When Charles Darwin signed up for his formative voyage on the Beagle in 1831, his role was not primarily that of a naturalist but that of a geologist. He developed his theory of evolution by natural selection with a keen eye on the interactions of the living and geological worlds, recognizing that life on Earth can transform the very environment that shapes it.
In Living on Earth, philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith takes up that theme, offering “a story of organisms as causes, rather than evolutionary products” to create “a picture of an Earth that is constantly changing because of what beings do alive”. While the actors in this tale include bacteria, birds, and octopuses, a significant portion of the book focuses on the creatures that are transforming the environment like no one else: us. Examining our minds, cultures and ethics (or lack thereof) towards other species, Godfrey-Smith seeks to embed us within what Darwin called “a grand system” and to find a vision of how our increasingly technological societies can be combined in the big one. the chain of being. Living on Earth it is consistently rewarding, filled with insight and invitations to reflect, and blessed with some excellent writing.
Godfrey-Smith presents the book as the conclusion of a trilogy that began with Other Minds, with a particular focus on the octopus, and continued with Metazoa, which looked at the evolution of cognitive complexity and subjective experience in animals. Like many biologists and zoologists, he is convinced that “felt or conscious experience is probably widespread in animals” – which makes him a passionate animal rights advocate. His focus on what animals (like us) do to their environment is often linked to questions of mind and agency: we are not, in this view, mere automatons or vehicles for genes, but are purpose-driven and purpose-driven. independent.
A constant theme in these books is the way in which minds and intentions are shaped and conditioned by the circumstances in which they arise. It is unlikely that dolphins will ever evolve complex technologies and cultures, in part because what you can do on land and in the sea differs (try hammering a nail underwater); Therefore dolphins and octopuses have little use for tools. Reefs are dominated by animals such as corals and bryozoans that do similar things to plants—or rather, land-based distinctions between animals that move and act and plants that stand still and grow are less important under the sea.
“Actions,” says Godfrey-Smith, “stem from perspective, from the particular perspective that each animal has on things.” Behavior is then best understood not as a response to external stimuli, but as trying to get inside the animal’s mind. It’s an attitude that Godfrey-Smith attributes to the German-Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll, who coined the notion of UMWELT- as the world accessible to an organism through perception and action—a collection, one might say, of what is meaningful to it. What that picture lacks, he adds, are the others: no creature floats around in a solipsistic perceptual bubble, but exists in relation to other entities.
How should we do this? Precisely because Godfrey-Smith has devoted so much effort to digging up the origins and cross-species parallels of the mental capacities known to us, he can allow, without the risk of exclusion, to show how we are different. Many animals exist in complex social structures, but human culture is something else. In particular, we have an open, syntactically rich language, compared to the small, fixed lexicon of signals deployed by even our closest evolutionary cousins. Language and social organization have supported each other to increase not only what we can do, but what we can do imagine doing. Our ancestors’ actions shifted from being habit-based to plan-based: as Godfrey-Smith puts it, “a change in the causal processes by which things are done in the world.” Hence our alarming power now to dominate the biosphere and change the environment on a planetary scale.
While Godfrey-Smith’s musings on the implications for the ethics of our interactions with other animals, particularly in conservation, agriculture and medical experimentation, point predictably towards “we must do better”, his willingness to look in unexpected directions keeps the discussion surprising. Could there be a moral case for actively intervening in “wild” nature to reduce the suffering caused by predators? Should we welcome the prospect of our extinction for the greater good of the planet? (He’s not so pessimistic.) Is there an ethical case for seeking immortality? In the end, Godfrey-Smith insists on identifying with nature rather than standing outside as caretaker: and on “gratitude and a sense of kinship” with the process that brought our species into the world.
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