Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life by Steve Stewart-Williams

Author:Steve Stewart-Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2010-04-23T04:00:00+00:00

The spark of reason

The upshot of this rather long discussion is that if we wish to maintain that human beings are superior among the animals, this cannot be based on the idea that evolution is progressive, and that humans are the latest and greatest of its products. However, it’s an easy enough matter to decouple claims of human superiority from the concept of evolutionary progress. The way this is most often done is by pointing to our intellectual abilities – our unique possession of reason, language, and the capacity for culture. Claims of superiority based on traits such as these need not rely on evolution being progressive. But can they survive critical inspection?

We’ll start with the most extreme version of this general line of thought: the claim that we and we alone are rational, whereas all other animals operate purely on instinct. An obvious criticism of this claim is that it is the product of an anthropocentric bias. In his book, The Descent of Man, Darwin made a strong case for the continuity of the mind and intellectual abilities of humans and non-humans.

The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, &c., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.19

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