The Myth of Human Supremacy Read online

  I think this is all pretty cool—and also not particularly surprising. I told one friend who replied, “I thought we knew that more or less all creatures make decisions about what to eat based on the needs of their bodies.” But never fear: the journalists and scientists want to make sure we know that even though caterpillars are making choices, no, they certainly couldn’t be thinking. National Geographic News reports, “The new finding challenges the idea that self-medication is restricted to relatively intelligent creatures that [sic] are capable of learning, such as primates [later we will explore the reality that basically everyone is capable of learning, with the possible exception of human supremacists]. For example, chimps can learn which drugs to take to cure their ills and can pass on that knowledge to others. Something much simpler is probably happening in insects. When a woolly bear is infected by parasites, its immune system may react by altering taste receptors so that the animals crave more alkaloids, Elizabeth Bernays of the University of Arizona said. Insects ‘have a system that’s based on changes to their taste system, rather than the cognitive ability of their brains,’ she added.”38

  But even if the caterpillars are eating more of these plants because the alkaloids taste good to them, that still doesn’t mean the caterpillars aren’t making decisions. They have to find the plants, they have to figure out how to get to the plants, and they have to go.

  •••

  This is a great example of what I mentioned about how too many people seem to believe that being able to track the biochemical or bioelectrical processes by which some decision is made or action taken implies there’s no volition in these choices or actions.

  I remember in high school I sometimes went to a restaurant that offered all-you-can-eat steaks. I’m sure they lost money on every teen-aged boy who walked through the door, and even more on me and my remarkably inefficient metabolism. But I soon became convinced they had an angle. Since the first and second steaks always tasted better than the third and fourth steaks, and the fifth and sixth steaks tasted pretty awful, I figured the cooks paid attention to how many times you returned to the grill, and the more times you returned the worse steaks they gave you. This would discourage people from eating a lot of steaks and costing them a lot of money.

  I’ve never said I’m always the sharpest claw in the paw.

  In my defense, it only took me three or four visits to realize that the cooks were not in fact counting my steaks, but that food tastes better when we’re hungry.

  Taste exists for a reason. Food not tasting good is one of the ways we know we’re full, and don’t need to eat more. Likewise, some berries taste good because they provide a lot of energy. We co-evolved with plants and others who grow substances that when eaten and metabolized provide us with different amounts or kinds of nutrition, so we evolved such that we experience a pleasant sensation when we ingest, for example, huckleberries or blackberries, as a way of encouraging us to do so. Likewise, many substances that aren’t good for us taste bad. There’s a reason huckleberries taste better to most of us than shit. I’ve always presumed, however, that shit tastes good to dung beetles, some species of flies, some species of worms, and so on. Likewise, the wood I’ve tasted in my life is pretty bland—and I just learned that a lot of fast and/or processed foods contain some form of powdered cellulose, which in plain terms is wood pulp, so there’s a chance you’ve eaten some yourself—but I’m guessing a lot of termites would have a different opinion. So the termites might have preferred the table to even that delicious first steak. And maybe they like their wood pulp with special sauce, lettuce, cheese, and so on at McDonald’s.

  My point is that the fact that the perception of taste in caterpillars might change when they require a specific food so that baby wasps or flies—who presumably prefer the taste of living caterpillar guts to wood pulp, or they’d burrow their way right out of the caterpillar and into a nearby Burger King—don’t eat them alive, in no way implies that the caterpillars aren’t making decisions. It isn’t so different from a decision you or I might make a decision not to have that fourth piece of cheesecake, since it might not taste quite as good as the first one.

  •••

  Why is it so difficult for us to accept that others besides ourselves have rich interior lives?

  I guess because that would mean our moral universe just got a whole lot more complex.

  •••

  A female botanist friend just gave me another example of a human supremacist moving target. A while back she briefly dated a vegan. The relationship came to a sudden halt when he insisted she convert. After she refused, he accused her of human supremacism, saying, “You hold yourself above animals.” Then he asked, “How can you eat someone who is sentient?”

  She responded, “Everyone is sentient.”

  “Plants aren’t sentient.”

  She was way ahead of me on the plant sentience thing. She laid into him with all the stuff I just mentioned, and plenty more.

  When she finished, he shook his head and said, “Even more important than sentience is suffering. How you could eat someone who suffers?”

  “What makes you think plants don’t suffer?”

  “No central nervous system.”

  We’ve been through that one before. She used her equivalent to my “since my sexual pleasure sometimes includes ejaculation, then everyone’s must” comment (a precursor to my comment, really; I learned more of my plant sentience chops from her than the other way around). Then she asked, “So plants don’t feel distress? They don’t have physiological responses to discomfort or danger?” She summarized for him some of the literature on the personal and communal effects of various forms of stress on plants.

  He said, “Those are nothing but physiological responses.”

  Even though they were in a café, she let out a scream. He leapt from his chair. Everyone stared at her. She said, “What you just did was nothing but a physiological response.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “You jump up and open your eyes wide when startled. Plants have different responses to sudden threat. Yet because their response is different than yours, they must not get scared, right? Likewise, you suffer when you’re thirsty, and plants suffer when they’re thirsty. Yet because plants’ manifestations of this suffering don’t follow the same patterns as do yours, they must not suffer, right? Likewise, they suffer when predators come after them, and they fight back. But since they don’t suffer like you suffer, and they don’t fight back like you’d fight back, they must not really suffer, and they must not fight back. They communicate with their neighbors. But they don’t communicate the way you communicate with your neighbors, which means they don’t communicate at all. When they’re pulled from the ground, they suffer, but because they don’t suffer the way you suffer, they must not suffer at all.”

  He said, “No central nervous system equals no pain, no suffering, no sentience.” Then he smiled smugly and said, “No brain, no pain.”

  The last thing she ever said to him was, “We have much deeper differences than my belief in plant sentience.”

  •••

  She later told me she thought part of the hesitation of so many people to acknowledge that everyone else is alive and everyone else is sentient is that they are fearful of living in a world that is nearly infinitely complex, and nearly infinitely morally complex. It’s much more convenient to live in a world where your morality is based on a clearly defined hierarchy, with you at the top. To interact with a machine is less complex and less morally complex than to interact with a community.

  She’s right. She’s also right when she points out what a wonderful experience it is to find yourself in a world of infinite complexity, and infinite moral complexity. It’s as though before, you could only move in one or two dimensions, and now suddenly you’re living and moving in three dimensions, then four, then five, and on and on, and you then wonde
r how you never went mad from the claustrophobia of earlier having restricted yourself to only one or two dimensions.

  •••

  To not be able to conceptualize or accept the existence of any form of intelligence that does not resemble your own does not seem to me very intelligent. And to not be able to conceptualize or accept the existence of any form of suffering that does not resemble your own does not seem to me very compassionate or empathetic. In both cases it seems quite the opposite: not only unintelligent, and not only showing a complete lack of anything remotely resembling imagination, but cruel.

  •••

  Almost twenty years ago I interviewed Cleve Backster about plant intelligence. No, he wasn’t a botanist. He was one of the world’s experts on the use of polygraphs, or lie detectors. I know that sounds like an odd connection, but listen to his story, and the connection will become clear. Just after World War II he was a CIA interrogation specialist, and founded The Agency’s polygraph school. In 1960 he left the CIA and formed the Backster School of Lie Detection, to instruct police officers. This school is the longest running polygraph school in existence.

  Backster could name the moment the focus of his life changed forever, from lie detection to plant intelligence: early in the morning on February 2, 1966, at thirteen minutes, fifty-five seconds of chart time for a polygraph he was administering. He had threatened the subject’s well-being in hopes of triggering a response. The subject had responded electrochemically to this threat. The subject was a plant.

  Here’s his story: “I wasn’t particularly into plants, but there was a going-out-of-business sale at a florist on the ground floor of the building, and the secretary bought a couple of plants for the office: a rubber plant, and this dracaena cane. I had done a saturation watering—putting them under the faucet until water ran out the bottom of the pots—and was curious to see how long it would take the moisture to get to the top. I was especially interested in the dracaena, because the water had to climb a long trunk, and then to the end of long leaves. I thought if I put the galvanic-skin-response detector of the polygraph at the end of a leaf, a drop in resistance would be recorded on the paper as the moisture arrived between the electrodes. . . . I noticed something on the chart resembling a human response on a polygraph: not at all what I would have expected from water entering a leaf. Lie detectors work on the principle that when people perceive a threat to their well-being, they physiologically respond in predictable ways. If you were conducting a polygraph as part of a murder investigation, you might ask a suspect, ‘Was it you who fired the shot fatal to so and so? If the true answer were yes, the suspect will fear getting caught lying, and electrodes on his or her skin will pick up the physiological response to that fear. So I began to think of ways to threaten the well-being of the plant. First I tried dipping a neighboring leaf in a cup of warm coffee. The plant, if anything, showed what I now recognize as boredom—the line on the chart just kept trending downward.

  “Then at thirteen minutes, fifty-five seconds chart time, the imagery entered my mind of burning the leaf. I didn’t verbalize; I didn’t touch the plant; I didn’t touch the equipment. Yet the plant went wild. The pen jumped right off the top of the chart. The only new thing the plant could have reacted to was the mental image.

  “I went into the next office to get matches from my secretary’s desk, and lighting one, made a few feeble passes at a neighboring leaf. I realized, though, that I was already seeing such an extreme reaction that any increase wouldn’t be noticeable. So I tried a different approach: I removed the threat by returning the matches to the secretary’s desk. The plant calmed right back down.

  “Immediately I understood something important was going on. I could think of no conventional scientific explanation. There was no one else in the lab suite, and I wasn’t doing anything that might have provided a mechanistic trigger. From that split second my consciousness hasn’t been the same. My whole life has been devoted to looking into this.”

  He called what the plant was doing “primary perception.” He found that not only plants were capable of this: “I’ve been amazed at the perception capability right down to the bacterial level. One sample of yogurt, for example, will pick up when another is being fed. Sort of like, ‘That one’s getting food. Where’s mine?’ That happens with a fair degree of repeatability. Or if you take two samples of yogurt, hook one up to electrodes, and drop antibiotics in the other, the electroded yogurt shows a huge response at the other’s death. And they needn’t even be the same kind of bacteria. The first Siamese cat I ever had would only eat chicken. I’d keep a cooked bird in the lab refrigerator and pull off a piece each day to feed the cat. By the time I’d get to the end, the carcass would be pretty old, and bacteria would have started to grow. One day I had some yogurt hooked up, and as I got the chicken out of the refrigerator to begin pulling off strips of meat, the yogurt responded. Next, I put the chicken under a heat lamp to bring it to room temperature, and heat hitting the bacteria created more huge reactions in the yogurt.”

  I asked how he knew he wasn’t influencing it.

  “I was unaware of the reaction at the time. I had pip switches all over the lab, and whenever I performed an action, I hit a switch, which placed a mark on a remote chart. Only later did I compare the reaction of the yogurt to what had been happening in the lab.”

  “Did the yogurt respond again when the cat started to eat?”

  “Interestingly enough, bacteria appear to have a defense mechanism such that extreme danger causes them to go into a state similar to shock. In effect, they pass out. Many plants do this as well. If you hassle them enough they flatline. The bacteria apparently did this, because as soon as they hit the cat’s digestive system, the signal went out. There was a flatline from then on.”

  Cleve continued, “I was on an airplane once, and had with me a little battery-powered galvanic response meter. Just as the attendants started serving lunch, I pulled out the meter and said to the guy next to me, ‘You want to see something interesting?’ I put a piece of lettuce between the electrodes, and when people started to eat their salads we got some reactivity, which stopped as the leaves went into shock. ‘Wait until they pick up the trays,’ I said, ‘and see what happens.’ When attendants removed our meals, the lettuce got back its reactivity. I had the aisle seat, and I can still remember him strapped in next to the window, no way to escape this mad scientist attaching an electronic gadget to lettuce leaves.

  “The point is that the lettuce was going into a protective state so it wouldn’t suffer. When the danger left, the reactivity came back. This ceasing of electrical energy at the cellular level ties in, I believe, to the state of shock that people, too, enter in extreme trauma.”

  “Plants, bacteria, lettuce leaves . . .”

  “Eggs. I had a Doberman Pinscher back in New York whom I used to feed an egg a day. One day I had a plant hooked up to a large galvanic response meter, and as I cracked the egg, the meter went crazy. That started hundreds of hours of monitoring eggs. Fertilized or unfertilized, it doesn’t matter; it’s still a living cell, and plants perceive when that continuity is broken. Eggs, too, have the same defense mechanism. If you threaten them, their tracing goes flat. If you wait about twenty minutes, they come back.

  “After working with plants, bacteria, and eggs, I started to wonder how animals would react. But I couldn’t get a cat or dog to sit still long enough to do meaningful monitoring. So I thought I’d try human sperm cells, which are capable of staying alive outside the body for long periods of time, and are certainly easy enough to obtain. I got a sample from a donor, and put it in a test tube with electrodes, then separated the donor from the sperm by several rooms. The donor inhaled amyl nitrate, which dilates blood vessels and is conventionally used to stop a stroke. Just crushing the amyl nitrate caused a big reaction in the sperm, and when the donor inhaled, the sperm went wild.

  “So here I am, seeing single-cell
organisms on a human level—sperm—that are responding to the donor’s sensations, even when they are no longer in the same room as the donor. There was no way, though, that I could continue that research. It would have been scientifically proper, but politically stupid. The dedicated skeptics would undoubtedly have ridiculed me, asking where my masturbatorium was, and so on.

  “Then I met a dental researcher who had perfected a method of gathering white cells from the mouth. This was politically feasible, easy to do, and required no medical supervision. I started doing split-screen videotaping of experiments, with the chart readout superimposed at the bottom of the screen showing the donors activities. We took the white cell samples, then sent the people home to watch a preselected television program likely to elicit an emotional response—for example, showing a veteran of Pearl Harbor a documentary on Japanese air attacks. We found that cells outside the body still react to the emotions you feel, even though you may be miles away.