Hood, Bruce - Supersense

Leviticus 11:4–8

Any group of animals should share more properties compared to those from another. Biologists call this grouping ‘taxonomy’, after the Greek taxis , which referred to the main divisions of the ancient army. Today’s modern taxonomy is based on one originally devised by the Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus in the eighteenth century, but prior to this, taxonomies were based on animals’ different modes of movement and their habitats.

All the various animals of the land, sea, and air share very similar bodily structures and forms of locomotion. Land animals have four legs and jump or walk. Fish have scales and swim. Birds have wings and fly. One suggestion is that unclean animals tend to be those that violate these properties of the general category to which they belong. Sharks and eels live in the sea, but do not have scales. Ostriches are birds, but do not fly. Crocodiles have legs that look like hands. Maybe some of the unclean animals are the freaks of their taxonomic group. The early Jewish scholars thought that such violations were abominations of the natural world.

Our inclination to understand the world leads us to chop it up into all the different categories we think exist. By looking for the structure in the natural world, we group natural things together into their various kinds. In doing so, we acknowledge that members of a group share the majority of characteristics compared to members of a different group. However, in categorizing the natural world, we become aware that some members do not fit neatly into one category or another. Unclean animals and human freaks are violations of the natural order of things, and that order is one that we construct as part of the intuitive biology we develop as children.

IS IT A BIRD? IS IT A PLANE?

Give a twelve-month-old infant a bunch of toy birds and planes to play with. Then sit back and watch as something quite extraordinary happens. After the initial examination with eyes and then mouth, the baby will start to touch each of the birds in sequence, followed by touching each of the planes. Even though they may have similar shapes, with long bodies and stuck-out wings, the infant is treating birds and planes as different types of things. 10More remarkable is that six-month-olds shown different pictures of cats and dogs can tell the difference even though no two animals look alike. 11This simple demonstration reveals some very important things about babies. For a start, they are naturally inclined to sort out the world. They are thinking about things and forming categories. They must be thinking, This is one type of thing, whereas that is another . It’s exactly the sort of observational technique that professional scientists use when trying to understand the world. By sorting, they are telling us that they understand that dogs are members of one category whereas cats belong to another. In short, they have a rudimentary biology.

When and where does the child’s understanding of biology come from? The Harvard psychologist Susan Carey argues that children take a relatively long time to understand biology. They may be able to sort birds and planes and cats and dogs, but Carey thinks that such categorizing is only simple pattern detection that doesn’t require a deep understanding of biology. To get to grips with biology you have to appreciate life as a state of being, as well as the invisible processes associated with it. In Carey’s reckoning, it’s not until age six or seven that children begin to understand what it is to be alive. 12

Also, babies may spot the difference between living and non-living things, but they could just be making judgements based on how humanlike something is. In other words, they may be thinking nothing more than that the closer something in the natural world is to looking or behaving like a human, the more likely it is to have the same biological properties as humans. It’s anthropomorphism at work again, not reasoning about other life forms as separate categories. We can get an idea of children’s level of biological knowledge if we show them pictures of plants, insects, animals, and objects and ask them questions such as: Does it eat? Does it breathe? Does it sleep? Does it have babies? The closer things are to looking or behaving like humans, the more biological properties children give them. For example, in one study pre-schoolers thought that dogs and even mechanical monkeys were more likely to eat, breathe, sleep, and have babies in comparison to bees and buttercups because they resembled humans and seemed more purposeful than insects and plants. 13

As far as it goes, this is not a bad strategy. It’s the pre-schoolers’ equivalent to the ‘if it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck’ approach to figuring out the living world. However, more recent research suggests that preschoolers do have something akin to a biological awareness that goes beyond simple outward appearances. Children think that there must be something inside animals that makes them both unique and alive. Before they reach school, children start to think like most adults in terms of essences and life forces. They are intuitive essentialists and vitalists.

THE ESSENCE OF LIFE

What is an essence? Consider the real essence of physical chemical compounds. Both flowers and cats can produce such a physical essence. In perfumery, essences are the concentrated reduced quantity of a fragrant substance after all the impurities have been removed. Chanel No. 5 is one of the world’s most successful perfumes and is very expensive because of the cost of harvesting one of its chief ingredients, jasmine blossoms. These are grown in the Provence region of France and survive for only the briefest time before losing their fragrance.

Another reason Chanel No. 5 is expensive, apart from jasmine essence, is that until recently it also contained musk secretions from the anal glands of the endangered civet cat, the same species in Asia that excretes coffee beans to produce the Kopi Luwak gourmet coffee mentioned earlier. (The civet cat is not actually a cat but a raccoonlike creature.) Musk is a sex chemical that a number of mammals use to attract partners and mark their territory. The pungent smell takes a long time to decay, and so perfumers use musk to prolong the scent of more fragile fragrances. When it became widely known that Chanel used civet cat musk in its perfumes, Chanel replaced this ingredient with a synthetic musk compound. It is not clear whether this decision was due to pressure from the animal rights groups concerned about the cruelty inflicted during the musk extraction process or, more likely, to consumers’ distaste at discovering that they had been smearing secretions from an animal’s bum around their delicate wrists and necks.

In philosophy, essences are less smelly. In fact, you can’t detect them at all because they exist beyond man’s ability to perceive. Greek philosophers thought essences were some inner, invisible substance that made things what they truly were, like another dimension to reality. For example, Plato, probably the most prominent exponent of essentialism in his theory of ideal forms, argued that everything has an inner reality that we cannot necessarily perceive. Aware that appearances can be deceptive, he proposed that the world we experience is only a shadow of true reality. He likened human experience to sitting in a cave and watching reflections of reality from outside projected as shadows on the cave wall. It’s a bit like our Matrix comparison again. We glimpse only a fraction of the reality that truly exists. Plato thought that humans could never get at the true essence or form of things because of the limits of our minds.

Plato’s analogy is true in some sense – well, actually, all senses when it comes down to it. Our brains can process only the information we receive from the outside world through our senses. But our senses are limited. We know there is sound we cannot hear, light we cannot see, smell we cannot detect, and so on. 14This means that there are things in the world that we cannot directly perceive. There are microbes, viruses, particles, atoms, and all manner of teeny-weeny things that we know must exist but that are invisible to us. We are only ever glimpsing a portion of reality. Likewise, early essentialists thought that essences reside beyond our sensory range. Plato thought each essence is the core internal property that gives a thing its unique identity.