The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters

by Christine E. Webb

A New York Times’s Notable Book of 2025

An impassioned celebration of humility before the living world that leads us to a new understanding of other species—and ourselves

Darwin considered humans one part of the web of life, not the apex of a natural hierarchy. Yet today many maintain that we are the most intelligent, virtuous, successful species that ever lived. This flawed thinking enables us to exploit the earth towards our own exclusive ends, throwing us into a perilous planetary imbalance. But is this view and way of life inevitable? The Arrogant Ape shows that human exceptionalism is an ideology that relies more on human culture than our biology, more on delusion and faith than on evidence.

Harvard primatologist Christine Webb has spent years researching the rich social, emotional, and cognitive lives of our closest living relatives. She exposes the ways that many scientific studies are biased against other species and reveals underappreciated complexities of nonhuman life—from the language of songbirds and prairie dogs, to the cultures of chimpanzees and reef fishes, to the acumen of plants and fungi. With compelling stories and fresh research she gives us a paradigm-shifting way of looking at other organisms on their own terms, one that is revolutionizing our perception both of them and of ourselves.

Critiques of human exceptionalism tend to focus on our moral obligation towards other species. They overlook what humanity also stands to gain by dismantling its illusions of uniqueness and superiority. This shift in perspective fills us with a sense of awe and satisfies one of our oldest and deepest desires to belong to the larger whole we inhabit. What’s at stake is a better, sustainable way of life with the potential to heal and rejuvenate our shared planet.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Philosophy, Anthropology, Nature, Animals, History

336 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 2, 2025

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read a book called ‘The Moral Animal’ sometime in the late 1990’s that changed or more accurately solidified my view of humanity. When I learned from that book that apes had a sense of fairness, were capable of deceit, and had empathy for each other I realized in a profound way that we humans are simply animals; nothing more and nothing less. Since ‘The Moral Animal’ had such an impact on me, much of the message of ‘The Arrogant Ape’ was not new to me. This book covers a lot of ground that I have already read in other books. The primary message is to stop use the human template as the only important measure of all abilities.
The author was also presenting a case for deep ecology “emphasizing the intrinsic value of all living beings and acknowledging the profound interconnectedness that defines our existence.”
She also spent a significant part of the book elevating indigenous knowledge. A quote she uses “Others perceive science as a way of understanding the world, a story of how things happen, a way that human beings have evolved to try and explain and understand existence in time and space and relationships vis-à-vis the natural processes of the world. In this perspective, every culture has science.”
She argues for giving indigenous knowledge greater respect (fine) and also greater control over traditional indigenous lands (I am doubtful). I am resistant to elevating any subculture especially those based on biological relationships in a permanent way.
The author thinks we are in a third re-adjustment of the human outlook:
“The Copernican revolution revealed that humans were not the center of the cosmos. The Darwinian revolution showed that humans were one species among many, evolved from common origins. We are amid another revolution in how we understand ourselves in relation to the rest of Nature—one challenging the remaining strongholds of anthropocentrism in Western science”. Perhaps we are, but that outlook has yet to be born.
The author thinks we should live more in tune with nature, she praises movements like degrowth. I cannot agree. I need the natural world, I can’t be happy without dipping into it. But I can’t say that I want to live a totally ‘natural’ life. A final quote from the book that I liked:
“Humility means recognizing that we cannot understand everything and do not know what lies ahead, rather than clinging to false assurances or dire outlooks. Optimism and pessimism are probabilistic; they proclaim to know the odds, and await a better or worse future. Hope, on the other hand, centers on potential and uncertainty—it’s about not knowing”.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Arrogant apes have wreaked, and continue to wreak, havoc on our world. Is it too much to ask for a few of them to take the time to read and learn from this book, before we all go down?

[Mark Ortiz Ortiz Ortiz · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Arrogant Ape holds a mirror to human exceptionalism and asks if our superiority complex is not only blinding us from the genius of nature but could possibly be the downfall of our species and many others along with us.

This is a beautiful love letter to nature, evolution, and Mother Earth. It's full of interesting facts and studies attempting to show the reader what man considers exceptional about ourselves is simply a small array of wonders in nature's bag of tricks. The book has a strong message of conservation and doing less to affect Mother Nature's genius—along with a plea to begin measuring other species’ consciousness and contributions to progress without comparison to human intellect and ability.

It's a 3/5 ⭐ for me. Only because I feel like I read a book like this once a year. They are basically memoirs, sprinkled with facts and studies to help support the author's love for nature. Somewhat unoriginal, but still an enjoyable book.

[Thorkell Ottarsson]

I did not finish this book. I thought it would be scientific, but instead it is part autobiography (I did not get why anyone should be interested in her life, down to small details like that she got baptized a little older than others) and part politics. The book is a postmodern study (even quoting Derrida) and sprinkled with feminist studies. All evil comes from white men and the culture of the W.I.E.R.D. nations/the west (even though most who fight for animal rights have come from there and the rest of the world has a long tradition of mistreating animals. This hate of the-west-white-men attitude is just so old-fashioned. The Arrogant Ape would have made sense 5 years ago, but I feel we have moved away from this stuff. I've at least had my fill of it.

The Arrogant Ape is also very selective in the science it presents. Some of it is just based on what Christine E. Webb felt or interpreted in different situations (we just have to take her word for it), while others reference problematic experiments like the Rat Park experiment, which had a lot of problems and has never been replicated successfully (a study I hope will be proven correct one day but our hopes have nothing to do with facts). Why not just say that? Why not say that there are some problems, but given that the results are true, then we might assume... Why not just trust the reader to come to her or his own conclusion? Well, because Webb is not interested in facts. She wants to win an argument.

I really wanted to read about all the clever animals. I do agree with the premise of the book. We are arrogant and we measure animal intellect and qualities unfairly. I just can't stand political books dressed up as scientific books. And by the way, I'm a social democrat, so this is not a rant from a right-wing nutter, even though it might sound like it. :)

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

The aim of The Arrogant Ape by Christine Webb is to demonstrate that human exceptionalism is (1) a myth and (2) dangerous to our world.
To make this argument, the author shows, chapter by chapter, that every species is marvelously unique in its own way. She champions a humbler and more collaborative approach in natural science, an approach that engages with nature not as a collection of objects to be mastered but as a living community of subjects.


Each chapter marshals an argument aimed at debunking what she calls the myth of exceptionalism and the claims she believes we use to uphold it.
She argues that human exceptionalism is not really inborn, but learned as we grow up (Chapter 2), that the so-called ladder of nature as seeing some animals and plants existing for the sake of man, blames orthodox Christianity for fostering anthropocentrism (Chapter 3), points out that scientific studies are usually designed in ways that give humans an unfair advantage (Chapter 4), leading to the mismeasure of the intelligence of other species (Chapter 5).

In Chapter 6 she advocates for reversing our biased assumption that sentience and intelligence are not ubiquitous in all diverse life forms. In Chapter 7 she argues for a phenomenological approach to the study of the environment, concluding that our ecological crisis is as a result of having a subject-object relationship with nature. She follows up with Chapter 8 where she argues that humans are separate from nature and that the idea of nature red in tooth and claw is a stereotype.

In Chapter 9 she turns fully to solutions by suggesting that we turn our gaze to the profound wisdom embedded in indigenous worldviews, presenting them as alternatives to western anthropocentrism. The book concludes (Chapter 10) with a call for humility and connection with nature.

Overall the book is an empathic exploration that aims to reshape how we relate to nature. If that is all the book is about, I would have judged it to be worthy of high praise. The problem is that it fails specifically in its two aims.

The first aim is to show that human exceptionalism is a myth. My response is, to paraphrase Inigo Montoya, that her claims do not debunk what she thinks she is attempting to debunk. The wondrous uniqueness of nature does not necessarily debunk human exceptionalism. Both concepts are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the mistake arises from believing that human exceptionalism is a concept that emerges from a series of implicit and explicit arguments. On the contrary, human exceptionalism is an unimpeachable conclusion from our very own experience in life. It does not matter whether you believe it to be a myth or not. It is the name we give to our phenomenological engagement with the world. It is not a set of cognitive facts; it is an unshakeable phenomenological disposition. Just the way knowing that the earth rotates around its axis and revolves around the sun can never stop you from phenomenologically seeing the sun rise in the east at dawn. Knowing cognitively that the earth shuttles through space at an impressive speed will never make you feel the movement of the earth. The only way to break the phenomenology of the rising sun and the speeding earth is to stand outside the earth. In the same way the only way to escape human exceptionalism is to see nature from another animal or plant. And this is impossible.
From our point of view we are the protagonists and no amount of facts about animal abilities can overthrow this disposition. In other words, human exceptionalism is the POV of human beings. I say this because there is no point going chapter by chapter to debunk the claims; my argument is that even if all of them are absolutely true (and they most certainly are not) it still won’t overthrow the concept of human exceptionalism. The claims are simply irrelevant to the argument she is making.


This leads me to the second aim; that human exceptionalism is dangerous. Here the author fails to acknowledge that there are two manifestations of human exceptionalism. It can be good or bad, but it is always there.

The man who dedicates his life to protecting elephants from poachers and the man who travels thousands of miles to poach them for their ivory tusks are operating under the assumption of human exceptionalism. The poacher is a bad exceptionalist and the one who stops him is a good exceptionalist. One considers it his exceptional privilege to use everything in nature as he pleases; the other believes that we are an integral part of nature and that we should use only what we need and in an amount that does not throw nature out of balance. A hawk knows that the hen whose chick she has just swooped down to carry is feeling bad for the loss of her chick but it won’t stop her from doing it next time. Only a human being is exceptional enough to worry about the well-being of an animal which her fellow humans have for dinner. You definitely have to believe in the exceptionality of human beings to argue that the way we treat nature is bad. Our environmental crises will not be solved by faux human unexceptionalism; it will be solved by good human exceptionalism.

[ScottEF · Rating 1 out of 5]

A breezy review of others' scholarship, adding little new to the field. The question of how unique humans are has long been debated, with plenty of room for people to push in either direction. One can hence always write another book claiming either 1) we're more unique than some people claim, or 2) we're less unique and more continuous with the natural world than other people claim; both are true, since there are enough "other people" to argue against. But asserting (1) or (2) alone says nothing about the world, or even about new research, it simply reflects whether one is a "lumper" or a "splitter" as a personal predilection regarding humans and nature.

More egregious, the book is full of misattributed claims: I only checked two, and both are wrong. The 231 citation to Pereira (1508) is actually from Manuel Álvares (c. 1615), while the 258 citation from Einstein (good god, another internet quote misattributed to Einstein--really?) is not from him. We should expect better from a Harvard researcher, and from Penguin Random House editors.

[Blair · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The Arrogant Ape” is a book, as the subtitle states, that covers “The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why it matters”.

The author, Christine Webb, is a primatologist at Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology”. At Harvard she teaches a course by the same title as this book –"The Arrogant Ape" - that demonstrates many of the scientific arguments, which have placed human beings at the top of an evolutionary ladder are simply wrong. She provides reasons why the scientific community is self-serving and largely wrong in its conclusions.

I liked the book because it presents a reasoned argument that science’s positioning of human beings as the most important species is truly self-serving. How could it not be? History is generally written by the victors, so when humans write history how can we (they?) write the story in another manner.

Further, I agree with the author that human beings are generally very arrogant about our position in the world, and that we act with an exaggerated sense of our own importance. At the same time, most human beings are largely uninformed about how the world works - for it is incredible and more intricate that we understand, and perhaps even more intricate than we can understand!

We need to change this thinking if we are to survive. It's that serious. And the first thing we need to change is our mindset about our role on this Big Blue Dot. While Musk and Bezos distract us with a "Plan B" to live elsewhere, a much better strategy is for us to learn how to live within this great planet. That starts by better understanding our roles in helping this planet and all the lives on it.

I also like authors who are brave enough to challenge the status quo – with the view of greater knowledge or to de-bunk myths, more than just to tear down systems without putting something more valuable in their place. Christine Webb takes us on a journey about how various scientists have done this.

The weaknesses I found in this book were that the thoughts were more of a compilation of other scientists’ work, and not much was new or revolutionary.

As a result, it’s a good book and does explain why human beings (Homo Sapiens Sapiens – I had not come across this term before) are often, arrogant apes. She needs add more of her own thinking over summarizing that of others. That’s where real value is added and that’s how to get a higher sales of
your books.

[Karl.bromley · Rating 1 out of 5]

Insipid. DNF'd at 18% as author is describing what she wore to her baptism when she was thirteen. I thought this might be a somewhat important life science book. My mistake. I need to vet my books more thoroughly.

I did really like "What an Owl Knows" by J. Ackerman, "Transformer" by N. Lane and "An Immense World" by E. Yong. Those are good life science books, although "Transformer" was a challenge (for me). Those books are in a different league than "The Arrogant Ape".

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I agree 100% that human exceptionalism is a deeply harmful myth. I just don’t think this author made a particularly cogent argument to support that statement. I enjoyed parts of the book, but overall it wasn’t great. Probably would have rated it two stars except for the profound importance of the premise.

[Nils · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sharp, evidence-based dismantling of "human exceptionalism" — the deeply ingrained belief that humans sit atop a biological hierarchy, separated from the rest of the animal kingdom by a chasm of cognitive and moral superiority. Webb’s central thesis is that this perceived gap is not a scientific reality but a cultural construction, fueled by linguistic biases and a selective blindness toward animal complexity. She identifies that our self-assigned "uniqueness" usually rests on a shifting goalpost of traits: tool use, language, culture, and theory of mind. As ethological research consistently proves that other species — she trots out examples from corvids to cetaceans — possess these abilities, exceptionalists simply redefine the terms to ensure humans remain the sole occupants of the "superior" category.

One of the book’s strongest critiques centers on the linguistic and psychological divide we create between the "human" and "animal." Webb highlights the absurdity of grouping millions of diverse species into one monolith ("animals") while holding "humans" apart. Webb suggests our obsession with what makes us unique is a form of collective narcissism that prevents us from seeing the "deep continuity" of life. We judge animal intelligence (and she might’ve added: artificial intelligence) by how well it mimics human behavior. If a chimpanzee doesn't solve a logic puzzle the way a Yale undergraduate does, we label it "primitive," ignoring the specific evolutionary pressures that shaped the chimp’s own sophisticated cognition. By assuming animals are "automata" (a Cartesian hangover), we have delayed decades of breakthroughs in understanding consciousness and social evolution.

In her zeal to flatten the hierarchy, however, Webb risks underplaying the sheer scale of human impact. While a beaver modifies an ecosystem, a human modifies the planet’s chemistry. To claim there is no "exceptional" quality to human collective learning or cumulative culture is to ignore the very technology Webb used to write her book.

[Paul Womack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very fine read… I read it theologically, i. e. as an extended scientific essay on the need to connections that enrich the creation.

[Hayden Triance · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jeez. I wish everyone were to read this book with an open mind.

[Chris Roberts · Rating 2 out of 5]

'The Arrogant Ape'
(5/10)

On the plus side this was not a boring read, but it did feel like sitting through a tiresome dorm room debate where Webb had been stuck defending the notion that humans are not exceptional. Not all of her arguments are bad, I agree we should work together with all species to make this a better world going forward. But she will make points that are basically like, "I know you think your iPhone is pretty great tool but elephants use sticks to scratch their ass so we pretty much the same." Or, "You might feel pretty good about being at the top of the food chain but joke's on you because it isn't actually a food chain it's a food web." Then near the end she fall backs on the favorite talking points of academics everywhere; colonialism, indigenous populations, the 2024 Election. I was right back in Freshman Anthropology class and not in a good way.

[Susa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jokaisen pitäisi lukea ja sisäistää tämä.

[Twirlsquirrel · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title had me excited, the dedication to Frans de Waal as the author's mentor moreso. Unfortunately the rest was a letdown that I ended up skimming, and the more I skimmed the more I skipped. There were several issues.

Unfocused thesis and prose

This struck me first. Everything feels like it was written for a short pop science article - or possibly the introduction to a book, since those are often stylized differently from the main text. That distinct stylization is generally done to ensnare the reader's attention with a sprinkling of interesting facts, and sketch out the themes of the book. In good nonfiction those facts and themes will then be expanded upon significantly in the main text, with sustained narrative attention given to each idea, and chapters organized as building blocks according to their corresponding stage of development of the main thesis. One thing this typically means in practice is that chapters become progressively harder to understand without reference to the ones preceding them.

There is however a trend of catering nonfiction to readers who prefer magazine-style vignettes and short articles that share only loose thematic association, so that chapters can be read in any order. That's this book. The result felt less like reading successive chapters about a central thesis, and more like reading a dozen prologues in a row, each for a different book whose main text I'll never actually see. I find this style maddeningly unsatisfying and usually avoid such books, but this one slipped through the cracks.

The prose also lacks focus and needed another round of editing. For example the book is full of parenthetical statements that don't clarify anything but do bog down the narrative flow:

'I immediately became curious about whether the underlying motivations for the behavior were also shared. Coincidentally (or perhaps not at all), I ended up writing my doctoral dissertation on this topic some years later.'

That parenthetical and its containing clause should've been removed. Not a big deal in isolation, but the book is full of these, and their gradual accumulation is how the prose gets that 'fluffy' feeling, like the literary equivalent of eating potato chips. There are simply too many words present for the complexity of ideas and information being conveyed.

Inconsistent and incorrect arguments diminish an important premise

Agreeing with a book's premise, but seeing constant flaws in its logic? It stings. This book stung me a lot.

There were many minor inaccuracies, like when Webb says 'Indigenous groups have been experiencing their own apocalypses for decades'. Benefit of the doubt says she meant to write 'centuries' and her editor didn't catch the slip. However these mistakes don't actually impact the book's central premise, so I won't dwell on them.

The major issues tended to be linguistic in nature, as when Webb critiques several words from colloquial English 'describing the natural world as a commodity whose ultimate purpose is to be used and managed by humans'. Many of her examples are apt, like 'livestock' as a euphemism for animals raised to be slaughtered and eaten by humans. However at one point she critiques the word 'freshwater' as a similar euphemism for 'rivers', which is simply wrong.

Pretending anthropocentrism exists where it doesn't

The word 'freshwater' is a critical descriptor in nearly every branch of science; it is intended for contradistinction against 'saltwater'. The difference between these two kinds of water determines everything about Earth life and ecology, about the planet's climate and atmosphere and geochemistry, about the kinds of physics that can happen in each based on differences in water conductivity, buoyancy, phase transition points, and other physical parameters. The term is, in fact, a basic description of the most fundamental properties of our world.

It is not a matter of human supremacy infiltrating language. A whale won't thrive in a freshwater lake nor a pine tree in a saltwater one; this is true regardless of whether humans know about either whales or pine trees, or whether humans exist at all. Webb's 'freshwater' example is sloppy logic, which occurs repeatedly throughout this book. And sure, all human languages convey intrinsic ontological bias towards humans by virtue of existing for human use, but that's not the point Webb was going for here.

A similar ontological error occurs when she criticizes the phrase 'nonhuman animal' as an example of 'human exceptionalism', elaborating: 'Given that the vast majority of life on earth is not human, this term is like calling a human a non-chimpanzee or a chimpanzee a non-grasshopper! "Non-" groups millions of species together by an absence, by their failure to conform to the human archetype.'

This is non-sense. Calling a human a non-chimpanzee (or a 'non-chimpanzee animal', to stick to the originally posed formulation) would be perfectly reasonable if you were discussing humans alongside all other non-chimpanzee animals and doing so in contradistinction to a specific trait of chimpanzees! Like, "No non-chimpanzee animals preferentially dine on colobus monkeys." (I don't know enough about chimpanzees or colobus monkeys to know if this is actually true - and I will not even venture a guess about analogously appropriate grasshopper facts because my entomological training is zero - but you get my point.)

This is precisely how the phrase 'non-human animals' tends to be used - for example, by saying that no non-human animals have occupied all geological niches on Earth and low-Earth orbit, too. This is an ecologically important fact about humans in contradistinction to non-human animals, one which does not imply or depend upon any 'failure to conform to the human archetype'. The phrase is practical shorthand for a phylogenetic distinction, not euphemizing shorthand for a moral or philosophical one. To avoid it in technical contexts would be misguided; you'd just be making longer or less precise sentences for yourself for no coherent reason.

In fact, 'non-human animals' is such a helpful phrase that I'm going to be substituting it into several locations throughout the remainder of this review, in contexts where Webb originally refers to 'other animals' and leaves the reader to infer the object of contradistinction.

Projecting hierarchical human linguistic constructs onto animals

Webb makes another kind of compound linguistic error in this book. For all that she rightfully draws parallels between human supremacy over non-human animals and supremacy of specific humans over other humans (like racialization), she seems unaware that she's enacting the same process in reverse when she quotes as a 'promising sign' Jane Goodall's formal request to use gendered pronouns for non-human animals:

'When gender is known, the standard guidance should be, she/her/hers and he/him/his, regardless of species. When it is unknown, the gender-neutral they, he/she, or his/hers should be used.'

Not to get too technical here, but hell no. Gender is not sex. You cannot tell an animal's gender by looking at it. This is true for all animals including humans, but at least with a human you could theoretically ask their gender, or make a guess based on relevant cultural signals. We don't know enough about the genders of non-human animals to make those decisions for them. As someone who's been mistaken for every possible gender throughout my life, I can attest that most people (including biological scientists) don't even know enough about human genders to correctly guess those.

It sounds like what Webb is actually endorsing here is to automatically assign gendered pronouns to non-human animals based on their observed sexual characteristics. But conflating that concept with gender reintroduces the same ambiguity that the word 'gender' in its non-linguistic sense was coined to distinguish in the first place!

But if sex isn't gender, let's back up to what gender actually is: A cultural construct that varies from society to society, differing vastly across place and time, which conveys cultural information and expectations about a person, generally tied to sexual features such as genitalia and sex chromosomes. These gender expectations define the social propriety of that person's clothing choices, perfumes, level of eye contact, body language and other mannerisms, vocabulary, vocal tone, terms of respectful address, eligible schooling and career paths, duties at work and home, right to speak or vote or fight or drink alcohol, eligible romantic partners, marriage customs, literacy, property ownership, legal and religious status, and so on. Most importantly, gender is not a universal concept at any given time, and it is not a stable concept in any given place.

When carried out in humans, conflation of sex and gender constitutes a kind of biological determinism or bioessentialism that frequently denies the actual genders of the people involved. This is often violent, debilitating, socially repressive, or even deadly. If we are to avoid human exceptionalism as this book proposes, surely we should adhere to the established human distinction between sex and gender, regardless of which sort of animal we're discussing?

Obviously, the delimiting of gender expectations generates many opportunities to enact deeply iniquitous hierarchies based on a nonconsensually imposed gender binary (or trinary, in some cases). Undoing and moving past that legacy is the whole point of feminism. And here we have the author of a book about human exceptionalism celebrating a proposal to impose this same baggage onto non-human animals!

Webb in particular should already know better: Frans de waal, her mentor to whom this book is dedicated, wrote an entire book on the topic of animal gender that was published three years before this one, saying much of what I've said here. Yet Webb seems wholly incurious to explore this conflict of opinion further, despite having gone out of her way to broach this complex and messy topic in the first place.

Lack of linguistic self-awareness in a book about species self-awareness

Webb admits that her perspective in this book is a Western one, but she doesn't seem to have considered similar implications when it comes to the linguistics of gender. In conjunction with the Goodall quote from earlier, she strongly advocates that non-human animals should not be referred to as 'it' because 'we would never deem it appropriate to refer to another human being as "it"', so we should avoid the double standard.

But I happen to know Webb's premise is completely false because I speak some Finnish. This is a language in which the most commonly spoken singular third-person pronoun for another human being is none other than 'se', which literally means 'it'. Turns out I prefer the Finnish language for exactly this reason, because as mentioned earlier I've had many people confuse me for incorrect genders, which is a serious problem - and one that mostly disappears in Finnish, because I'm not being pointlessly misgendered every other sentence.

As for the second-most common singular third-person pronoun in Finnish? Well that would be 'hän', which literally means 'they'. Once again, I find this superior to Webb's insistence on an outdated and inadequate English-centric model in which 'they' is reserved only for groups of people, or for individuals of indeterminate gender.

Regarding those English staples of 'he' and 'she', Finnish has no equivalent for either one. Every human being is 'they' or 'it'. I vastly prefer all of this to English, which is part of why I think Webb's plan to formally impose English gender standards onto the entire animal kingdom is a really bad idea without much serious thought behind it. Because if we're talking about not treating ourselves as exceptional, a moment's reflection on the linguistic possibilities available among all existing human languages will show us that an English obsession with unnecessarily gendering every individual in every sentence is not a necessity, that in fact entire societies, nations, and linguistic groups get along just fine without it.

For the record, Finnish is not even the only language that omits gendered third-person pronouns. Have fun looking up the others!

I'm so weird

There's one more point to address before we leave linguistics behind. Early on, in a well-meaning attempt to highlight various forms of cognitive bias, Webb implicitly situates herself and possibly the reader as members of the WEIRD people, which she defines as 'Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic'. The thing is, though, I don't think she's really thought this acronym through before using it here. Western educations are hardly the only kind, and it's pretty insulting to imply otherwise as this acronym so casually does.

Furthermore, this is an acronym invented by liberals, who certainly do love to think of themselves as the experts on democracy. But liberalism and 'liberal democracy' are not synonyms for 'democracy' generally, but rather for 'capitalist democracy' specifically. Under capitalist democracies it is impossible for the average person to legally wield any political or economic power, because the average person is a worker, not a capitalist. A worker has no more power under a democracy of capitalists than a capitalist would've had under a council of lords at the height of feudalism. Should those capitalists have called themselves lords because they may have been in the room when royal proclamations were made?

There does exist a much more democratic form of democracy, one that is much more likely to be of use to any reader of this book: A workers' democracy, or what we commonly call 'socialism' or 'communism'. And this brings me to my final point about this book.

Capitalism is the central problem

Early on Webb states that human exceptionalism 'fuels our collective inertia and disempowerment in the face of unsustainable growth and production - trends that, though relatively recent, appear inevitable. People assume these are powerful forces that we can't possibly counteract. Corporate greed and deception, capitalist economics, and a lack of political will certainly play an outsize role. But we don't just need an overhaul of these institutions; we need a new relationship to the world. The process of building and sustaining that relationship does not proceed entirely from the top down. It can be enacted only by individuals who are motivated by another vision and experience of what the good life might be, who can reimagine this richer relationship and are already bringing it into being.'

This is a great start; I agree with nearly all of it, for it is nearly all the sort of thing a communist would say.

My worry is that Webb is downplaying the central and historically unique role of capitalism in driving forward all extant ecocides, by several orders of magnitude compared to all prior human economic systems.

If we as humans are to care deeply about our non-human relatives, that must start with preventing their extinctions, and this in turn must start with ending capitalism. Nothing on this planet that we care about will survive - including ourselves - if we fail to eliminate capitalism and build socialism. Our planet's situation is so dire it is genuinely difficult to exaggerate. We are, after all, in the exponential ramping phase of this planet's sixth mass extinction, and we have been placed here unequivocally and exclusively by capitalism. For all the good intent of Webb's book, it does not even come close to capturing the material urgency of the situation, nor does it even name the necessary material solutions - specifically, socialism and communism.

Authors like Webb need to name these names, just as they need to shame capitalism and its buddies, liberalism and fascism. Otherwise it's just vague hopes and vibes. To worry about speciesism without prioritizing the dismantling of capitalism is like worrying about dying of a disease while a stick of dynamite runs down its fuse on the floor right next to you.

A final example to drive the point home. At one point Webb says: 'Yet Indigenous communities today are understandably cautious about the misappropriation of their cultural concepts and ideas. As just one example, plants are now being taken from the Amazon and patented by pharmaceutical companies without compensating the local Indigenous peoples who have contributed vital medicinal knowledge about them.' As if the problem is misappropriation or a lack of compensation, rather than the rapid extraction and extinction of all life from this planet under capitalism, its commodification of the sacred, its patenting and hoarding of what is taken freely and inconsiderately from the world, all for the sake of making utterly meaningless numbers go up for the powertrip playtimes of genocidal capitalists.

Final thoughts

Two stars for the author's general good intent and some interesting facts, ideas, and anecdotes. A third star for the importance of the topic matter and because she genuinely cares about it. If she works on the issues I've described in this review I'll look forward to reading her next book without skimming.

As it stands, I'd say this book is worth reading if you are either learning about speciesism and human supremacy for the first time, or if you absolutely cannot get enough of the topic. Otherwise you probably won't find much here that's new or developed enough to really be useful. For a stronger but longer intro to these topics, I'd recommend working your way through Frans de Waal's catalogue - forward or backward doesn't really matter, it's all good. Webb's choice in mentor was impeccable.

For an introduction to the material emergencies of capitalism that I think Webb critically fails to highlight in this book, read The sixth extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert, The Jakarta method by Vincent Bevins, and The capital order by Clara Mattei. For an intro to the systems needed to reach for a better future, I recommend Red star over the third world by Vijay Prashad and Red deal by Red Nation.

Now I've spent more time writing this review than I did reading the book, so hopefully someone out there finds it useful.

[Mark Przybylski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tremendous work. Starts with a deep dive on humankind’s inflated sense of superiority, that our intelligence and uniqueness rightfully earns us a spot atop the pyramid of life, and the costs that accompany this mindset. Webb illustrates why we behave this way, how we are unconsciously keeping the narrative alive and all that could be learned if we took better note of the world and species around us…much of which requires ample humility and the ability to “unlearn” in the process.

Just a few of the many ideas that have left me with continued reflection;

- The tallest human-made building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, is 828 meters tall, 531x taller than the average human. Termites can construct mounds up to 9 meters, about 914x taller than the average termite. All of this accomplished without tools or fossil fuels. They also construct their mounds with natural ventilation, so unique, that architects used this design in what is now the largest office/shopping complex in Zimbabwe. Similar “biomimicry” can be found in wind turbine blades (from humpback whale fins), bullet trains in Japan (from kingfisher birds) and even Velcro (from those pesky burrs).
- Are plants conscious? What does consciousness even mean? In one experiment, sensitive plants were dropped from a short height. The plants retracted and curled their leaves, a typical threat response. But after several repeats, the plants stopped reacting, habituating to the drop after learning it wasn’t a threat. But plants are brainless and lack neurons…should an example like this give us pause to reconsider learning and memory?
- By cell count, the vast majority of what you might consider “your" body is not actually yours. It contains trillions of microorganisms, outnumbering your human cells by ten to one. The number of bacteria in your gut alone exceeds the number of stars in our galaxy. The number in your mouth is comparable to the total number of human beings who have ever lived on earth! If one were to remove all these microbes from the body and put them on a scale, they'd weigh in at about three pounds, the same weight as an average human brain. And research suggests they can wield as much influence as the brain. Your ability to solve complex memory and learning tasks is predicted by the health of your gut flora. Your mood, too, depends in part on the composition of your gut bacteria (as suggested by the colloquial "gut feeling").
- In the broad sweep of human history, Western culture is among the youngest and most inexperienced. Yet many of its hallmarks, including beliefs in human exceptionalism, seem simply a "matter of fact." Cultural and economic systems (like capitalism) that center human interests appear so given. However, if we condense earth's 4.6-billion-year history into a 46-year timeline, humans have existed for only four hours, and the Industrial Revolution began just one minute ago. Despite our attachment to our current way of life, it is relatively new, and it's important to recognize that alternative, sustainable ways of living have existed and thrived for millennia.

So what are we to do? “This growing and diverse movement goes by many names—biocentrism, posthumanism, new animism. In reality, it is less a formal movement than a shared vision among those who defy the commodification of the natural world and the tendency to mechanize life itself. Instead, they seek a more profound understanding of and connection with the earth and its myriad sentient inhabitants. They apprentice themselves to the land and local ecologies rather than attempting to master and control them. They suspect that we must eventually begin to scale down our technological ambitions, our blind commitment to the lure of progress. These are humans who are open to unlearning. Who are continually remembering. Who have, to borrow Robinson Jeffers's phrase, "fallen in love outward" with the world around them. What might the world look like beyond human exceptionalism?”

[Andrea McDowell · Rating 5 out of 5]

You'd think with all my nattering on about hierarchies being the root of all evil, the algorithm might have twigged me on to a new book about human exceptionalism. Somehow, no. I found this one the old fashioned way: browsing a local bookstore.

I didn't learn a lot that was genuinely new to me -- it's a subject I've been thinking and reading about for a long time -- but I did get a whole lot of citations and nice quotes. To sum up: humans are not as smart as they think they are, and other animals are a whole lot smarter than we think; not only are we not special, our belief that we are is killing everything, including ourselves, and fueling our most pressing social problems; other societies and civilizations have not had this trouble; it is not innate to our species' biology or psychology, but a peculiar and destructive hang-up for western civilized (or WEIRD) people.

Darwin would likely be surprised by human exceptionalism's lingering grip on the public imagination today. But even he foresaw it: "The main conclusions arrived at in this work--namely, that man in descended from some lowly organized form--will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many persons." Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that scientific efforts to assert human exceptionalism redoubled in the decades that followed.

I've often wondered if the implications of Darwinian theory ramped up the human superiority complex. Intriguingly, recent research suggests that human exceptionalism is a worldview we cling to when threatened. The "Ascent of Man" measure was developed by Nour Kteily and colleagues at Northwestern University based on notions of humans rising to the top of a biological hierarchy. In one study, they showed participants the famous image of the five silhouettes proceeding from quadrupedal hominid ancestors to bipedal modern humans. Participants then rated their perceptions of the "evolvedness" of various human groups--such as Americans, Arabs, and South Koreans--listed beneath the image. Kteily found that the presence of threats primed participants to assert their in-group ... as a hierarchically unique or superior form of life. ... The more we are made aware of our vulnerability and threatened by animality, the more we must assert our dominance and superiority. As Melanie Challenger, author of the 2021 book How to Be Animal, points out, "This generates a curious paradox, of course, if we perceive being animal as a threat in an of itself." (pp. 56-7)

I'm not surprised by this study, but I wonder how replicable it is between societies. Would indigenous people cling to human superiority when threatened? Or just those of us schooled in human exceptionalism?

...as we've continually defined and redefined what it means to be human, we've excluded certain groups from moral consideration and justified their mistreatment. And the problems with that have never been limited to other species.

Are women human? This question may sound ludicrous today, but it has been asked in some form many times throughout civilization's history. In antiquity, women, foreigners, and others deviating from the dominant white-male Greek ideal weren't actually conceptualized as people at all. ... It was often argued that these subordinate human groups were primarily constituted by their physical bodies rather than by anything rational. Aristotle (in)famously refers to the female character as "a sort of natural deficiency."

This illustrates a fundamental point: the worldview of human exceptionalism has never placed all humans on a par. Rather, it has historically denied full humanity to certain human groups, subordinating others on the basis of their supposedly animal-like qualities. As with the Differential Imperative, this compulsion to demarcate the "human" has sanctioned exploitation along not only species but also ethnic, racial, gender, sexuality, disability, class, and other lines. It's telling that throughout history, human groups thought to lack the attributes in which other species were supposedly deficient--reason, culture, intelligible language, morality, technology, and the like--were considered "subhuman." (p. 68)

Is it a surprise that, during a global climate and biodiversity crisis where we need to reimagine our relationship to the rest of nature on a more equal footing, the political ideology most determined to extract every bit of oil, coal and gas no matter the cost to anyone or anything is also reasserting in the most noxious and rage-filled terms the subhumanity of women, immigrants, queer people, disabled people, etc?

This was cool:

My colleagues and I have found not only that chimpanzees console each other following conflicts (a behaviour indicative of empathy) but also that individuals vary markedly in this tendency. ...Research in the wild also suggests that the behaviour may not be universal. One chimpanzee community living in the Mahale Mountains of Tanzania appears to console, while another in the Budongo Forest of Uganda does not.... beyond material cultures (population differences in behaviours like tool use), chimpanzees also have social cultures ... as is the case with humans. ... Too often, we look at chimpanzees as a "species" rather than as the members of diverse communities and individuals that they actually are. Why should this nuanced outlook be reserved for humans alone? (p. 83)

I guess that's what happens when you see other species as furry or many-legged or winged robots, running a program called "instinct."

One of Juniper's most loveable qualities is her distinct and obvious preference for Echo over me. If you have a pet I'm sure you've observed something similar. Echo receives boundless and overwhelming empathy. I do not. It can be extremely funny. Echo is crying? Juniper wraps her little pencil legs around their neck and insists on licking every tear away. I'm crying? Meh. Human, I need a snack. Can we play fetch? I'm taking a nap. I mean....

Let's now revisit the common objection that we can never really know what other species experience.... The truth is, we may never be 100 per cent sure. And so it is with all subjective experiences.

...Just imagine being on a boat rocking back and forth as the ocean swells intensify. You go out to the deck for some fresh air and see someone--a total stranger--pale, sweating, and retching. There is good reason to believe that they are seasick, even if they assure you to the contrary. ... Likewise, when a dog yelps after stepping on a wasp, limps, and protects his injured foot, we assume that he experiences something more than a simple, painless reflex....

Of course, there is always the risk that we might misread the behaviour of the individual in question and incorrectly interpret their experience. There are many mysteries in animal (including human) behaviour and being: it's part of the beauty and trouble of living together. But most of the time, it works pretty well. And surely it's better than assuming we can infer nothing about the private feelings of those around us. Yet we seem to require more certainty when it comes to other species. ... That demand for perfection of evidence appears to be a subtle way of adhering to human exceptionalism--a contemporary myth often cloaked in scientific rigour.

According to the founder of cognitive ethology, David Griffin, "The tendency to demand absolute certainty before accepting any evidence about mental experiences of animals reflects a sort of double standard." (pp. 147-8)

I don't have much to add here that I haven't already written elsewhere, but I highly recommend it. It's a well-deserved and long-overdue blow to the human ego. If it helps, it's written by a Harvard primatologist, so if you like hierarchical credentials, it's got them.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love it when a book can change how I think about things. This book derives from the author's Harvard class of the same name. Basically, it's a challenge for us to unlearn how we see the world from an anthropocentric lens, where, as Pythagoras says "Man is the measure of all things." She does a wonderful job of uncovering so many inherent biases about the supposed exceptionalism of humans and instead shows how connected we are to the wider web of animals and plants.

I have really started to think about how our habit of creating hierarchies among humans, other animals, and plants is directly related to other toxic hierarchies like male supremacy and white supremacy.

The author covers a lot of ground, biology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, etc. In short, I loved it!

[Gerben Bruinsma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ik hou van boeken die me proberen om de wereld uit een ander perspectief te laten zien. Dit is een boek waarbij dat voor mij het geval was. in het begin dacht ik ja oke dat snap ik wel maar ik vind het wat overdreven, maar gedurende het boek werd ik er steeds meer in meegenomen en enthousiaster. Een appel voor nederigheid richting het denken van anderen om ons heen, maar ook in het specifiek inheemse volkeren en de natuur. zo veel van ieders wereldbeeld zorgt er voor dat we menen dat we meer begrijpen dan we eigenlijk doen. telkens als ik persoonlijk ergens op inzoom blijkt het onderwerp zo veel rijker en complexer dan ik initieel dacht. sommige mensen vinden die complexiteit vervelend en voelen een gevoel van onzekerheid er bij, maar ik vind het een van de mooiste bronnen van wat het in houdt mens te zijn.

[Jonathan Karron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very thought provoking. Definitely written by an academic but dumbed down enough for someone like me to understand (I do teach at a university, but marketing, not biology or sociology). Seems like this author and Yuval Noah Harari could be writing partners (love his books).

Really makes you question a lot of assumptions about human superiority since we measure things against our metrics and not on other animals playing fields and where and how they are superior to humans. Worth a read for sure and I think it’ll have me questioning some
wide held assumptions in the future.

[Francisco Valdes]

A book that articulates abundantly some loose thoughts and reflections I've had.
Human, humility and humble. Three words tied in etimology but also conducts and practices that we as a species would do well to tie together.

[Jeff · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tons of facts and anecdotes are brought to bear to make the author's argument. I cannot imagine anyone who needs that much convincing regarding this simple premise. For those that do, I can't imagine them plowing through all of this.

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this sociological/biological/philosophical/political hybrid. Will return later for a thorough summary.

[Cassidy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book highlights an important topic in our society today and how we can better our views and ideas, creating much needed change in our world.

[Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional. Definitely one of the best books of 2025.

[Tracy Kaneshiro · Rating 5 out of 5]

I appreciated the things this book had to teach me and hope that many more people read it with open minds.

[Matt Berkowitz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Books like this are disappointing to me because (1) I agree with the general premise and think the premise is extremely important, but (2) I consider this book to have a pretty weak epistemic status—that is, it frequently relies on cherry-picked, poor quality or misinterpreted evidence, overstates conclusions based on the available evidence, and often ignores what the weight of evidence/scientific consensus is on a topic in favour of a more fringe take. In this case, the general premise is that human exceptionalism/supremacy is an often blind ideology that humans embrace, leading us to disregard the well-being of non-human animals and harming our own understanding of nature, leading to deleterious societal and environmental repercussions. This is an important message, and the author should be commended for writing an engaging book with endless examples that support her thesis.

Unfortunately, the overall message is contaminated by the aforementioned epistemic problems. Here are some examples:

-Webb approvingly cites Stephen Jay Gould for his “exposition” of “racist biases in human intelligence research” (p. 70). Webb states, “For years, studies on IQ purported to demonstrate that certain human groups—namely white Western Europeans—were innately superior in intellectual ability.” This is a charged and inaccurate way of summarizing what such IQ research found, which is that different ethnic/racial groups had different mean IQs. There is a clear scientific consensus on this issue, but there is no consensus about the cause of these differences. It is true that some (likely racist) scholars did posit genetic explanations to explain this gap, but the existence of the gap is not seriously debated by experts. And Gould’s criticism of IQ as a construct—specifically in his book, The Mismeasure of Man—has been excoriated by psychometricians and other experts alike. Citing Gould on this topic would be like citing antivaccine doctors on the safety of vaccines or climate change denialists about human-caused climate change. Gould is really a terrible source on this subject.

-Webb claims that “glyphosate, one of the world’s most commonly used herbicides, is interfering with the navigational abilities of honey bees and other pollinators?” (p. 81). There are some small, often underpowered, lab-based studies (something Webb often criticizes in other contexts in favour of natural, ecologically valid studies) supporting Webb’s claim, but much larger, semi-field studies that fail to show this toxicological effect. Perhaps Webb’s error here is because her expertise is in primatology, not toxicology. Either way, she has selectively presented evidence to support her thesis and ignore evidence to the contrary. As an aside, Webb constantly criticizes human exceptionalists for their confirmation bias, but Webb could validly be criticized for the same confirmation bias in the opposite direction in her (laudable) effort to refute such human exceptionalism.

-In discussing bird tetrachromacy (the ability to see through four cones in the eye and thus a greater range of colour), she extrapolated on some legitimate findings to conclude: “meaning they [birds] can probably see entire dimensions of colors we can’t even imagine”—i.e., asserting a broad qualitative jump rather than the ability to perceive a broader colour gamut due to tetrachromacy.

-In the introduction, Webb summarizes the state of the world's forests as such: “Thirty percent of global forest cover has been cleared, another 20 percent is deteriorated, and most of the rest is now fragmented, leaving only about 15 percent intact.” This ignores that, despite tropical forests still being cut down at alarming forests, temperate forest deforestation has been declining for quite some time. As Pinker says in Enlightenment Now, “the world’s largest tropical forest, the
Amazon, peaked in 1995, and from 2004 to 2013 the rate fell by four-fifths”. This progress is an important part of the story. By only summarizing overall deforestation in the way Webb has, she misleadingly communicates the story.

Hopefully you see the picture. Moreover, Webb also implicitly (and sometimes explictly) attempts to draw a causal connection beyond human exceptionalism and environmental problems. I can buy the claim that such exceptionalism has exacerbated certain problems (especially our treatment of non-human animals in factory farms), but I again think she's overstating. For example, climate change seems better explained as due to humanity discovering a cheap fuel a century and a half ago, which we built our civilization with, and our struggling to overturn the global entire energy infrastructure with alternative fuels—replete with incument political and economic interests, and technologies that not been fully developed.

This might still be worth a loose read if you’re not too bothered by frequent empirical blunders and can appreciate the overall message. To me, I wish a more empirically accurate and epistemically defensible book was written in support of such an important message.

[R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book. I really, really liked this and I learned a lot of fascinating facts about a wide variety of animals. I would love to find and read more like this one.

[Mike Wright]

I found this book to be disingenuous:

"When I began exploring Indigenous knowledge, I realized that much of what I had come to understand about “science” needed to be reevaluated. Many of us are taught to think of science as settled fact, rather than the great, flawed, ongoing process of knowledge construction that it is. For years, I accepted certain ideas without question, including that science was value-free—a series of cut-and-dried eternal truths. I believed that science was entirely divorced from the culture in which it operates. I’ve now come to see that one of the greatest myths within Western science is that it is immune to cultural influence."

There's no way a Harvard scientist could have obtained a PhD without realizing that science isn't settled fact and culture impacts science. Unless she read indigenous science in her first year of undergraduate studies, this statement is ridiculous.

[Jr · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was really eye opening and I enjoyed learning the author's perspective on humanity's place in the great chain of being. I think however that one can still believe in human exceptionalism yet simultaneously show and feel awe, humility and respect for nature, plants, animals, etc.---they are not mutually exclusive in my view. On some level doesn't the author prove humans ARE exceptional given her numerous moral judgements made throughout the book?