On Our Own – the Lonely Species

Even Science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars’ unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Nought. - Prologue to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda

Whose fault? Whose but his own? - Book III of John Milton’s Paradise Lost

A myth has been propagated, often to wry amusement, regarding the perceived irrationality of one of European Philosophy’s progenitors. In fact René Descartes did not believe apes – other than humans - possessed intelligible language, choosing not to speak out of coyness. The idea’s true originator seems to be Louis Racine, son of the famed dramatist. Coupled with a misreading of Descartes own letters where he ascribes the belief, derisively, to the indigenous people in lands where other apes are natively found, the factoid has proliferated erroneously. Equipped with even a meagre knowledge of Descartes you may now be furrowing your brow. Let alone possessing of what were seen as uniquely human faculties, Descartes of course did not even believe animals to be sentient.

The uniqueness of our human abilities is now under a severe scrutiny, nearly as intellectually unfashionable as geo-centrism. This sort of Cartesian logic of the Enlightenment, itself both a rejection and continuation of Judeo-Christian anthropocentrism, seems a signficant error when we deny sentience to other species. That Descartes thought consciousness itself the sole possession of Homo sapiens, the ‘wise man’ of Linnaeus, seems mired in an arrogance so mighty that the path to rebuke seems obvious and overdue.

Thus springs the multi-species modalities, biospheres and other discussions of human and non-human consciousness which now populate the discourse. Even organisms that our broadened understandings have still not found to be sentient – the vegetable and fungal kingdoms – are routinely described as such, or even in possession of language and feeling in certain circles. As the Enlightenment is ever distant, chronologically and in intellectual life, so too becomes the hegemony Western thought had held. The preference for quantitively considering what constitutes life, thought and consciousness has been usurped by qualitative understandings of the mind.

But what if Descartes was right? Not in an outmoded sense of human supremacy, nor the idea that humanity finds itself alone alongside a non-sentient biota, but in the sense that our human consciousness is a thoroughly unique phenomenon? A litany of behaviours are now increasingly recognised elsewhere in the animal kingdom that were previously considered the sole domain of the human being. Tool use, self-recognition in mirrored surfaces and transmissible cultural practices have all been readily documented, not only in apes and cetaceans, but birds, fish – even some invertebrate species. Yet for all these discoveries which Descartes could not comprehend, the human practices of language and art in particular remain contentious in other species. Depending on the scholarly school one prescribes to, they may even be absent in the other extinct members of our genus Homo, let alone more distant relatives.

This is not a study of the cutting edges of linguistics or biology. This is a question of implication - if we were alone as a consciousness, not superior, but unique in its faculties, why do we behave as we do. How should we behave? Our Damoclean capacity, for which nobody argues compatriots elsewhere in the animal kingdom, makes the question all the more urgent. The human linguistic and creative abilities are contrasted with an aptitude towards destruction equally atypical. Its repercussions now affect every other living thing on the planet.

It would seem the sword is no longer dangling by a hair, so much as it is being swung two-handed with a centrifugal might that fails to convince its arc remains under control. Some of Descartes’ interpretations have demonstrated spectacular pitfalls, but does the search for kinship really place us on the antithetical path? Who alone wields the sword is unmistakable.

1.

Max Ernst invented frottage, a surrealist technique, within the series Histoire Naturelle (1925). Chance based rubbings over found textures, both natural and artificial, reveal ‘hidden’ images found by the artist’s unconscious hand. It is interesting that most of these figures are zoomorphic, both renditions of animals real and fantastical. In creating this mixed-media technique, Ernst was simultaneously participating in a highly ancient visual exercise. European cave painting sites discovered in modernity such as Altamira, El Castillo and Chauvet show equivalent techniques, using the natural contours of the rock face to aid, guide or embellish figurative paintings. Again, animals make up the bulk of these depictions. The ripples of the cave wall might abet the depiction of a bison’s hunched shoulder or a mammoth’s domed skull, the way Ernst found a bird or fish in discarded modern objects, a dozen millennia later. We have learnt nothing, as Picasso was reported to remark upon leaving Lascaux, though in fact it appears possible he never even visited the site.

The practice is likely much older still than the tangible remains it has left. Consider how frequently animals occur in constellations, where a few stars may imply the form of a familiar beast. Zoomorphic constellations seem to be a cross-cultural constant, and this propensity to see animals might also make sense from a practical perspective. A lingering moment gazing at a stellar likeness of a predator might overlap with the same skills required to spot the real thing. The eyespots on the wings of moths and other flying insects show us that even somewhat rudimentary resemblances to real threats are effective messaging in the animal kingdom.

Perhaps this capacity to spot zoomorphic forms is common amongst other species, easily selected as a practical trait. But do fanciful constellations and other images in nature form in the eyes of other species as they do for humans? These questions are difficult to answer, and before an emphatic ‘yes’ is delivered, we might consider why we strongly feel that other animals do, or even should, possess features that may be exclusively human.

If we see animals in other things with such propensity, then this is easily matched with our capacity to see ourselves in animals. The argument in many circles is often an affirmative one. For instance, this school of thought is often convinced that the multitude of life on earth possesses similar language as the human organism understands it. It is easy to springboard off the Western tradition, embodied here by Descartes, of denying awareness to all animal species other than our own and suggest we head the other way – these clearly sentient kin are also just like us. Evidently the animal kingdom expresses and communicates with itself in a staggering degree of complexity and effectiveness. But is communication analogous to our own language, characterised as it is by things like grammar and arbitrariness?

The affirmative argument for language in other species largely takes place in pop-culture, rather than the laboratory. Its cause is not helped by the fact that many of the most prominent examples have been debunked, if they ever carried critical traction to begin with. Koko the Gorilla, famed for her celebrity acolytes, would swiftly beat Descartes’ allegations of lacking sentience – the French thinker in fact never encountered another ape species in person. Koko’s famous proficiency in sign language is, however, also doubted by virtually every professional in the field barring Koko’s carer herself. Whilst Koko could accurately reproduce signs, it was never established this action was linguistic and separate from the impending reward of food.

Across the aisle of the debate, the Nim Chimpsky study concluded much the same for its subject’s ability to master grammar, though in this instance did earn specific criticism for the lack of sign language fluency in the Chimpanzee’s instructors. Intelligent, sentient and clearly in dire need of more inter-primate empathy from their human relatives, if the other great apes do not exhibit language, then the broader non-human language thesis encounters deep trouble.

The disciplinary reception to these studies isn’t even close to being split – there is a resounding opinion that the other apes species have thus far never demonstrated the grammar and structure we would otherwise observe in language. Beyond Koko’s many famous friends which form part of a very compelling messaging, why do her claims to – not an innate Gorilla language, but a learned ability of human sign language – linger in the popular consciousness? Should we be looking for language, but not as we would recognise it? Would this hypothetical communicative vehicle still best be described as language if we were to find the supporting evidence?

Unlike Descartes, a vast portion of the world is now comparatively familiar with our closest relatives. Western scientists and intellectuals only learned of the Gorillas in the mid 19th century, nearly two centuries after Descartes’s death in 1650. It is clear that once the West met the other great apes, we had some catching up to do to recognise a kinship that now seems obvious, as it appears it was to many of the African and Asian cultures that live alongside these species. Do these language assertions push this correction too far? There is a garish, ominous extreme to this dialectic, where nappy-clad primate ‘children’ flank human parents.

2.

Victorian critic John Ruskin coined the term Pathetic Fallacy in relation to the Romantic poetic of his native British Isles. An excessively negative pairing of words in their contemporary connotations, Ruskin drew more neutrally on a sense of imaginative pathos within verse describing nature. A sophisticated study of anthropomorphisation – that other archaic tradition that sees human figures also populate the constellations alongside animals – Ruskin recognised the practice as almost symbiotic with Romanticism.

The case for non-human language, scholarly faltering aside, may need to better distinguish its aims from rank and file anthropomorphising. As the other great apes are being granted legal personhood in some countries, the orthodox Cartesian position is thankfully sufficiently retired. Not only does sentience in the animal kingdom seem well demonstrated across a vast array of organisms, but complex communications are not doubted. Complex communications, however, do not make a language as the research apes demonstrate.

Lacking an ecosystem of wild primates to personally observe, I instead consider the mimetic songbirds of Australia. A surprisingly common trait, mimicry in Australian species is most famous and probably most developed in the Lyrebirds, the most basal songbird group alongside their closest relatives, the Scrubbirds. Incidentally, the Scrubbirds are also powerful mimics, despite splitting from the Lyrebirds tens of millions of years ago in the Eocene, roughly 30-50 million years ago. This implies that either mimicry has a common mechanism promoting it convergently, or more tantalizingly, that mimicry has an incredibly ancient origin. It might be possible that a Cretaceous Songbird ancestor was relaying off the calls of dinosaurs, in a long forgotten medley of sounds from a landscape that no longer exists, save these contemporary relict species.

The Lyrebird is noted for its patchwork song, intermixing its own loud melodic whistles with bird calls of other species. If the pitch perfect replication were not impressive enough, it can also vocalise onomatopoeic sounds with – what sounds to my own inferior ears – exact accuracy. This includes the wingbeats of the large forest pigeon taking flight, replicated from the bird’s syrinx (the ornithological vocal organ) and not the flapping of its own appendages. Lyrebirds introduced to the island state of Tasmania in the mid 20th century, where they are not native, mimicked mainland calls absent from this new environment for many subsequent generations. This proved the cultural transmission of the bird’s call, not only learnt from first hand observation, but taught from elder male bird to younger.

Not just a courtship song, the bird’s complex vocalisations form a code through which alarm and other communications may be sounded. The rarer of the two Lyrebirds, the Albert’s Lyrebird, even expresses its mimetic call most often as a stereotyped song. This means the local population will sing out the same mimicked calls in the same order, with slight variations and pauses connotating various meanings, emanating through the cool, wet rainforests of its mountainous habitat. Inarguably a highly complex code, and with a degree of structural organisation we barely yet understand, the vocalisations still don’t fit our definition of language even if certain aspects bear similarities.

The Lyrebird’s mimicry is certainly exceptional though not categorically unique. Human language by contrast does seem to lay claim to several unique traits. While the Lyrebird’s call is highly complicated and immensely superior to our own ability to imitate, it is not language as we would understand it. Would we be any closer to an understanding if we did force its conception as linguistic? Would this in turn bring a heightened appreciation, or empathy with other species?

A troubling aspect sometimes present in avid proponents of non-human language are the motions of generosity. We historically malign other animals, and thus perhaps we need to imbue them with characteristics of our own which we classify as noble. Perhaps we could consider these categorical differences as a source of intrigue and respect. Rather than searching for behaviours we already regard highly because we ourselves perform them, we might find greater admiration for animal behaviour in what some schools of commentary have precisely sworn to abolish – its otherness.

3.

If humanity finds itself alone, and the reasons for doing so are compelling, can we discard notions of God-given superiority as its source? We could turn to our own organism’s biology as the source of this precarious ubiquity, and in turn reflect why non-human intelligences should now be compared against the yardstick of our own. Why are works, especially at the extreme end of their claims, like Peter Wohlleben’s bestseller, The Hidden Life of Trees (2015) finding such traction now? The claims are effectively near identical to earlier works that have already lost nearly all critical milieu, like 1973’s The Secret Life of Plants. It begs the question why history should repeat itself now.

We are not so much in another Cold War, ironically, as the official status of the conflict has been openly declared. It may be that as history is doomed to repeat, we will be similarly haunted by echoing responses to political conditions. In the way the Age of Aquarius put whale song on the menu, some of the same tendencies may be rearing their heads again, and thus non-human consciousness, animal – even plant – intelligences are a hot topic once again.

We are of course richer for this in general. A lack of empathy for the other organisms of this planet seems so humanly endemic that we might divorce Descartes from his ubiquity to the problem. So rooted within us is the idea of our own superiority, that we absolutely refuse to concede to the outward world any portion or part in it, Goethe writes in his autobiography, describing the prickliness that non-human sentience seems to elicit. But is there solace in making every pot plant a confidante in the face of crisis, rather than focussing on our supreme ability to create the material conditions for existential problems to arise and – with any luck – our ability to change the course we have set ourselves on? Unlike the first counterculture wave, the kinship proponents are now more philosophically highbrow, perhaps even capturing some of the original hippy audience as they aged themselves out of the commune and into tenure positions.

Much has been said of the slime-mould, a difficult to categorise form of life, and its ability to ‘solve’ mazes while lacking a brain or nervous system. Unlike the other great apes, amongst the other organisms we designate as complex in contrast to the simple slime mould, there is no ready case for intelligence or sentience in these single-celled organisms. Language isn’t even a distant mirage in the non-dream of a slime mould. Would we appreciate the remarkable fact that the slime mould can operate in a way we thought only possible in the ‘higher’ lifeforms if we began advocating for slime mould learning? Would slime mould rights be further advanced if we understood its utterly alien existence as a slime mould language?

On the less obtuse end of querying, writers and thinkers like Timothy Morton and Donna Harraway argue for an entwined future for Gaia’s biome. Humanity is nature, and is within nature; we can’t separate ourselves lest we sit atop a hierarchy. It is a perspective we may have lost, but as Harraway and Morton would attest, many Indigenous peoples retained; a conjoined relationship with nature. Yet as John Berger put forward in the seminal Why Look at Animals? (1977), the peasant who raises his pig for slaughter also loves the animal, and looks forward to consuming it.

The perspectives Morton searches for on Pacific atolls or the Papuan highlands might readily be found much closer to home, in a more populous context. One societal region where it is most often retained is in the agricultural classes that grow our food, even in the West, providing they have not totally subsumed to industrial practices. It is not a stretch to suggest that critical theory departments and farmers rarely, if ever, interact. Yet this rallying cry, that ecological salvation can come from communion with nature, comes far away from practical, material answers, and the apparatuses through which solutions might function. It is not so much that these theorists are arguing for a glib, emotive relationship with nature, as that the kinship school of thought risks eroding notions of difference, when difference obviously exists.

4.

Rather than well intentioned rehashing of the 1970s, why not consider the human consciousness for what it is; a remarkable and more or less completely unique feature of the animal kingdom. When these ideas first became established in post-war academia, a self-taught firebrand theorist named Murray Bookchin offered his scathing criticism in 1987’s Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology:

This marvel we call “nature” has produced a marvel we call homo sapiens — thinking man, and more significantly for the development of society, thinking woman, whose primeval domestic domain provided the arena for the origins of a caring society, human empathy, love, and idealistic commitment … to deny the species its uniqueness as thinking beings with an unprecedented gift for conceptual thought, is to deny the rich fecundity of natural evolution itself.

Bookchin argued that the fashionable shedding of the humanist label was a denial of our biology. His enthusiasm for anticapitalism, first as a dedicated anarchist before later self-describing as a ‘communalist’, provides a succinct list of targets which all facilitate and entail destruction of the natural world. Humanism was not amongst them.

We need not waste further time dissecting the pitfalls of Enlightenment rationality to rebuke the greatest minds of the 1600s. Descartes was a Catholic zealot, Newton thought gravity a phantom and ghostly force – needless to say, these particular ideas do not stack up well in the 21st century. Particulars of our own current discourse will not either with centuries of retrospect, if we are also immensely privileged to still be read after such an interim. These men laid intellectual foundations but lived in a world without electricity – and massive carbon emissions. Concerning this specifically, the fundaments of a material worldview should now take a prominence that a narrative of an unexceptional human species would seek to deny.

The best evidence suggests that the human brain is unique. Ignoring this points us in a grim misdirection – there is nobody coming to save us, and friendship with a dolphin will not change this. Denying the materialism at the root of the Enlightenment because Descartes got apes, amongst other things, grossly incorrect only serves to bid goodbye to possible solutions to the climate and biodiversity crises.

We can talk to nature all we like, but nature won’t talk back – not in the literal sense, the sense that only we seem to understand and therefore implicitly value the most. While we are talking, we run the risk of missing the vast and amazing differences it possesses. Proponents of the kinship school of thought stress compassion and togetherness, as they did previously in the decades of post-war counterculture. Yet we still have not found the suitable course for a true coexistence, only a broadened vocabulary for its rallying cry. It seems specifically naïve to promote salvation through relation, when our previous dalliances with nature have generally skewed so lop-sided. If this were simply an intellectual quibble, a question of phrasing, then our attention could be diverted elsewhere where it is urgently needed. However, on this issue both perspectives are adamant – the problems are very likely mutually existential, and will only get more dire from here on out.

If we recognise that this is the landscape within which the debate rages, why deviate from scientific orthodoxy on this subject? Avoiding the consensus in certain fields of science means measle outbreaks are recurring in the 21st century in countries which it had been effectively eradicated. This is a form of attempted extinction which nobody seems to seriously debate, though Bookchin noted some lesser lights of the 1980s who remarkably wished to do so in his takedown of the misanthropy of Deep Ecology. If we do have active language-in-measles advocates, searching for coexistence with pathogen nowadays, they are relegated to less-prominent platforms. Ignoring certain practitioners; epidemiologists, climate scientists, is as good to rescind invitation to large swathes of our socio-academic landscape. Why can we place consciousness, in a uniquely human sense, elsewhere in the kingdoms of life to such seemingly rapturous enthusiasm, yet such cavernous lack of evidence?

Fields which make first hand observations their fare – or have subjects readily observable to the layperson – seem particularly susceptible. Linguistics and behavioural science are only some of the victims, with anthropology and ecology all seemingly having reciprocal pop-sciences in tow, largely in contradiction to these disciplines’ current empirical understandings. In a sense climatology is no different, outside of the socio-academic sphere. We recognise this kind of reasoning as fallacious and detrimental to action, but in turn we seem committed to effective pseudoscience if the implications are more pleasing to those of us within the academy. Does this discussion in fact obfuscate the responsibility it proposes, trivialising hard research along the way? Will the search for co-conspirators elsewhere in the kingdoms of life simply form a distraction from the action it proposes to facilitate?

Whether it is Koko the gorilla or interpreting the sensory abilities of the vegetable kingdom as a human-like chatter, there would seem to be deeper intellectual reasons to be wary of breaking with orthodoxy. For one, this route of empiricism, unfashionable though it may be, points us in a diametrically opposite direction regarding the scope of non-human consciousness. On the psychosocial plane of which many of these arguments seem to favour, we also risk not seeing a behavioural and physiological spectrum elsewhere in the kingdom of life, both so beyond and foreign to our own that we avoid the proposed end goal of empathetic kinship. We run the risk of landing instead on an old-fashioned anthropomorphism, dressed up as radicalism.

5.

Does the silence, deafening in some respects, emanating from the cosmos feel similarly unnerving in the terrestrial realm? Psychologically, the common cross-cultural motif of speaking animals which populate fairy tales and religious rites might show an instinctual need to satisfy this want for kinship. Do we need animals to be conscious, categorically in the exact same ways as we are, because the implication of a lonely species is uncomfortable?

Arthur C. Clarke famously opined on this search for alien life. Either it exists elsewhere in the universe, or it does not, and either option is frightening. With the vastness of space increasingly understood as teeming with other solar systems and planets that seem capable of supporting life as we know it – and many more possibly hospitable to life as we do not – the former has always seemed the wiser stance as a sheer numbers game. Yet perhaps we should consider the possibility that we are alone, at least as the only animal on Earth in possession of the ability to make these queries. Like Clarke suggests, we should absolutely consider this possibility as terrifying.

At this point, it may be frustrating to not offer up a viable solution. To paraphrase what must have been one of tens of thousands of email communiques, some now notorious, from the venerable Noam Chomsky, noted linguistic purist and non-human language doubter - despair is not an option; solutions are at hand, but we do not have much time. This is not an endorsement of the technocratic class and its long promised solutions. Look how well that has turned out. This is a cry for the intellectual classes to not retreat into themselves when despair does in fact seem a viable option.

A return to another outmoded product of the Enlightenment might be salient. Many have recoiled from the term, being that the ideology places our organism at the beneficent centre. Why not instead propose a Humanism of consequence? We are the only epochal species we know of, capable of conscious destruction on planetary scales. Perhaps the humaneness of responsibility, not further blurring of fact and metaphor when biology is concerned, suggests a future course. Centuries of subsequent discovery, mostly irreconcilable with the 17th century origins of the Enlightenment, are now at our helm. Maybe the methods are still essentially sound and it is the application which is lacking. Accepting our inheritance, reluctantly, as the thinking animal, does present a roadmap in the face of problems that need practical, material solutions.

Louis Racine thought apes could talk. The premise seems both humorous but oddly prescient. The particulars of his argument are interesting, particularly in the face of a contemporary lavishing of all animal abilities, seemingly excepting our own. The younger Racine suggested that the other apes were in fact more intelligent than humans, contrary to Descartes. The reason for higher intelligence – they chose not to speak, like the aphorism, and remove all doubt. These apes were smarter for electing for silence over the human self-aggrandising.

In the mid 17th century was an instance of praising animal ability not so dissimilar to the present. It is hard to ignore that, as a metaphor, Racine landed upon this while also getting the question of language completely wrong. This strikingly contemporary, humane opinion comes from right within an era we seem hasty to divorce ourselves from. Perhaps we do this too hastily if, fundamentally, we readily find other respects in which we have not learnt very much at all in 300 years. We have learnt nothing.