Nature has no perfect dividing lines, only degrees of difference
In short: We like to draw hard borders between humans and animals, but biology suggests these boundaries are often human inventions. By looking at shared evolutionary histories, we find that our most complex behaviors—grief, cooperation, and competition—are not unique to us, but part of a continuous biological spectrum.
Nathan H. Lents, a professor of biology at John Jay College, argues that while humans often impose categories on the natural world, these classifications are frequently arbitrary. Nature is inherently continuous; there are no perfect dividing lines separating one species from another or one behavior from another. Instead, biological categories serve as tools to interpret meaningful differences in how organisms interact with their environments and each other. Lents serves as the director of the Cell and Molecular Biology program. His work explores how these categories reveal evolutionary histories.
In 'Not So Different', Lents posits that our distinction from other creatures is a matter of scale rather than essence. He proves that cooperation and competition, as evolutionary drivers, have influenced both human and animal existence by combining data from ethology, anthropology, cognitive science, and psychology. This shared programming manifests in behaviors once thought to be uniquely human, such as elephants grieving for their dead, wolves missing one another, or monkeys addressing social inequality. Prairie dogs actually assign names to specific humans they see. These animals also use rich vocabularies for communication. They even deploy sex as a strategic weapon.
The implication is a shift in perspective: acknowledging these biological commonalities doesn't diminish the human experience; it grounds it. By recognizing that emotions like jealousy, greed, and irrational phobias have deep evolutionary roots shared with our closest kin, we can develop a more nuanced understanding of our own moral lives. We move away from an isolated view of humanity toward a fuller appreciation of the biological basis for our most profound instincts. Lents authored the book Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches in 2018. He also maintains a blog titled Beastly Behavior to explore these topics.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: How Biology Classifies a Continuous World | Nathan Lents
- Also: Not So Different | Columbia University Press
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