«Few people would deny that humans are animals, evolved beings with evolved bodies and evolved minds. Equally, few would deny that humans are in some fashion distinct from other animals. In part, at least, the debate about what science can or cannot tell us about human nature is a debate about how we should understand the relationship between continuity and distinctiveness, and about whether we can explain what is distinctive about humans in the same terms as we explain the continuity of humans with the rest of the natural world - in other words, can the distinctive aspects of being human be explained in naturalistic terms?
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For many natural scientists, any acknowledgement of human exceptionalism smacks of mysticism. The primatologist Frans de Waal, for instance, suggests that the traditional distinction between nature and culture is one more expression of 'outdated Western dualism'. Natural selection, he argues, 'has produced our species, including our cultural abilities. Culture is part of human nature'. And since human nature can be understood through 'a combination of neurophysiology and deep genetic history', as EO Wilson has put it, so all that appears distinctive about human beings - language, morality, reason, culture itself - is not in fact that exceptional, and can be understood in the same way as can all natural phenomena.
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Over the centuries many thinkers have pointed to some specific quality - culture, reason, tool-use, language, morality - as that which makes humans distinct. Others, especially in the wake of Darwin, have argued that each of these qualities can also be found in non-human animals: that many animals use tools, act according to reason, have the capacity for language, act morally and possess culture.
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Frans de Waal defines culture as 'knowledge and habits [that] are acquired from others'. It explains why 'two groups of the same species may behave differently'. Under this - very reasonable - definition many species of animals can be viewed as cultured.
Humans, however, do not simply acquire habits from others. We also constantly innovate, transforming ourselves, individually and collectively, in the process. There is a fundamental difference between a process by which certain chimpanzees have learnt to crack open palm-nuts using two stones as 'hammer' and ‘anvil’, and a process through which humans have engineered the industrial revolution, unravelled the secrets of their own genome and developed the concept of universal rights.
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Science has expunged consciousness and teleology from the natural world. But consciousness and teleology remain crucial aspects of the human world. Any naturalistic account of humanness, therefore, has to account for human consciousness and teleology in non-teleological terms.
One approach has been to argue that consciousness and teleology are illusions, phenomena that natural selection has designed us to believe in, not because they are true, but because they are useful.
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From an evolutionary point of view, truth is contingent. Darwinian processes are driven by the need, not to ascertain truth, but to survive and reproduce. Of course, survival often requires organisms to have correct facts about the world. A zebra that believed that lions were friendly, or a chimpanzee that enjoyed the stench of rotting food, would not survive for long. But although natural selection often ensures that an organism possesses the correct facts, it does not always do so. Indeed, the argument that consciousness and agency are illusions designed by natural selection relies on the idea that evolution can select for untruths about the world because such untruths aid survival.
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Another way of putting this is that human nature is not simply natural. We often lose sight of this because of the ambiguity of the concept of human nature. On the one hand, human nature means that which expresses the essence of being human, what Darwinists call 'species-typical' behaviour. On the other, it means that which is constituted by nature; in Darwinian terms, that which is the product of natural selection.
In non-human animals the two meanings are synonymous. What dogs and bats or sharks typically do as a species, they do because of natural selection. But this is not true of humans. The human essence - what we consider to be the common properties of our humanity - is shaped as much by our history as by our biology.
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For most of human history, though, slavery was regarded as natural as individual freedom is today. Only in the past two hundred years have we begun to view the practice with revulsion. We have done so partly because of the political ideas generated by the Enlightenment, partly because of the changing economic needs of capitalism, and partly because of the social struggles of the enslaved and the oppressed. Certainly, today we view opposition to slavery as an essential aspect of our humanity, and see those who advocate slavery as in some way inhuman - but it's a belief that we have arrived at historically, not naturally. To understand human values such as the belief in equality we need to explore not so much human psychology as human history.
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(Kenan Malik)
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