The final for my very first anthropology class included an essay question, asking what made humans unique from the rest of the animal kingdom; and if we are no different than any other animal species, what makes us worth studying? Of course, every animal species has unique characteristics–things that define it as a separate species. Without those unique things, they wouldn’t be species, would they? Naturally, humans are no different. We are unique in many ways. That uniqueness, however, does not go nearly as far as we’ve congratulated ourselves. Copernicus moved us from the center of the universe; Galileo showed us that all Creation does not revolve around us; Darwin forced us to accept that we began the same as any other creature. Still we cling to the last balwark of our superiority; that we are still Hamlet’s “paragon of animals,” the natural end-point of billions of years of evolutionary progress. For untold millennia, we crawled up through the mud; a long epic of our victorious triumph eventually revealing us, in all our glory.

We’ve grasped at a lot of straws to prove that we’re special. The first was the soul. Of course, we can’t even prove we have souls, much less that other animals don’t, so the modern, scientific mind has locked onto a related concept: intelligence. The problem is that this supposedly unique human trait is not uniquely human. We’ve found significant intelligence among nearly all the great apes, dolphins, parrots, and crows. This intelligence even extends to tool use and communication.

Perhaps, then, we can find the key to our uniqueness in culture? When we define culture tautologically, then yes, of course, only humans have culture. But if we choose not to define “culture” as “what humans do,” but instead “things we learn,” then suddenly we see quite a few animal cultures. We know there are orangutan cultures, and even though he can’t prove it, George Dyson just can’t shake the notion of interspecies co-evolution of languages on the Northwest Coast.

During the years I spent kayaking along the coast of British Columbia and Southeast Alaska, I observed that the local raven populations spoke in distinct dialects, corresponding surprisingly closely to the geographic divisions between the indigenous human language groups. Ravens from Kwakiutl, Tsimshian, Haida, or Tlingit territory sounded different, especially in their characteristic “tok” and “tlik.”

Which brings us to communication. Surely humans are unique in language? Again, it all depends on how niggardly we define the word. It makes sense to consider only verbal communication, and so eliminate the complexity of bees’ dances and the pheramone waltz of ant colonies, but we routinely understate the complexity and nuance of chimpanzee calls, bird song, and other animal communication in order to elevate our own achievements.

In each of these regards–intelligence, culture and language–humans have achieved a degree of nuance and sophistication that surpasses everything else in the animal kingdom. But these are differences of degree, not kind. We are not unique in our possession of these traits, only in how much we have of them.

And why not? The idea that evolution is somehow concerned with “progress” towards some pre-defined Aristotelean ideal is patently absurd, without even mentioning that said ideal is an upper-class London business owner under the reign of Queen Victoria. As Mark Merritt showed in “The Unsustainability and Origins of Socioeconomic Increase,” the appearance of evolution driving towards greater complexity is an illusion. In fact, evolution simply fosters diversity, and beginning from a baseline of the utmost simplicity, greater complexity is inevitable. But in fact, the vast diversity of bacteria and insects compared to large mammals shows that there are far more ways to be simple, than to be complex.

And so we see the last defense of our specialness slip away; we are not the pre-determined goal of all Creation, we are not a higher and nobler form of life. And good riddance! For centuries, we have sat in isolation, a miserable king on a lonely throne, ruling over a wasted Creation of our own destruction. Our ancestors recognized that they were not rulers of the earth, but part of it. In animistic belief, it is not simply humans that have souls, but everything. It is a world bursting with life and diversity; a world where humans are part of a vast tapestry of life, rather than its solitary ruler.

Which would you rather live in?