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A friend of mine who read my book Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World and didn’t know much about the social behavior of rhesus macaques beforehand had the following reaction: “Wow, these monkeys really behave like people. They are people!” To which I replied: “No, it’s people who really behave like other primates. People are primates.”
Our species, Homo sapiens, belongs to a group of mammals called primates and, more specifically, to a subgroup of primates called great apes. There used to be many species of great apes on our planet, but many of them have gone extinct. The remaining great apes are the chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans. Our closest relatives are chimpanzees and bonobos, which share with us about 98 percent of their genetic material. Closely related to us and the other great apes are the lesser apes - gibbons and siamangs - and Old World monkeys such as macaques and baboons, which share with us about 95 percent of their genetic material. Studies of fossils and comparisons of DNA between different species suggest that our hominid ancestors split from the ancestors of the other great apes between 5 and 6 million years ago, from those of gibbons and siamangs about 10 million years ago, and from those of macaques and baboons about 25 million years ago. The taxonomic classification of human beings was established on the basis of anatomical similarities long before genetic data were available and long before Darwin published his evolutionary explanations for these similarities. The taxonomic classification of human beings is not particularly controversial. Even creationists who believe that evolution is just a theory don’t seem to challenge our taxonomic status as a primate species. Who cares about taxonomy anyway? It’s just a bunch of labels, isn’t it?
But we do care about other aspects of our “humanness.” My friend’s surprised reaction upon discovering the similarities between human and rhesus macaque behavior is representative of the way a lot of people think about themselves and their behavior. First, there is the “they are like us” versus “we are like them” issue. This has to do with anthropocentrism – the idea that humans are at the center of the universe and everything else revolves around them. Telling some people that there are primates out there, such as rhesus macaques and chimpanzees, that are very similar to us in behavioral terms is like telling Ptolemy that two new planets have been discovered in the Earth’s orbit. Our solar system becomes a little larger, but we are still there, right in the center of it. We are the sun, and all the others are planets, regardless of how many of them there are out there.
Anthropocentrism is stronger for some human traits than for others. People’s faces and bodies resemble the faces and bodies of many other animals, but when it comes to these similarities, no one cares about the distinction between stars and planets. The Walt Disney Corporation and toy manufacturers around the world have made billions of dollars exploiting animal-human similarities for their cartoons and stuffed animals. Not everyone may know that our bones, muscles, skin, hearts, lungs, and stomachs and intestines work exactly like those of other animals, but I am pretty sure that many people given the news would shrug their shoulders and say, “Okay, so what?” When we discover similarities in behavior, however, our anthropocentrism kicks in. We are not like them. They are like us. Maybe.
Similarities in behavior between humans and other animals are a source of endless controversy. People generally have a different view of their behavior than they do of their faces and bodies - as if bodies are biological but behavior is something special, something nonbiological. I suspect that one of the factors at play is the question of free will. We were born with our particular faces and bodies, and until the advent of plastic surgery there was nothing we could do about it. Now, as long as we can afford it, we can have almost any face or body we want. We don’t need any professional nip and tuck for our behavior, however, because we perform our own cosmetic surgeries every day. We wake up in the morning and make plans for the day. Then we change our minds and make different plans, sometimes more than once. Everything we do we think about first, and then we do it. Thinking is the cause and behavior is the effect - or so we believe. We make hundreds of conscious decisions about our behavior during the course of a day. How can this be affected by millions of years of evolution? How is it possible that the product of free will ends up resembling what monkeys and apes in the jungle have been doing for millions of years?
Free will and anthropocentrism go hand in hand: The seventeenth-century French philosopher Descartes, who came up with the brilliant phrase Cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”), believed that humans are unique in possessing free will and that all other animals act like robots. Accordingly, Descartes placed humans right at the center of the universe. Many embraced Descartes’s view, including the psychologist William James, who wrote in 1890 that the whole “sting and excitement” of life comes from “our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another, and that it is not the dull rattling off of a chain that was forged innumerable ages ago.”
Well, for over two centuries people have had to disabuse themselves of the notion that humans are fundamentally different from other animals. Beliefs about the uniqueness of human behavior might well be the last bastion of our superiority complex, but even this redoubt may be crumbling. As for free will, experiments in psychology and neuroscience suggest that – to paraphrase one of my favorite films of all time, The Princess Bride – “I do not think it is what you think it is.”
In a 2007 New York Times article entitled “Free Will: Now You Have It, Now You Don’t,” science columnist Dennis Overbye reported on interviews with two scientists - Benjamin Libet, a former physiologist at the University of California-San Francisco (he died in 2007), and Daniel Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard University - who have done research on the issue of free will. In the 1980s, Libet conducted experiments in which he asked volunteers to choose a random movement with their hand, such as pressing a button or flicking a finger, while he recorded electrical activity in their brains through an electroencephalogram. Libet asked the subjects to watch the second hand of a clock and report its position at exactly the moment they felt they had the conscious will to move. The experiments showed that a spike of electricity occurred in the neurons in the brain that control hand movement approximately half a second before the subjects consciously felt that they had decided to move their hand. In other words, it appeared that the brain unconsciously controls behavior before a conscious decision is made. The perception of an action makes an individual conscious of it, and this after-the-fact consciousness generates the illusion that our behavior is the result of a decision and not the other way around. Libet’s experiments suggested that free will is an illusion – a trick played on us by our own minds. His results have been replicated by other neuroscientists (although, as usual, some skeptics have criticized them), while experiments by Daniel Wegner, summarized in his 2002 book The Illusion of Conscious Will, have shown that people can be easily fooled into believing that they cause and control their own actions when in fact they don’t.
In the interviews for the New York Times article, Libet said that his results left room for a limited version of free will in the form of veto power over what we sense ourselves doing – we can choose to inhibit our behavior once we become conscious of it - while Wegner commented on the potential consequences of exposing free will as an illusion. Some people worry, he said, that the death of free will could wreak havoc on our sense of moral and legal responsibility: people might feel that they are no longer responsible for their actions. Wegner believed, however, that in reality exposing free will as an illusion probably would have little effect on people’s lives or on their feelings of self-worth. Most people would remain in denial. “It’s an illusion, but it’s a very persistent illusion; it keeps coming back,” he said, comparing free will to a magician’s trick that has been seen again and again. “Even though you know it’s a trick, you get fooled every time. The feelings just don’t go away.”
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