I think it's weird when people ask if violence is natural, or if eating meat is natural,

or if infidelity is natural, or whatever else.

It's like, you would never even ask this sort of question about the behaviors of rabbits

or ducks or snails or any other animal.

If a bunch of ducks were regularly getting up to something, you would never

think, hang on, is this natural behavior? Because the behavior is automatically natural by virtue

of them being animals. So, implicit in these sorts of questions, is a positioning of humans in a special place above other species,

where some of our behavior is outside of nature, and, more remarkably, outside of our own nature.

And some of you are comfortable with that positioning.

And I might not be able to make a persuasive argument against the idea that humans are special for their ability to transcend their own nature.

But I could take you on a graveyard tour of dead ideas about human specialness.

We used to say humans were unique for our tool use,

unique for our ability to have culture,

unique for our culture gene co-evolution,

for our non-kin cooperation,

for our ability to wage war, all of these claims to human uniqueness,

and more,

have by now been put to bed by multiple examples in other species.

And since I know language is ringing in your ears, as a potential candidate for human uniqueness,

I'll paraphrase my old advisor at Boston University, the anthropologist Matt Cartmill,

who quipped that researchers come up with a

new definition for language whenever the old definition is discovered to apply to another species.

...