The Giraffe's neck and the human mind

In his book "The Third Chimpanzee" Jared Diamond makes the case that human beings are not anything special. They do things just like other animals do, only slightly differently. Humans are animals, that have some special ability. Everyone knows what this ability is, it is the overblown brain of ours. It allows us to think, remember, organize thoughts, learn, communicate and teach. But what is special about that?

The specialness of this special ability is just that it gives us ability to think and talk about the ability itself. When we assume that we are special and superior to other animals, we do not talk about physical power, well there are lots of animals that will crush the best of us in hand to hand combats. We don't talk about our abilities to run, fly, swim... we are probably worse than the average in most of those. What allows us to be the kings of this planet is the ability to think.

But again, what is special about that? Take Giraffe for example. Giraffe is a unique animal if you only considered the length of the neck as the supreme feature to judge animals. Some horses, camels and ostriches have decent lengths. However, the giraffe stands shoulders above them all (literally!). If you measured necks of all animals, there will be a lot of them who will bunched at zero to inches neck, some more bunched at necks between 6 to 12 inches. But as you increase the neck length, fewer and fewer animals will occupy that interval. And as you reach the end, there will be many intervals that will be completely empty, and you reach the giraffe. The same thing will happen if you start dividing the animal kingdom on the length of their nose. The elephant will stand alone at the extreme, far superior from the other animals.

In this world, there are many evolutionary niches, where you can make livelihood by the characteristics you as a species possesses. Some make it using a good balance, some make it by reaching an extreme in something. Giraffes and elephants reach an extreme in one quality, whereas a sparrow does not have any extremes - just a combination of some good qualities in reasonable proportion.

One of these characteristics happens to be the brain size, or rather the brain capability. These two are of course different. The Neanderthal brain sizes were larger, but they certainly weren't smarter than the modern human beings. But as it happens, brain capability is just one of the many characteristics by which one can classify the whole animal kingdom. And of course we human beings stand in one extreme, farthest from the near zombies bunched together, and even further from the chimps and the dolphins who are a little bit more respectable.

But again what is special about it? It depends on what you are trying to understand by answering the question. If you are asking a simple matter of fact question of what advantage it gives in terms of evolutionary success, the answer is trememndous. We see it, since we have become the masters of this planet in simply few hundred thousand years. That is barely an eyeblink from the evolutionary standpoint.

If you are trying to find out if somehow we are "better" than other animals, then we need to pause and investigate objectively. "Better" is a highly charged word. There is no logic that says that ability to fly is "better" than the ability to swim. Why do we ask something is better or not? Are we asking, when push comes to shove, who should die out and who should survive? That is it okay to kill off all the non thinkers when there is an unavoidable natural calamity, to preserve the human beings? We don't always think in these terms, but this is the question that we have at the back of our mind when we try to think of ourselves as superior to say, cows. If we are trying to answer this question, we don't have any objective way to decide if intelligence is better than long neck, if humans should survive over giraffes.

Think of the species as points in the multidimensional space of characteristics. The axis could be as many as you want, provided you can attribute to everyone. Main ones I can think of are the sensitivities of the five senses, speed of moving, speed of flying, lengths of various parts, stregths - overall and individual body parts and so on. There may be tens of others. Various animals will be bunched together into small bins - animals that have similar properties. They obviously occupy the same niche. Humans will be close to small mice on speed. The whale will far outweigh everyone else. But the question we are trying to ask is "is there any criteria that tells us if any of these qualities are morally better?" The answer is not forthcoming. When you look at the species from the outside, the word morality itself starts losing its meaning. There is simply no way to decide. The only questions that we can attempt to answer is about usefulness for something.

The only way to decide this question is to go by "all species for themselves" attitude, and let the survival of the fittest begin. And there of course you know who is going to win, we got the gun and they aint got one!

But hasn't that been going on for the past few billions of years anyway?