Melanie Challenger - How to Be Animal: A New History of What it Means to Be Human

Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system with all these exalted powers Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

Charles Darwin

T he world is now dominated by an animal that doesnt think its an animal. And the future is being imagined by an animal that doesnt want to be an animal. This matters. From the first flakes chipped from stone in the hands of walking apes at least several million years ago, history has arrived at a hairless primate with technologies that can alter the molecules of life.

These days, humans are agents of evolution with far greater powers than sexual selection or selective breeding. Thanks to breakthroughs in genomics and gene-editing technologies, the biology of animals, including humans, can be rewritten in various ways. We have created rodents with humanised livers or brains partly composed of human cells. Weve made salmon that grow to our timetable. Scientists can sculpt DNA to drive lethal mutations throughout a whole population of wild animals.

Meanwhile, the rest of the living world is in crisis. In our oceans, our forests, our deserts and our plains, many other species are declining at unprecedented rates. In geological terms, were an Ice Age, a huge metamorphic force. Our cities and industries have left their imprint in the soil, in the cells of deep-sea creatures, in the distant particles of the atmosphere. The trouble is we dont know the right way to behave towards life. This uncertainty exists in part because we cant decide how other life forms matter or even if they do.

All that humans have tended to agree on is that we are somehow exceptional. Humans have lived for centuries as if were not animals. Theres something extra about us that has unique value, whether its rationality or consciousness. For religious societies, humans arent animals but creatures with a soul. Supporters of secular creeds like humanism make much of their liberation from superstition. Yet the majority rely on species membership as if it is a magical boundary.

This move has always been beset by problems. But, as time has passed, it has become harder to justify. Most of us act according to intuitions or principles that human needs outrank those of any other living thing. But when we try to isolate something in the human animal and turn it into a person or a moral agent or a soul, we create difficulties for ourselves. We can end up with the mistaken belief that there is something non-biological about us that is ultimately good or important. And that has taken us to a point where some of us seek to live for ever or enhance our minds or become machines.

None of this is to say that there arent clear differences between us and everything else. Our conscious encounter with the world is a breathtaking fact of how life can evolve.