Cottage. It was in the countryside of England where she opened her doors and windows to the many different kinds of birds who lived in the area. And over many, many years, formed a trusting relationship with them. I mean, there's amazing photographs. She has this book called Birds as Individuals. There are amazing photographs that really show how trusting this relationship is. The birds

• 40:04Speaker 01

  are hiding, you know, in her hair and perched on her fingers as she's writing on the typewriter. And through this trusting relationship, she came to know them as individuals and she came to understand their mental lives, which I believe is also how humans come to understand other individuals' mental lives. It's through relationship, it's through getting to know them, right? C.S. Lewis has this famous quote, "You can't study men, you can only get to know them." And that's what Len Howard did with the birds, she got to know them. And she, her book is, is, is filled with insights about their interior worlds. That really surprised me, so one is their capacity for teaching.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  So that when fledglings are about to, to leave the nest and don't really know, you know, about glass or other harmful things in the environment. How mothers will teach their fledglings about glass by taking a worm or a bit of food on one side of the glass so that the fledglings will tuck on it and then moving to the other side so that they're attracted to food and then going back to the glass so that they try to get it, but realize the glass is there. So they learn that glass is there as opposed to just flying into it one day. And just, it was only through careful observation of these birds as individuals that she understood their capacity for teaching, which is another one of these cognitive Rubicons that we thought separated humans from other forms of life.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  And so I love this example because it emphasizes how the way that we study other animals is paramount to what we can learn about their interior worlds. And this, coming back to this point about being in a relationship with others, I think as a scientist, you're often trained to sort of separate yourself from your study systems to not form relationships with the individual animals that you study. But in some ways, that lack of relationship, I think, can actually introduce more noise into the data, right? If you're studying an individual who's terrified of you, how much are you really going to

• 42:15Speaker 01

  learn about their, their emotional and cognitive worlds? Not very much, so I think, and I've.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  Written a lot about this, you know, not just in the book, but also in my sort of scientific life as a primatologist, the importance of empathy and forming relationships and getting into a trusting relationship. Barbara Smets, who is a mentor and friend of mine, she has written beautifully about this and her experiences of working with baboons. And only really by getting to know them as individuals through relationship is that how she came to understand their rich mental worlds. And just to shift gears slightly, I think there is this, coming back to your assumption or your point, many people assume that, you know, dogs and cats and birds, that they don't, they're not imagining or they're not planning. And, you know, where did that

• 43:08Speaker 01

  assumption come from in the first place is a really interesting one. Historically, I think a lot of it is maintained today by this presumption of unknowability. Like, we can never really know with absolute certainty what's going on in the mind of a dog or a baboon or a robin. And while that might be true, that's equally true of us right now. I can't know with certainty what's going on in your mind, even though you have human language to describe your interior states. That's not as reliable as we like to think of. I think of language as just another behavior. It's just another source of information. But your body language, your, you know, pupil dilation, our history, our relation, all

• 43:52Speaker 01

  of those things are much, I think, more reliable indicators of your interior world.

• 43:57Speaker 00

  Well, you might struggle to know my interior world, but you have to also remember, I struggle.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  I love that. Yeah.

• 44:05Speaker 00

  I might, if you said, what are you thinking right now? I could put words on it. I might be fooling you intentionally. More likely, I'm unconsciously fooling myself. But I think, I think you're onto something in the In the pet world in particular, you know, we want so much to communicate with our pets and they don't talk and it's a very frustrating thing. And so I guess it is somewhat natural through, again, through most of history, but I think it's changed in the last 40 years even, to assume, look, they're not thinking anything. They're not talking, so they're not thinking anything.

• 44:45Speaker 00

  But they have emotion in their eyes that they appear to, again, we don't know. But they certainly act as if they have it in their life that is, like you say, it's hidden from us and from our fellow human beings. It's not surprising it's not revealed very accurately in our animal friends. But it would be absurd to go to the other extreme and say, well, they're just automatons. They're just the product of instinct and they don't have any inner life at all. They're just machines.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, precisely. And I think, you know, we could just as easily say that a human is acting as if they feel an emotion, right? But we don't normally say that. We normally assume that-

• 45:37Speaker 00

  I worry about it. I do worry about it.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Well, yeah, and I love this point that, you know, we don't even know our own subjective selves. I mean, I don't know, our own consciousness, my experience of blue the same yesterday as it was today, or, you know, it's just, it's all a mystery and we should honor that. And that doesn't mean we just throw our arms up in the air and say, okay, well, we can't really know, but we do the best that we can with the sources of information that we do have and in the relationships that, where we really get to know someone, then those sources of evidence become more and more apparent. And we don't need to say, okay, they're acting as if they feel sad. We just can say with confidence, they're sad.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  And there's always the possibility that we're wrong.

• 46:26Speaker 00

  But sure. And that's true again of our fellow human beings. But I, I think, um, you know, at the other extreme, I, I happen to be sympathetic to the view that we have free will while being open to the possibility that we don't.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  But certainly my reading, which no dog has ever suffered through of various tractates, treatises and books on the question of whether human beings have free will has pushed me in a particular direction. And I may be living in a total delusion that an animal will never have to worry about because they have not read all the propaganda on one side or the other, whichever side you, you're sympathetic to.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I, that point reminds me of this whole idea of, okay, you know, so much of what humans are doing, like we're on autopilot so much of the time, right? So much is happening, happening beneath our conscious awareness. So even if we like, wanted to argue that other animals, other forms of life were less conscious than humans, which I don't think that's a sound evolutionary argument necessarily or one that I believe. But even if we wanted to say, it's like, okay, so their consciousness is, is, is more limited, but that also might mean that their subconscious world is more limited and maybe they're living actually more in their conscious and we're the ones who, you know, are just tip of the iceberg and then everything's beneath the surface.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  Like it, in, in either case, you could sort of question this notion of, of human superiority, right? That maybe a lot of it's just happening beneath the surface and we have no idea, no control over it whatsoever.

• 48:07Speaker 00

  Well, when we think of the meditative or mindfulness ideal of be here now.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:13Speaker 00

  Uh, I, I suspect animals are better at that than we are. Um, I don't think they're very good at planning. Uh, I don't think, I'd be interested if you disagree, but I don't think they know they're going to die and we are burdened by that in intense, uh, intense ways that they don't have a.

• 48:36Speaker 00

  A culture that discusses death, as far as I know, or that trans or that communicates the idea of death. So those birds playing in Lynn Howard's hair or on her keyboard fingers maybe were just enjoying themselves, not worrying about the fact that winter's coming and they're going to have a tough time, or a bunch of them are going to die, or their their fledglings are never gonna, a bunch of them by definition don't make it, almost for sure. And they just can be, be birds.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think, I think this idea of, of planning or having a sense of the, of future, I, I do think other animals are certainly capable of that. When you look at birds who are caching food for the winter and, you know, coming there and they're making plans, they're storing them in thousands of separate locations that they know that they'll be able to access. Dan Gilbert, in his, his book, Stumbling on Happiness, he talks about this thing called the sentence, right? Which you said before, the human is the only animal that, and he completes that sentence with, as a sense of, of the future. But he also says in that same part of the book, that like, every scientist tries to

• 49:54Speaker 01

  say this, but often they're, they're proven wrong, right? Later in their career, or something like that. And I think that there has been pretty good evidence that animals can plan and have a sense of the future. This question about death is a really interesting one. It's the basis of what's called terror management theory, which is that, you know, because humans have a sense of their own mortality that infuses so much of, of their lives and causes sort of angst and distress, and also reminds them of their own animality, like their own animal bodies, right? And maybe their inability to transcend that. So there's a lot of interesting work on the relationship

• 50:34Speaker 01

  between terror management theory and humans seeing themselves as animals or, or not. You know, I wonder, in these conversations, so I don't think humans have a unified understanding of death.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  Like, I, I, I think that we have absolutely no, and, and does every human know that they're gonna die? Wha- what does that even mean? Some people think that they're going to an afterlife, so is that actually dying? Right? Some people believe, we, we don't, I don't really understand. I don't understand this concept of death. So I sort of come back to this point of, you know, I'm not sure that, that we have a solid grasp on this either. And therefore to deny it to other animals, who I think are also, they do show signs that they're trying to survive. Right? They're not running into the jaws of predators out there. I mean, they're, they're acting as if they understand

• 51:33Speaker 01

  and have a will to live. So I'm not prepared to deny them that capacity. Maybe you, but it sounds like you are.

• 51:42Speaker 00

  Well, I, I would just say one thing, that, um, I, I don't think I've ever heard anyone make this observation, but it, it seems embarrassingly true. It's very commonly said that every person's going to die. And, and people say this as if it's an empirical fact. They say, well, you know, everybody dies. And yet, there's about 10 billion people on this planet who are alive and have yet to die. And the presumption that they will die is, I think, a good one, but it's not a closed, open and shut case.

• 52:22Speaker 00

  That everybody who's alive today is gonna eventually die. We, we say that because we believe intellectually in mortality, but as an empirical matter, it is not an established fact. But people treat it like it's a fact, like, um, you know, like the Earth revolves around the sun. It's not of the same kind. But, but having said that, I want to come back to your, your point about... Animals, creatures, understanding of their own mortality and their ability to plan. Yeah. And make a separate point that I'd like to hear your reaction to. Yeah.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  So the squirrel, the bird, many, many creatures cache food for hard times. Yeah. So do human beings, obviously. They save for a, quote, rainy day.

• 53:17Speaker 00

  And I think historically, again, in the scientific literature, when you ask, well, why does a bird cache food? Why does a squirrel cache food? They, the answer has always been instinct. Yeah. Which I have always believed is a way of saying, we don't know. So I, I am, I, in other words, I don't think there's a genetic

• 53:43Speaker 00

  infallibility, a genetic determinism that teaches, that, not teaches, coerces animals of that kind to cache, to hide food for, for the winter. I don't think we really understand that very well. I think we have a better understanding, perhaps, of some of the more extraordinary animal feats, but still not very good. Yeah. The ability of an animal, of a bird, to return from a multi-thousand mile journey to the place it came from, or a salmon to return to its spawning bed. Yeah. I think we, quote, understand it. We would say it's instinct, and then we would say, yeah,

• 54:28Speaker 00

  and it has something to do with magnetic, appreciation for magnetic fields, but it's a really terrible explanation. It's not a good explanation. Yeah. But we know they don't have manuals, and we know they aren't taught in school. So we fall back and say it's instinct. But that, to me, is just a, a technical way of saying we don't understand it. Maybe we will. But I, I don't think. I don't think it's proof that they foresee things, but maybe I'm wrong.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  I think it's interesting that you, when you hear an explanation that is based on instinct, that that sort of leads you, or you interpret that as a more like a humble posture in a way. It's like, well, we just don't know. I find that really interesting. I haven't heard that before. When I hear the word instinct, I think of automata. I think of they have no choice in the matter.

• 55:26Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  How they're doing this. So I don't take it as we don't know. I take it as we know, and it's not more complicated than pre-programmed genetics. And I think that's a shame, right? I would much prefer the idea of looking at, okay, well, we call it instinct just because we don't actually have a better explanation yet. But I also think what's interesting is like that any behavior can be explained at different levels of analysis. And we're so quick sometimes to focus on the genetic or the molecular one.

• 56:03Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  Right? Like when I'm typing on my computer, that can be reduced to a very physical anatomical, neurons firing, causing, you know, this muscle to do that explanation. But that is one explanation for a phenomenon that is far more layered and complex, right? Just because you can explain it there doesn't mean that I'm not conscious of doing it, or that I'm not having will or intention or planning or a desire, right? So I think, I think that's really important too, in our ways of studying other animals, that like just because something can be explained at one level of analysis, doesn't preclude these other possibilities, right? That maybe

• 56:49Speaker 01

  we just don't know yet, or don't fully understand yet, from being important explanations that don't negate the other more, let's say, physical or biological explanations, but they are additional layers explaining the same behavior or phenomenon.

• 57:09Speaker 00

  You know, I say this thing about instinct, this that means we don't understand it because I don't think we've established the mechanisms by which those instincts get fulfilled. I mean, I have, I'd say it a different way, maybe instinct maybe is not the right word. I think human beings are hardwired to acquire language. They might not. I mean, a child isolated for its childhood and then at 18 plopped into society, I don't think could speak, but but built into the software of our humanity is that when people talk to

• 57:51Speaker 00

  us, we imitate them and we learn how to speak, which is extraordinary, by the way. It never ceases to amaze me because it doesn't matter where you grow up, you're going to learn a different language in at least a few hundred different places, depending on where you're born without your choice. And yet, the software is really flexible. I mean, that's an astounding thing that amazes me. But the idea that a bird could fly thousands of miles, and by the way, endure all kinds of very unpleasant situations. You know, there was that remarkable experiment where they they took a bunch of birds, I forget

• 58:36Speaker 00

  what species it was, I think it was in Japan. They took them a few thousand miles away. Half of them, they didn't do, that was the control group. They all came back. They all came back to the same apartment building or the same lab in wherever it was in Japan. The other, the other six, or whatever number it was, they did a little surgery and they took out A little piece of um iron that is in the uh brain of of of the bird.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:09Speaker 00

  And of those six, you know, this is, I don't know if this is exactly right, I don't have the numbers right, but you know, five of them were never seen again.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 59:18Speaker 00

  And the six somehow, you know, in my, in my tragicomic version of it, comes home with, you know, tattered clothes, uh, missing an ear. Birds don't have, there's like in the, like Van Gogh, but um, but some, and after like an unimaginable amount of time, it's like a, wherever the journey was, it was like, three years later, this bird shows up like, yeah, I made it, but they don't have any idea how, except because the other five didn't make it. They understood, whatever that means, understood, the scientists understood that the birds somehow, on, we don't know how,

• 59:57Speaker 00

  use the electromagnetic field of the earth and the magnetic, excuse me, the magnetic field of the earth. And that little piece of metal helps them somehow navigate, I mean, it's again, it's like, it's so magical, it's absurd to say, oh, well, it turns out, we know, they just use the magnetic field of the earth. That's not that helpful.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, right, right. No, I mean, that it's, it's a, it's a magical explanation in its own right. And then I would add on to that, that just because they do that doesn't mean that they're not conscious or or or

• 1:00:27Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  making plans or or are cognitive, like instinct doesn't make people mindless. It doesn't mean it's that it's necessarily minds, mindless. Aspects of it can be instinctive, aspects of it can be um minded. You know, they're not always so either or.

• 1:00:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I agree.

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:47Speaker 00

  Uh. You write, quote, "We talk about our oceans, our planet, but could we refrain this possessive language to instead reflect that shared sense of belonging to a place that coconstitutes our very being? Perhaps then we'd no longer be quite so afraid of death." Um, that's, end of quote. That's a, that's a, I, I think of it a little bit differently, but certainly the uh.

• 1:01:16Speaker 00

  Our connection to the earth is some solace, potentially, in the face of mortality. Talk about that and about the role of awe in your work.

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think there's a lot to say here, but one way of approaching it is just through my own experience of unlearning human exceptionalism and how that actually did make me less afraid of death. And it's not that I don't fear it, but that there is something about seeing humans as part of a bigger picture and a bigger story. And also, I think in the particular chapter you're quoting from, I talk a lot about the myth of individualism, right? This idea that we are somehow these biological individuals

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  when most of our body actually is composed of viruses and bacteria, members of other species, right? That there's just so much that sort of challenges this idea that, okay, we are individual humans and we are not these multi-species collectives in and of ourselves. And so, you know, when we die, part of that multi-species collective lives on or feeds other forms of life. And so it's like seeing yourself as a part of a bigger, grander earthly narrative, I think, helps you to see that, like, the end of... It might be the end of you,

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  but you were never just you in the first place, if that makes sense. And I do think this is related to experiences of awe. So awe, there's been more research on awe in recent years. And in some ways, I don't think that that is a total coincidence. I think we need more awe now than ever. And... Awe is described as this emotional experience of vastness that requires accommodation to understand this vastness. So a lot of people experience awe when they're

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  in nature. I've experienced it. I was charged by a male silverback gorilla and it was one of the most terrifying moments of my life. I thought I was gonna die and here's this gorilla who's five times my size, angry, you know, because we had disturbed his peaceful resting time.

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  And I felt very small and very not in control of the situation and very terrified. But afterwards, and still today, reflect on that moment as a moment of awe and wonder at just how this being held so much power over me and could completely control the situation. It was really, it was really incredible. And I think awe and humility as kind of the antidote to the arrogance that the arrogant ape maybe doesn't see he has, but awe and humility are very much related. So there's been a lot of research on how awe leads to a greater sense

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  of humility and also pro-social behaviors. So when people experience awe, they experience this sort of diminishment of the self and the self-concept that then allows them to be more interested in others and in helping others. And I think that those others need not be human others. They could be other forms of life too. So I do, yeah, I think this notion of belonging and awe and again, I think it's the benefits of awe in terms of how it leads us to treat others has been mostly focused on human-to-human relationships. But I do

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  think those experiences absolutely influence how we treat and perceive the rest of nature as well.

• 1:05:36Speaker 00

  Religion used to play that role in

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:38Speaker 00

  Western society. The diminishment, the sense of belonging were both part of that. And of course, for people who are religious today, it still does play that role. But I think for people who are not, that doesn't speak to

• 1:05:56Speaker 00

  nature, and nature's always been an alternative to religion in some, in some dimension. But the, the ability.

• 1:06:05Speaker 00

  I, I don't have any problem.

• 1:06:08Speaker 00

  I would just say it this way, and I'll let you close this out. I'm in awe of it all.

• 1:06:14Speaker 00

  The fact that human beings can say anything at all about the origin of the universe is awesome.

• 1:06:25Speaker 00

  That we have language, that we have abstract thought, that we have calculus. Even cell phones, which I have mixed feelings about are kind of remarkable. And your book, or many books, that, that somehow give me the ability to get inside your head, at least as best as you can communicate it, as best as you think you know yourself. With all the struggles we talked about earlier, the, of self-awareness.

• 1:06:53Speaker 00

  And

• 1:06:55Speaker 00

  everything else, the octopus and the bird that comes home and the salmon that, that comes home and the social gatherings of, of creatures and beehives and ants, they're all awesome to me.

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I know. I, I can relate to that. One of the things that is awe inspiring to me is just New York City. It's such a, you know, human dominated space and, you know, environmentally, I mean, we, yeah, but it is awesome. Right? It is, it is overpowering and sort of requires a lot of accommodation to just appreciate that sense of vastness. Yeah, but I think that there's, there's also something.

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  Really powerful about what we what we don't know, right? And and so, yes, we have, we can sort of understand the origins of of the the universe. But like, what about before that, right? And what what that is what gives me awe. It's like, I don't that that those question marks about, you know, and the concept of infinity. Like, that is where, for me, awe is also this, it can be this uncomfortable feeling, right? It's also origin of the word awful. It's not just awesome, it's also awful and terrifying. And and yeah, maybe a a good way of closing out that that sort of relates to that

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  is the importance of not knowing in terms of how we navigate ecological crisis. Because in my classroom, a lot of the conversations would end on this kind of despairing note. You know, what are we, what are we gonna do? It seems like we're moving in a worse direction every day. And I'd like to share this important distinction between hope and optimism. Because I think of optimism as more probabilistic, like pessimism. It sort of seems to know the odds.

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  It predicts a a better future is likely, or a worse future is likely in the case of pessimism. And I would say that if I had to choose between these two options, I would be more pessimistic about the path forward, given where we are and where it seems things are headed. But instead of that, I tend towards hope, because hope is actually about not knowing. And I think hope is more aligned with awe and with humility, because It actually is not a probabilistic estimate. It's just saying there's a chance, right? It's coming back to this idea of mortality and billions of humans that we assume are going to die.

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  There's always a chance that we won't, right? And so, but, and it's not that dire in my mind, the odds. But it's, it's, it's, it's not about making odds, or it's just about recognizing that we don't know everything and that anything is, is possible in some ways. So, yeah, that is, hopefully, a hopeful message to close out on, that even if you're not optimistic, you can, you can still be hopeful in that, I think, is aligned with a humble outlook.

• 1:10:12Speaker 00

  My guest today has been Christine Webb. Her book is The Arrogant Ape. Christine, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:10:18Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 1:10:26Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.