Unlearning “humans are at the peak of the great chain of being”

This chapter locates our human species as just one among the myriad animals on this planet, from which we are far less different than the thought emerging from the 20th century would have had us believe. This is evident from discoveries in palaeoanthropology and genetics, which show our biological and cultural debts to Neanderthals and other hominin species with which we until very recently shared this planet, and a vast array of discoveries about high levels of non-human animal intelligence and cultural sophistication. The chapter also sets out how the assumption that intelligence must be linked to brains like our own has been swept aside. It questions how, given what we know now, we can continue factory farming and the current treatment of laboratory animals. This 20th century bequeathed us the ranked idea of life inherited from Aristotle through Christian thought that delivered the overweening concept of human dominion. That was reinforced by René Descartes’s dismissal of non-human animals as machines, an approach challenged since it appeared, including by Margaret Cavendish. The chapter also demands the ending of the Cartesian division between animals being the objects of scientific study, and humans being subjects in the humanities.