Scala Naturæ

Without a doubt we all should take with the utmost seriousness the responsibilities of humans to each other, to other animals, and to the planet which we share.

But — one thought on whether "human brains are superior" to the brains of other animals.

I don't believe there is any doubt that, from an evolutionary perspective, the simple answer is NO. I can't hold a conversation with a dolphin. And I don't believe that, given enough time and the finest courses in conversational English, the dolphin's going to catch on. The same point extends to the dolphin and mathematics, the dolphin and music, the dolphin and the other natural sciences, the arts — also lying and counterfeiting, exploitation, environmental degradation, gratuitous violence, and so on. The dolphin won't be able to pick-these-things-up because that's not how dolphins are made. Quite unlike me, for example. If you put both the dolphin and me in a room with a bunch of people who speak Mandarin Chinese, neither the dolphin nor I will be able to take part in their conversation. But for much different reasons. None of which has any bearing of the relative superiority (or lack thereof) of my brain.

The late Harvard philosopher of evolution Ernst Mayr (he had a more academic title, which we can skip) asked: "how can one explain the seemingly upward trend in organic evolution?"

In place of "seemingly upward," read from less to more "superior."

Mayr answered: The appearance of an upward trend is illusory. Period.

He continued:

"After Darwin established the principle of natural selection, this process was widely interpreted to be teleological, both by supporters and by opponents. Evolution itself was frequently considered a teleological process because it would lead to "improvement" or "progress." Perhaps such an interpretation was not altogether unreasonable in the framework of the Lamarckian transformational paradigm. However, it is no longer a reasonable view when one fully appreciates the variational nature of Darwinian evolution, which has no ultimate goal and which, so to speak, starts anew in every generation... [C]onsidering how often natural selection leads into fatal dead ends and considering how often during evolution its premium changes, resulting in an irregular zigzag movement of the evolutionary change, it would seem singularly inappropriate to use the designation teleological for any form of directional evolution. To be sure, natural selection is an optimization process, but it has no definite goal, and, considering the number of constraints and the frequency of chance events, it would be most misleading to call it teleological. Nor is any improvement in adaptation a teleological process, because whether a given evolutionary change qualifies as a contribution to adaptedness is strictly a post hoc decision. Natural selection deals with properties of individuals of a given generation; it simply does not have any long-range goal, even though this may seem so when one looks backward over a long series of generations.

There is adaptedness (Kant's Zweckmässigkeit) in living nature but Darwin showed that its origin can be explained materialistically. Even though there are many organic processes and activities that are clearly goal-directed, there is no need to involve supernatural forces, because the goal is already coded in the program that directs these activities. Finally, there are all the end-achieving processes in inorganic nature that are simply due to the operation of natural laws such as gravity and the laws of thermodynamics. [But] none of the recognized teleological processes works backward from an unknown future goal; there is no backward causation." [*]

Nor, for that matter, any valid notion of superiority. (The sheer vanity of the people who theorize about these matters aside.)

David Peterson
Chicago, USA

* Ernst Mayr, "Teleology," in What Makes Biology Unique? (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 39 - 66.

This is my dolphin story.

Living in North Florida, in the mid-seventies, I was an avid salt water fisherman. Many of my trips were in the Gulf of Mexico out from the mouth of the Suwannee River. On this particular trip, I had three other men in my boat, a twenty foot fiberglass open fisherman, deep vee hull, a hundred fifty horse outboard, with a twenty five horse outboard back-up. We went offshore early in the morning twenty some miles and spent most of the day trolling for kingfish and grouper. There was very little wind and a lot of thin cloud. In mid-afternoon the weather turned hazy and I decided to head back toward shore. This was before GPS and small boat radar, so navigation was strictly dead reckoning and visual flight rules only. My basic method was to steer a compass course at a set speed away from the last marker in the West Pass channel, time for distance on the way out, keep my off shore movement in mind during the day, and use a reciprocal compass course, modified for drift and movement off shore to return. Though it sounds hit or miss, it worked well, being based on many trips with my grandfather, his lessons of "how do you get home from here" and years of doing it on my own.

So I decided on my compass course, noted the time, and ran for home. Very shortly, the haze that prompted our return became light fog, and then got thicker and thicker. I was soon paying very close attention to the boat compass and my watch, thinking that I would be very lucky to find the channel marker I wanted without a slow search in shallow water with very limited visibility. I remember when the dolphins showed up because I had just checked my watch and made a decision to continue present course and speed for another twelve minutes. One of my buddies said, "Hey! Dolphins." There were three. One to starboard, two side by side to port. They kept their relative positions along side for what I remember as a couple of minutes as we all watched and admired their graceful progress.

Suddenly, the pair disappeared. The single animal then rose until his entire back was out of the water and he (or she) began to literally beat the water surface with very rapid tail movement, throwing water three to four feet high. It looked like the rooster tail behind a speed boat, and he moved to a position straight ahead of us and began to weave back and forth, starting at five or six feet either side of the boat's centerline, going wider and wider as he accelerated ahead. When the dolphin was near the limit of our visibility, about twenty yards (the fog was very thick), he turned from about forty feet right of the boat and went straight across our path, dove, and immediately jumped straight up, clearing the surface by more than his body length. From the time he left the side of the boat until his leap took less than two minutes. As he crossed our path, something made me pull the throttle to idle speed and we were slumping into displacement mode when the dolphin made that vertical jump. We not only saw, but heard the splash.

We looked at where the dolphin hit the water. We glanced at each other, and someone said, (it always happens) "Did you see That!" And I said, "Do you see that?" Just past the dolphin's splash, just now visible through the fog was the faint grey line of an oyster bar, then about thirty feet in front of the boat. Without the dolphins, I have no doubt that I would have hit that bar at near thirty knots. I looked at my watch when I saw the oyster bar and realized I had several more minutes before I planned to slow down. At a minimum there would have been serious damage to the boat and motor. What could have happened to the four of us hardly bears thinking about. I believe to this day that the dolphins, and one in particular, saved lives. We never saw any of the dolphins after that single, final leap.

I turned the boat southeast and at idle speed it was under four minutes until I found my channel marker. Perhaps the luckiest day of my life, even counting the fact of very few fish caught.

I still have questions about the dolphin's behavior. What motivated his actions? Was it a deliberate attempt to warn me of danger? Was it just a dolphin playing? All I know for sure is that in all the many encounters with dolphin in the Gulf and in the Atlantic, from Pensacola to Key West to Mayport at Jacksonville, offshore, inshore, intercoastal waterway, and even several miles up a couple of rivers, I have never seen a dolphin swim at top speed on the surface of the water as that one dolphin. I still can get chills thinking about what could have happened. Needless to say, I am a big fan of those animals, and I really don't care which one of us is smarter.

"I will try to be kind and gentle to every living thing and protect all who are weaker than myself"

— from the "Golden Chain of Love" which is recited by followers of Jodo Shinshu, a Pureland Buddhism sect.

Are humans smarter than yeast? Or will we pursue never ending growth until we use up the resources and pollute the Earth to the point where we all die off — like yeast in a vat of grape juice.

At least the yeast leave behind wine. What will be the human legacy?