Humans are not the most evolved species on earth
It’s this – the assertion of the uniqueness that makes us special – that really gets up my nose, because it’s a tautology and therefore meaningless. Giraffes are unique at doing what they do. So are bumble-bees, quokkas, binturongs, bougainvillea, begonias and bandicoots. Each species is unique by virtue of its own attributes – that’s rather the point of being a species – and human beings are just one species among many. To posit humans as something extra-special in some qualitative way is called human exceptionalism, and this is invariably coloured by subjectivity. Of course we think we’re special, because it’s we who are awarding the prizes. [...] Brian (qua Clegg), who has allowed me to quote him, has a good point, but it misses the point I was making, which is essentially this: the attributes of any given species are not transferrable, because they cannot be fully appreciated by members of another species. We humans might very well write books and make TV programmes, but these seem so much more superior to, say, the tools of crows, because they are made and consumed by us, not crows. From the point of view of a crow, a human-made TV programme makes no sense at all and therefore has no value.
Here’s another example, and perhaps a better one. We all recognise that domestic dogs are highly intelligent, social creatures. However, we do not regard them as self-aware in the same way that (we think) we are, because they cannot recognise their reflection in a mirror as belonging to them. But this test – the so-called mirror self-recognition test – is biased towards creatures for which vision is the primary sensory modality. Dogs generally have very poor vision, but this is more than compensated for by their sense of smell, which exceeds ours in sensitivity at least a hundredfold. This means that dogs can identify scents much fainter than we can detect, and also distinguish between scents.