The Myth of Human Supremacy Page 4

  My fourth problem with the notion that humans are smarter than and superior to all others because we’ve got really big brains is that if we do think with our brains, we have to recognize that there are plenty of beings with brains larger than ours. Hell, human beings 5,000 years ago had brains 10 percent larger than those of human beings today. I guess that means we’re 10 percent stupider than we were back then. This would explain many things, from fundamentalisms of all stripes to pop culture to presidential politics to environmental policy to the existence of bright green environmentalism to the stupid arguments of human supremacists. Neanderthals also had larger brains than do humans, which might explain why Neanderthals never created insurance advertisements claiming that something is so simple even a caveman can do it. In any case, if intelligence or superiority is measured by brain size, humans lose. Average human brain weight is somewhere around three pounds. Walruses are nearly as big, at almost two and a half pounds. Elephants are much larger, at more than ten pounds. And whales run from four and a half pounds up to more than seventeen pounds.

  But wait, I can hear you say, changing the rules as we go, actual brain size isn’t important. Brain size to body mass ratio is what leads to intelligence, and specialness, and all sorts of scrumptious wonderfulness that makes humans meaningful and everyone else meaningless! Of course a big animal needs a big brain to control its movements. Or something.

  Let’s leave off the fact that big animals don’t really need big brains—the Stegosaurus weighed four or five tons and had a brain weighing less than three ounces—and take this one at face value. The human brain is about 2.5 percent of our body weight. Sadly for us, this is about the same as it is for mice. The brains of small birds make up about 8 percent of their body weight. The brains of shrews are about 10 percent of their body weight.

  Well, that’s embarrassing. I guess since we didn’t win either of those contests, we’ll have to come up with another way to determine intelligence. As one author puts it, while arguing that humans are unquestionably more intelligent than anyone else: “Neither absolute brain weight nor the relationship between brain weight and body size provide us with sensible criteria for comparing the intelligence of different species.”15 Of course they don’t; any sensible criteria would make it so we’re number one.

  We could have predicted that supremacists would be quick to propose lots of variants on this same human supremacist theme: for example, that intelligence is determined by the quantity brain size minus spinal column over body weight, and on and on.

  It doesn’t really matter, so long as we win.

  But the whole “humans are smarter/superior because of brain size” theory has a bigger problem than either whales or shrews. The bigger problem is fungi. As I wrote in Dreams, “Did you know that fungi are intelligent? I didn’t. But [Paul] Stamets writes [in Mycelium Running], ‘I believe that the mycelium operates on a level of complexity that far exceeds the computational powers of our most advanced supercomputers.’ And he backs this up. Fungi demonstrate simple straightforward intelligence (even measured by our own narcissistic standards); if you put a slime mold16 at one end of a maze, it will grow randomly until it finds food. If you take a piece of this slime mold and put it in the same maze, it will remember where the food is, and grow directly toward it, with no false turns. Further, if you compare the information-transferring organization of mycelium to the organization of the Internet, you’ll find that, as Stamets says, the ‘mycelium conforms to the same mathematical optimization curves that Internet theorists and scientists have developed to optimize the computer Internet.’ Or rather, the Internet conforms to the same curves as the mycelium.” Fungi can be seen as huge neurological nets. Back to Dreams, where I begin by citing Stamets, “‘I believe that mycelium is the neurological network of nature. Interlacing mosaics of mycelium infuse habitats with information-sharing membranes. These membranes are aware, react to change, and collectively have the long-term health of the host environment in mind.’

  “I had to read that last phrase three times. But now I get it.

  “Have you ever wondered, for example, how tiny trees survive in the shade of their much-larger elders?

  “I asked Paul Stamets about this.

  “He answered, ‘If you’ve been in an old-growth forest, you’ve probably seen hemlock trees on rotting nurse logs. They’re usually the first trees to come up in these highly shaded environments. They have very little exposure to light. When these small saplings were dug up and taken to a greenhouse-like environment and given a similar amount of low light, they all died. The question became, where are these young trees getting their nutrients? So researchers radioactively tagged carbon and watched the translocation of carbon in the forest. They found that birch and alder trees growing in more riparian habitats along rivers—where there is more sunlight—were contributing nutrients to the hemlocks via mycelium.’

  “I said, ‘Wait. Are they . . .’

  “He said, ‘Yes. The mycelium—which, if you remember, run all through the forest soil and connect different parts of the forest to each other—are transferring nutrients from trees of one species who have nutrients to spare to trees of another species who need nutrients or they will die. The mycelium is taking care of the health of the forest. I think they are doing this because they understand that the health of the biodiversity of the ecosystem speaks to the survival of these fungal populations. I think these fungi have come to learn through evolution that biodiversity and resiliency of ecosystems are for the benefit of all the members, not just for one.’”

  Above, I said that fungi can be seen as huge neurological networks. Let’s step away from the scientific language and say brains. Now let’s talk about how huge these brains can be. A final time from Dreams: “Fungi can grow to be immense. A single Armillaria ostoyae—or honey mushroom—growing in Oregon covers 2,200 acres, or more than three square miles. It’s estimated to be 2,400 years old, and weighs more than six hundred tons. For hundreds and then thousands of years, this fungus has lived below and at the surface of the soil. It has nurtured tree upon tree, forest upon forest. It has attended to the needs of these trees, the needs of this forest. It has fed them. It has witnessed fire and rain, snow and drought. It has been parent and child to this forest; lover and friend; killer, decomposer, and creator. And through all of this it has built up the soil upon which all depend. Unfortunately, now it has also witnessed chain saws and clear-cuts. It has witnessed logging-induced destruction of soil. It has suffered herbicides and fungicides. It has suffered logging roads that have cut it into pieces. It may very well be witnessing the end of the forest, the forest it has lived with and loved so well.”

  Nearly all of the mass of this fungus consists of neurological network, so I guess that throws both our “brain size” and “brain-to-body-mass ratio” criteria out the window.

  * * *

  10 Except that, as we’ll see, we haven’t really gotten rid of God and the angels, but replaced them with Pure Reason and machines.

  11 My thanks to Shelly Magnum for the previous paragraphs.

  12 Originally at: “Probing Questions: Are Pigs Smarter Than Dogs?” at Research Penn State, but the page is gone. Here it is on archives: http://web.archive.org/web/20060630042251/http://www.rps.psu.edu/probing/pigs.html (accessed November 25, 2013).

  13 “Brain Evolution,” Your Amazing Brain, http://www.youramazingbrain.org/insidebrain/brainevolution.htm (accessed March 17, 2012). This stupid website isn’t alone in its narcissism. This attitude is common. I just heard celebrity physicist Michio Kaku say the same thing in an interview with Jon Stewart.

  14 The question and answer given in the article I’m citing are: “How Could Bees of Little Brain Come Up With Anything As Complex As a Dance Language? The answer could lie not in biology but in six-dimensional math and the bizarre world of quantum mechanics.”

  15 Declan Hayes,
God’s Solution: Why Religion Not Science Answers Life’s Deepest Questions (Lincoln, Nebraska: Iuniverse, 2007), 255.

  16 It ends up, and we’ll discuss this a bit later, that between the time that Stamets said all of this and my writing this book, scientists have decided to no longer classify slime molds as fungi, but rather as amoebas who are single-celled when food is abundant, and who gather in communities and act as a single larger organism when food is more scarce. None of which alters how amazing they are.

  Chapter Two

  Language

  People don’t think of trees as alive. We never see them moving unless the wind disturbs them, and then it is not their movement but the wind’s. The Wart saw now that trees are living, and do move. He saw all the forest, like the sea weed on the ocean’s floor, how the branches rose and groped about and waved, how they panted forth their leaves like breathing (and indeed they were breathing) and, what is still more extraordinary, how they talked.

  If you should be at a cinema when the talking apparatus breaks down you may have the experience of hearing it start again too slowly. Then you will hear the words which would be real words at a proper speed now droning out unintelligibly in long roars and sighs, which give no meaning to the human brain. The same thing happens with a gramophone whose disc is not revolving fast.

  So it is with humans. We cannot hear the trees talking, except as a vague noise roaring and hushing which we attribute to the wind in the leaves, because they talk too slowly for us. These noises are really the syllables and vowels of the trees.

  T.H. WHITE

  Humans are unique in their capacity to have language. It seems like everyone within the dominant cultural tradition, from linguists to men and women on the street, says this. But this is all crap. Prairie dogs have language and grammar. Chickens have language. Cows and sheep and goats have dialects. Elephants have language. Whales have language. Dolphins call each other by names they’ve made up. Orcas can learn to speak the language of bottlenose dolphins. And seriously, when bonobos have learned how to translate between humans and other bonobos and tell humans what the bonobos are saying, and vice-versa, who is the smart one? How many humans can speak bonobo? Likewise, scientists have debated for years whether the nonhuman apes who are kidnapped and taught American Sign Language really have language or are merely mimicking (and how, besides mimicking, do they think human children (and adults) learn language?).17 But the scientists consistently refuse to ask these key questions: 1) The nonhuman ape knows its own language plus human ASL; which of these creatures is bilingual, knowing the language of another species? 2) How could you possibly learn another’s language if you do not believe this other has language? 3) If a bunch of nonhuman apes in white lab coats kidnapped a scientist and put him in a nonhuman ape version of a mobile home, how long would it take for the scientist to learn their language? 4) Why do scientists think they have the right to kidnap a nonhuman ape? and 5) If we judge these nonhuman apes and these scientists by whether or not they kidnap innocent individuals, which species is morally superior?

  Likewise, there’s a border collie who knows more than a thousand words. Of English. Human. The dog also has a sense of syntax. Seriously, how many words of border collie do you know? If you’re like most of us, I’m guessing that would be one: woof. After which many would say to the dog, “Quit barking! I’m trying to watch television!”

  And of course, bees have their language of dance.

  And lots of other species speak. Perhaps they all do. How would we know? We’re all too busy trying to rationalize how their languages aren’t really languages, how, as Europeans said about the human Africans the Europeans were enslaving, “when they speak they fart with their tongues in their mouths.”

  I’ve often wondered what trees think about our perhaps to them rudimentary language . . .

  Wait . . . what? Back up. First, trees think? That’s crazy!

  Do you remember a few pages ago where I mentioned that sometimes vegans dismiss the notion of plant intelligence in the same scornful way that some meat-eaters dismiss the concerns of vegans? I wasn’t making that up. And of course it’s not only vegans who do that, but many people in this culture.

  Vegans provide an interesting case because many at least say they oppose human supremacism. But, of course, their analysis is predicated on the Great Chain of Being. A couple of years ago I read an essay in which a vegan attacked a belief in plant sentience by calling it a “bizarre and unsupportable” claim “held by not a single reputable scientist in the world.” First, let’s explicitly point out that members of the National Cattlemen’s Association would be quick to use similar language to dismiss nonhuman animal sentience. Next, let’s in this moment not take too much issue with the absurd, racist, and counterexperiential notion that, once again following the Great Chain of Being, scientists have a monopoly on understanding reality. We’ll only take issue long enough to ask why we should believe that scientists have a better understanding of whether or not plants are sentient than do Indigenous peoples who have formed millennia-long fully mutual relationships with these plant communities, or for that matter, a better understanding than anyone who forms long-term personal relationships with any plant species (I’m thinking, to provide one example among many, of long-term marijuana growers who recognize the personalities of their individual plants). Having said that, we’ll move on to take this notion at face value.

  Let’s say hello to Stefano Mancuso, one of the many reputable scientists who argue that plants are sentient. Mancuso is director of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology in Florence, Italy. What is plant neurobiology? Their website states that it is a field where “all the plant sciences will meet together to study diverse aspects of signaling and communication at all levels of plant organization, starting from single molecules and ending at ecological communities. Twentieth-century biology was dominated by attempts to reduce extremely complex biological phenomena to the actions of single molecules. While this process will continue in future, we also need to integrate the avalanche of obtained data together using system-based approaches. Plant Neurobiology will cover all plant sciences under one umbrella from the perspective of signaling and communication at all levels of biological organization. Plant Neurobiology will interlink together molecular biology with physiology, and behavior of individual organisms, up to the system analysis of whole plant societies and ecosystems. This integrative view will allow our understanding of communicative plants in their whole complexity.”

  I note with delight their use of the phrase “plant societies.”

  I also note with delight that Mancuso has videos showing plants doing what he describes as “playing.” Watch the videos for yourself and see if you agree.18

  The Laboratory website continues, “Our viewing of plants is changing dramatically away from passive entities being merely subject to environmental forces and organisms that are designed solely for accumulation of photosynthate. In contrast, plants emerge as dynamic and highly sensitive organisms that actively and competitively forage for limited resources, both above and below ground, organisms that accurately compute their circumstances, use sophisticated cost benefit analysis, and that take defined actions to mitigate and control diverse environmental insults. Moreover, plants are also capable of a refined recognition of self and non-self and are territorial in behavior. This new view sees plants as information processing organisms with complex communication throughout the individual plant. Plants are as sophisticated in behavior as animals but their potential has been masked because it operates on time scales many orders of magnitude less than that operating in animals.”

  I would quibble with their use of machine language, such as “systems” and “computing,” but I’d be also clear this is only a quibble. In my own mind I’ll just perform internal substitutions like thinking for computing and happily move on.

  The website continues, “Due to this lifesty
le [of operating on slower time scales], the only alternative to rapidly changing environment is rapid adaptation [because they can’t run away]. Therefore, plants have developed a very robust signaling [i.e., communicating] apparatus. Signaling in plants encompasses both chemical and physical communication pathways. The chemical communication is based either on vesicular trafficking pathways, as accomplished also across neuronal synapses in brains, or through direct cell-cell communication via cell-cell channels known as plasmodesmata. Moreover, there are numerous signal molecules generated within cell walls and also diffusible signals, such as NO, ROS and ethylene, penetrating cells from exocellular space. On the other hand, physical communication is based on electrical, hydraulic, and mechanical signals [as is ours]. Besides interaction with the environment, plants interact with other communicative systems [i.e., beings] such as other plants, fungi, nematodes, bacteria, viruses, insects, and predatory animals.”19

  “Interact with other communicative systems.” In a non human-supremacist culture, we would all be comfortable just saying they talk to each other.

  And they do. For example, plants tell other plants that herbivorous insects are eating them, and the plants who receive this message prepare defenses against the insects. After all, the plants can’t run away, so they need to have some way to keep from being eaten. One way plants communicate is by releasing pheromones that tell other plants to prepare. They also release pheromones calling predator insects. I’ve witnessed the effects of this, as a tree being devastated by an overwhelming aphid infestation was saved by the timely arrival of thousands of lady bugs, and soon, their young. But it gets even better. Plants can hear, and they respond to what they hear (which is more than can be said for global warming denialists, and frankly a lot of others). They can hear the sounds of leaves being eaten by caterpillars, and respond by changing the composition of their leaves to make them less palatable.20