The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters by Christine Webb • Avery • 2025 • 336 pages • $32
Suppose that you are walking at night, and you see someone on your side of the street coming toward you, about to pass you. Is his face angry, or is he just thinking seriously about something?
Your answer to that question may well depend on the faces that you are used to seeing. If you tend to encounter a lot of very angry faces, your threshold for considering a face “angry” is probably high, and so you might well think: He’s thinking seriously about something. But if the faces you encounter are rarely angry, and if you see a lot of friendly people, you might think: He looks pretty angry to me.
The phenomenon I am describing has a name: “prevalence-induced concept change.” It has in fact been demonstrated for judgments about whether faces are angry. When people have seen a lot of very angry faces, they are less likely to perceive arguably angry faces as angry. Prevalence-induced concept change has also been found for ethical judgments: When people see a lot of clearly unethical behavior, they are less likely to characterize arguably unethical behavior as unethical. If, for example, you live in a nation in which corruption is open and rampant, you might not be much agitated when you learn that your neighbors cheat on their taxes.
Prevalence-induced concept change should be seen as a demonstration of the immense power of the normal. What people normally see, or see as normal, establishes the baseline against which they make judgments about both facts and values. That principle helps explain challenges to democracy as well. If a nation is experiencing a significant increase in corruption, or a major deterioration in practices of self-government, its citizens might not be much alarmed today about something that would have been horrifying five years previously.
Christine Webb, a primatologist at New York University, is focused on “the human superiority complex,” the idea that human beings are just better and more deserving than are members of other species, and on the extent to which human beings take themselves as the baseline against which all living creatures are measured. As Hamlet exclaimed: “What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason!… The paragon of animals!” In Webb’s view, human exceptionalism is all around us, and it damages science, the natural environment, democratic choices, and ordinary (human) life. People believe in human superiority even though we are hardly the biggest, the fastest, or the strongest. Eagles see a lot better than we do. Sea sponges live much longer. Dolphins are really good at echolocation; people are generally really bad at it. And yet we keep proclaiming how special we are. As Webb puts it, “Hamlet got one thing right: we’re a piece of work.”
Webb does illuminating academic work on chimpanzees, bonobos, capuchin monkeys, and elephants. She studies empathy and consolation in particular. Do chimpanzees, for example, console bereaved mothers? In her new book, The Arrogant Ape, Webb turns to large ethical questions. She gives pride of place to the concept of the “umwelt,” introduced in 1909 by the Estonian-German biologist Jakob von Uexküll, who used the word to capture the world as it is experienced by particular organisms. I have two Labrador Retrievers, Snow and Finley, and on most days, I take them for a walk on a local trail. Every time, it is immediately apparent that they are perceiving and sensing things that are imperceptible to me. They hear things that I don’t; they pause to smell things that I cannot. Their world is not my world. Webb offers a host of more vivid examples, and they seem miraculous, the stuff of science fiction.
For example, hummingbirds can see colors that human beings are not even able to imagine. Elephants have an astonishing sense of smell, which enables them to detect sources of water from miles away. Owls can hear the heartbeat of a mouse from a distance of 25 feet. Because of echolocation, dolphins perceive sound in three dimensions. They know what is on the inside of proximate objects; as they swim toward you, they might be able to sense your internal organs. Pronghorn antelopes can run a marathon in 40 minutes, and their vision is far better than ours. On a clear night, Webb notes, they might be able to see the rings of Saturn. We all know that there are five senses, but it’s more accurate to say that there are five human senses. Sharks can sense electric currents. Sea turtles can perceive the earth’s magnetic field, which helps them to navigate tremendous distances. Some snakes, like pythons, are able to sense thermal radiation. Scientists can give many more examples, and there’s much that they don’t yet know.
Webb marshals these and other findings to show that when we assess other animals, we use human beings as the baseline. Consider the question of self-awareness. Using visual tests, scientists find that human children can recognize themselves in a mirror by the age of three—and that almost no other species can do that. But does that really mean that human beings are uniquely capable of recognizing themselves? It turns out that dogs, who rely more on smell than sight, can indeed recognize themselves, if we test by reference to odor; they can distinguish between their own odor and that of other dogs. (Can you do that?) In this sense, dogs too show self-awareness. Webb argues that the human yardstick is pervasively used to assess the abilities of nonhuman animals. That is biased, she writes, “because each species fulfills a different cognitive niche. There are multiple intelligences!”
Webb contends that many of our tests of the abilities of nonhuman animals are skewed for another reason: We study them under highly artificial conditions, in which they are often miserable, stressed, and suffering. Try caging human beings and seeing how well they perform on cognitive tests. As she puts it, “A laboratory environment can rarely (if ever) adequately simulate the natural circumstances of wild animals in an ecologically meaningful way.” Suppose, for example, that we are investigating “prosociality”—the question of whether nonhuman animals will share food or cooperate with one another. In the laboratory, captive chimpanzees do not appear to do that. But in the wild, chimpanzees behave differently: They share meat and other food (including nuts and honey), and they also share tools. During hunting, chimpanzees are especially willing to cooperate. In natural environments, the differences between human beings and apes are not nearly so stark. Nor is the point limited to apes. Cows, pigs, goats, and even salmon are a lot smarter and happier in the wild than in captive environments.
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