This is one of those books about which too much additional comment is warranted. In the main, I have said what needs be said in the review itself (see below). Gee can be correct about the mechanism of evolution and the inability of the physical evidence (fossils and DNA) to tell us a complete story about who came from what, and be incorrect as to its ultimate directedness towards capacity for abstraction laying the groundwork for moral free will, religion, and art.

Most of these arenas pertain to Gee’s discussion of consciousness, in particular “self awareness,” which he claims may be exhibited by crows and other animals. He recognizes that what looks like human-like self awareness in crows might emerge from some other mechanism (of consciousness) altogether and be unlike what humans experience. Nevertheless, he unhesitatingly declares that there is no qualitative difference between human consciousness and some of the higher animals. I beg to differ.

Gee claims that most people spend little to no time being “aware of their consciousness.” While it may be true that few besides philosophers spend hours a day in Husserlian epoche, the point is not that humans rarely think about their awareness, but that every human can exercise that capacity when he or she wishes. Moreover it lies always close at hand. All I need to do to evoke the capacity in you is to ask “are you awake?”

Self-consciousness, what I have elsewhere called recursive-consciousness, is the foundation of our ability to have abstract thoughts, thoughts about things unrelated to our sensory inputs or our need for food, sex, or avoidance of danger. It enriches our language by introducing the need to invent language that communicates the effect. From this stems religion and art. 

What signifies the emergence of art and religion in a species? Broadly, behavior that has nothing to do with acquiring food, sex, or safety, warmth, and so on. Cave paintings and decorative items (shell necklaces anyone) will do for art, while ritualized burial serves for religion.

Are there animals who spend time and energy creating art or self-decoration. Are there animals who ritually bury their dead? I know of none. Both sorts of activities require resources and energy that would be better put to hunting or reproduction. Why ritually bury your dead? Something about this implies belief in some after life, and possibly also fear of ghosts, which may be the earliest outgrowth of the nascent religious impulse. 

Primitive humans spent considerable resource propitiating ghosts later leading to venerating ancestors. The earliest human specialization might be the shaman, a profession dedicated to serving other than material needs. I know of no case of this among the animals. Gee would say (I believe) that we cannot know where exactly in the evolution of sapiens these qualities appeared. He is right, but again it doesn’t matter. At whatever point it appeared, that appearance marks “the human.” Could it be that art and religion appeared in hominid branches other than the sapiens line and petered out? Yes, it could. But that does not mean that these particular qualities are not qualitatively different from every other animal type that doesn’t exhibit them. It happens that our line, whatever sequence led to sapiens, is the only one left standing and in the absence of evidence (art, ritual burial, abstract language) the only one we know of that has achieved these milestones. 

But even granting that art, religion, and the evolution of language to express them are evidence of a qualitative difference between human mind and the animals, why should this difference suggest the teleological in evolution? Because neither art nor religion contribute to the acquizition of food, clothing, and shelter. They do contribute to socialization which has adaptive advantages, but evolution has solved this problem, even among predators (e.g., wolves) long before the appearance of art and religion. 

If it happens that there is a God, a teleologically infused evolution leading, eventually, to his recognition, would not be surprising. This is not to say that the appearance of art, religion, and the languaged to communicate about them entail a God, but a God is, at least, consistent with their appearance. 

The Accidental Species by Henry Gee (2013)

This is a book that does well in some parts and not so well in others. Broadly, it is a book about evolution, the evolution of modern humans, and the biological, social, and psychological parallels between modern humans and the higher animals.

The first part is the good part. Given the present scientific paradigm, no teleological (purposeful and established [ordained] before the fact) endpoint to evolution exists. Evolution is what it is: random genetic changes that happen to be of or take some advantage of some changing environmental condition. Gee argues convincingly that the appearance of humans as we know them on Earth now might have come out differently, arisen from different earlier stocks, or perhaps not come to exist on the planet at all. He also notes that the paleontological record is too sparse for us to reliably assemble the story of even our present form from the last handful of millions of years. This includes the marvelous addition of genetic analysis to the paleontological tool kit. Marvelous as genetics is, back past a few hundred thousand years, its samples are even rarer than fossils. 

In roughly the second part of the book, Gee compares modern humans to animals to show that none of our supposedly unique qualities (gait, brain size, tools, language–he barely mentions writing–and self-consciousness) are entirely unique to humans. Here, I think he tries to be too clever by half, suggesting the slime trails of voles, or the smell of urine to a dog, are communication with some comparable quality to human communication, which also happens to include such passive forms of signaling if more subtle than slime or urine. Some animals even possess rudimentary language communicated through gestures (bees) and often sound, as do we. 

Agreeing with Gee that the evolution of humans as we find them was not foreordained, we need not agree with him that nothing different-in-kind has emerged from the process. But since this difference manifests in art and religion, we cannot be entirely sure, as Gee unhesitatingly declares himself to be, that the endpoint (a being who could express himself in art, religion, philosophy, etc.) was not, by some unspecified ordination, teleologically driven even if it needn’t have emerged through exactly the path it happened to take. Gee’s very good first part and not-so-well-argued last part must leave that question entirely up in the air.

Gee is right that many animals possess nascent capabilities that resemble some of what humans do, though none I know of developed any form of writing. But he goes too far when he asserts that there are no qualitative differences between the abstractions of nuclear physics or moral philosophy and the chattering of birds and barking dogs. We cannot know, he tells us, what gospels the crows are telling one another. With regard to the last quality he covers, self-consciousness, which he admits is ultimately the source of religion and art (abstractions and their reflection in language in general), he is, in the end, an eliminative materialist on mind, a position that only writes off and does not explain such things as art, religion, and abstractions generally.