Erityisin eläin: Myytti ihmisyyden ylivertaisuudesta

by Christine E. Webb, Kaisa Kortekallio (Translator), Anniina Piiparinen (Narrator)

Vaikuttava tietokirja ihmislajin asemasta suhteessa muuhun luontoon

Ihmislajia vaivaa yleinen käsitys omasta ylivertaisuudestaan muihin eläimiin nähden. Erityinen eläin osoittaa, että käsityksemme älykkyydestämme ja merkityksestämme ei ole synnynnäistä, vaan se opitaan ja omaksutaan aikuisiässä erityisesti länsimaisessa kulttuurissa.

Teos ehdottaa, että vain tästä uskomuksesta luopumalla voimme pysäyttää planeettamme tuhoamisen ja turvata elinkelpoisen ympäristön muille lajeille ja tuleville sukupolville. Christine Webb osoittaa tässä hienossa teoksessaan, että ilmastonmuutos ja pandemiat, kuten covid-19, ovat seurausta harhaluulosta, että olemme luonnon yläpuolella.

Christine Webb on tohtori ja opettaa evoluutiobiologiaa Harvardissa. Hän on erikoistunut tutkimaan kädellisten käyttäytymistä. Erityisin eläin pohjautuu hänen tutkimukseensa, joka liittyy ihmislajin ja muiden lajien ja luonnon väliseen suhteeseen.

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

Audiobook

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. :)

[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.

[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.

[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 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's serious. And the first thing we need to change is our mindset about our role in this world. 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 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.

[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".

[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.

[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.

[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!

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Doctor Moss · Rating 5 out of 5]

What makes humans different from other animals? Maybe it’s our insistence that we are different and superior.

Christine Webb’s book really could be two books — one on the scientific bias toward anthropocentrism despite the evidence against it, and the other on the broader, cultural theme of anthropocentrism, the damage it has done, and the urgency to outgrow it. The two have a reciprocal relationship, the scientific bias both reflecting and reinforcing the cultural “arrogance.”

Webb herself is a primatologist, and a student and colleague of Frans de Waal. She follows a similar path to de Waal’s, learning to understand and respect the intelligence of primates through her research. In fact, she dedicates this book to de Waal.

Webb speaks of a “differential imperative” at both the cultural and scientific levels — a compulsion to draw a hard line between human behavior, cognition, and moral standing, and those of other animals, to complete the sentence, “The human being is the only animal that . . . “

That formulation captures a feel of how scientific research inherits cultural bias. The science is set up to validate the cultural stance. And her formulation certainly fits, as she recounts, a history of claims about the uniqueness of human beings, whether that is identified as rationality, language, tool-use, morality, or other merits.

What is the origin of the cultural bias? The Bible? But the Bible is an artifact of its time. How did what it reflects come about? Webb considers the possibility that the emergence of agricultural living and domestication of animals marks the turning point but concludes that the story is a complex one with no easy conclusions.

In scientific studies of primate intelligence, apes and monkeys are typically given human-derived tasks and challenges. Koko the gorilla was challenged to learn human sign language. Chimpanzees are tested by facial recognition tasks and arithmetic skills. Even more “basic” skill tests such as finding food in hidden places, or navigating through mazes are human contrivances, and the results are measured against human performance. Chimps test out as “equivalent to three year old humans”, for example, on some cognitive skill tests, as if their intelligence and ours were the same, just less advanced.

It’s far less common to try to learn a gorilla’s own communication skills to converse with her, to solve problems and meet challenges as they are presented in animals’ actual natural habitats, where, in fact, humans may perform at far worse levels. Imagine humans tested on their abilities to navigate dense jungles, or to find food in the wild, or to secure themselves against predators. Even social and “interpersonal” skills like resolving conflicts within communities, navigating and respecting social hierarchies — chimpanzees and bonobos do these things masterfully and in ways we don’t easily comprehend or appreciate.

We also stack the deck against animals by testing them in lab settings, with bars and other restraints between ourselves and an animal that has been taken from or has never seen his natural habitat or his natural community. Stress, depression, boredom — all the things that we might think would negatively affect an animal’s performance. We lay all of that on top of them and then proclaim their cognitive level.

Scientific research has always served as a convenient cover for how we treat animals, as well. Until remarkably recent times, animals were thought not to have conscious lives, not to sense pain or stress as we do. And still we persist with factory farms, inhumane killing methods, laboratory research . . . and don’t even think about lobsters boiling alive. Sorry.

It’s not just a moral argument, that animals other than humans possess the attributes that make them count morally, and so that we ought to treat those animals with moral respect. It is also that our understanding of those animals is obstructed by our insistence that they don’t possess those attributes, that they aren’t intelligent, aren’t conscious, etc. That insistence prevents us from adopting peer or intersubjective relationships in studies of animals — something controversially overcome by Jane Goodall and other primatologists and researchers of animal behavior and cognition.

The results of those studies revealed what had been hidden from more “objective” studies — patterns of cooperation, altruistic behavior, “political” behavior, and more. Webb writes, “This kind of mutual engagement with the animals offered insights that were impossible to obtain in any other way.”

It’s not coincidental that in situations where we routinely do adopt peer or intersubjective relationships with other animals, e.g., with pets, that we are loathe to deny them those attributes of consciousness, emotion, and intelligence. We just see them differently because we grant them intersubjective or peer standing. We see them with us together in a world where their actions and lives count differently and appear differently, by virtue of the relationships we have with them. Just as Goodall and the others pioneered in their studies of primates.

Ethnology and other research to understand the behavior of other human cultures has long embraced empathy and intersubjectivity. But somehow not research to understand the behavior of other animals. That’s where the “differential imperative” rises up, with the charge of anthropomorphism.

But to adopt an intersubjective footing with other animals doesn’t entail anthropomorphizing. On the contrary it can promote recognition of difference, that, for example, a baboon’s intelligence is different in kind (not degree) from human intelligence. Just as the ethnographer can recognize differences between their own and other cultures’ ways of expressing friendships or hierarchies so can the primatologist or other animal researcher recognize different ways of acting intelligently, reconciling conflict, etc. among primates or other animals.

Repositioning human beings within nature is not unprecedented. After all, as Webb points out in later parts of her book, Indigenous peoples have not followed the same path in their understandings of the world. Ecologically centered understandings are abundant and have long histories, successful histories in terms of maintaining cultures and lives.

Webb isn’t romantically supposing either that Indigenous cultures escape anthropocentrism unanimously and absolutely or that we, steeped in Western science and culture, should adopt Indigenous worldviews. Those worldviews are not our own. Rather she proposes, similarly to Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass, that we adopt complementary perspectives on the world, “two-eyed seeing”, as a way forward. If we cannot truly adopt a complementary worldview, we can at least respect it and give it space to contribute, as opposed to dismissing Indigenous knowledge and perspectives as “unscientific.”

Webb ends with a broad cultural message, that our anthropocentrism has not served us well. It has provided a barrier between ourselves and the natural world, reinforcing the attitude that the world is a “resource” for our use and consumption. As she said near the beginning of the book, “The arrogant ape is thus not a species or a culture or even an individual—it is a way of acting and moving and being in relation to the rest of Nature.”

I like to think I’m aware of and critical of the anthropocentrism that Webb is calling attention to and criticizing. But as I read her book, I realized how poor my own record is. On the science side, I do think of ape, and other animal intelligence, as different in degree from human intelligence instead of something unique and different, not more or less. I think of communication among animals as “like” but less complex or more primitive or even underdeveloped compared to human language.

And on the cultural side, there’s even more work to do.

In stepping out of her role as scientist to address these larger cultural (and political) issues, Webb might be criticized for getting out of her lane. She’s a scientist, not a politician or culture critic. I don’t really think that’s a fair criticism. After all, everyone is “political” and “cultural”. We all have voices, and hers is informed by her work as a scientist. A more valid point of criticism would be one that casts doubt on the relevance of her scientific research to those larger issues. But that criticism needs an argument.

[Diederik · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you don’t have an open mind, pick another book.

If you do, let yourself be surprised by the examples laid out in this book. They are uncomfortable in the best way: memorable, designed to test how you know what you think you know—without gotchas or sermons.

I really wish everyone in the world had read—and fully understood—this book. It invites humility, shows that we don’t (can’t?) know everything, and it challenges a human-centric perspective. It’s not about cynicism; it’s a call to intellectual honesty and curiosity, grounded in biology, psychology, and evidence.

As a non-native English speaker, the language sometimes struck me as unnecessarily creative, but it expanded my vocabulary and rarely got in the way.

I will recommend this book to anyone with an interest in biology, philosophy, science, or humans. Read it if you value changing your mind over being “right,” and slower judgments over loud certainty.

[Davis · Rating 2 out of 5]

Drawn out and repetitive. Little actual sustenance.

[Jonathan Pierce · Rating 3 out of 5]

File under: did I mention my personal anecdotes?

[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.

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a recent library checkout that I had half an eye on review-bombing from the start.

Why? The authorial mini-bio on the back flap dust cover says Webb is a “broadly trained primatologist.” I infer she’s implying many others are narrowly trained? “Arrogant ape, heal thyself!”

Then, less than 10 pages in, after noting Linneaean binomial nomenclature had us originally as “Homo sapiens,” we’re now “homo sapiens sapiens,” the “wisest of the wise.” She also knows the subspecies nomenclature isn’t used by scientists today.

Second, while climate change and the Sixth Mass Extinction is indeed a crisis, there’s no guarantee that seeing animals in better eyes will of itself avert potential disaster.

Third, to go beyond another reviewer, if chimpanzees were in our place, they might express chimpanzee exceptionalism.

And, for someone broadly trained, they’re not necessarily broadly read. It’s weird to not see Peter Singer cited, or even mentioned at all, in a book like this. Actually, implying she’s narrowly read, whether too harsh or not, might not be right. She quotes Roger Scruton and David Chalmers among philosophers. Maybe she doesn’t reference Singer because she’s afraid of looking really radical? But? He popularized the word “speciesism.”

At this point, I looked at the table of contents. Natch, there’s a full chapter on Indigenous points of view. To tackle one item from bad science and the Indigenous angle? First, trees don’t exchange information with each other directly via their roots; fungi on roots of one tree do that with fungi on roots of another. Second, American Indians of the Pacific Northwest may have long held such ideas, but were they scientifically researched? No.

This leads to a larger issue of certain biological scientists like Webb, along with certain cultural anthropologists — the desire to view Indigenous people as Roussellian noble savages. In reality, paleo-American Indians indiscriminately killed large megafauna 25,000 years ago, with no “western” prompting. Today, some American Indians drill for oil and even own tribal refineries. (Caveat words like “often” and “many” abound in this chapter.) Also (and I may have missed it earlier) I note the capitalization of “Nature” at this point. Next, she cites Vine Deloria Jr., the man who claims the Sioux have always been there (his dad even more so), even though in reality, they only crossed to the west side of the Missouri River in numbers at the same time Lewis and Clark were going up it.

A lot of this was intensified by COVID, of course.

Her story about how the Yupik perceive actions of bowhead whales as deciding whether or not to die is indeed mythological.

AND? It’s also speciesist. It’s humans saying “our group of whale-hunters is ‘worthy’ enough for this bowhead whale to sacrifice itself for us.” Boom. I sank your battleship.

Finally, what dropped it to 1 star? A head fake plus misframing in the first chapter. Webb said speciesism tied with ecological catastrophe, but never further discusses either the Sixth Mass Extinction or the climate crisis. The misframing is that the latter will hit homo sapiens worse than many other flora and fauna, in all likelihood. Man the urban animal, to properly translate Aristotle, can’t just migrate a modern megalopolis.

[Caroline Ky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Livre extraordinaire, je mettrais 6 étoiles si je pouvais.
Description :
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.

[Deborah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m so sold on this concept that it’s preaching to the choir, really. (In fact, I often find myself thinking that the only chance the earth and its suffering non-human inhabitants have is for something of a non-nuclear or asteroid-from-space level of violence to take out a huge percentage of the allegedly big-brained homo sapiens.) Anyhoo, this is an academic and carefully considered look at the long history of humans’ assumption of superiority over all other life forms and the entitlement that has given them to wholesale exploit and eliminate. Recent decades of science have increasingly revealed the myriad kinds of intelligence animals (even plants) possess. It’s shocking to consider that great scientific thinkers of the past regarded animals as some kind of automata that felt no pain. Descartes obviously spent no time on a farm, and anyone who has ever shared their life with a companion animal knows there’s a being in there, with intelligence and emotions (even a sense of humour), and that they most definitely feel pain. That’s enough of me on my pulpit. This compassionate survey from primatologist and professor Christine Webb firmly knocks man off the pedestal on which he’s placed himself and relocates him (us) in the intricate, interconnected web of life on earth.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anthropocentrism - the word is probably used 100 times in this relatively digestible 265-paged book. Webb examines our « human centered » cultural lens from a three perspectives. The first is biological perspective - exploring the super-refined adaptations of other species and their unique intelligences while highlighting the stupidity of trying to compare everything to humans. The evidence cited is delightful. The second is technical - how technology, engineering and innovation benefit from examining Nature and imitating it. The third is cultural - how non-western societies view themselves in relation to other life-forms dictates not just how they treat animals and plants but also how they view inanimate parts of nature; how they view themselves in the web of life rather than a at the top of a pyramid.
While some of Webb’s writing can flirt with self-congratulation, her ideas are well-expressed and well-illustrated. Like-minded souls will deeply enjoy this book, though I fear those who might benefit the most in considering the words from these pages may never pick up this book.

[Erin Krauss · Rating 4 out of 5]

If a reader has any experience with Colonialism, Feminism and the like, much of this book won't come as a surprise. However, the author cleverly ties many of these 'isms into their thesis with deftness and clarity that makes this book accessible, and I'd argue, somewhat unique. Webb's clear understanding of intersectionalism, albeit through a biological lens, is a refreshing take & one I was glad to read. The work is heavily cited but still easy to read & the author's tone is even, at times, playful.

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

The main question of this book is so interesting and so worth exploring: are humans really the superior species? Our false hierarchy places man on top based on the results of human developed tests and metric on metrics inflicted upon caged/restricted animals who has been removed from their natural habitats and placed under duress. How valid are these "results?" And there are many different kinds of intelligence ...academic, emotional, biological, spiritual...While some of the book gets bogged down in details of experiments and in the end did not fully convince me of its premise, it did make me look at the world differently--and what more can you ask for from a book? Some of the other points that will stick with me...The world view of human exceptionalism has never put all humans on par. So no surprise that there is a strong correlation between white supremacists, human exceptionalism and the mistreatment of animals and people considered "other. A few amazing factoids...Likens can be successfully resuscitated after ten years of dehydration and certain jellyfish possess the extraordinary capacity to revert themselves to a younger state. Some philosophical points to ponder: Nature is not more complex than we think, it is more complex than we can even imagine. Human mind is not designed to solve the environmental crisis because of our tendency towards "acceptance of inevitability."

[Alaina Ploski · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are certain books I wish were part of required reading for everyone, and this is one of them. The Arrogant Ape is an extremely important book, in that it helps to shape an expanded worldview respectful, mindful, and awe-inducing toward other species. Humans have always centered themselves, and that centrism has cost us and the planet. This is one of the best books I’ve ever read and I highly recommend it. It is well-written, zeitgeist-disrupting, and essential to personal and societal growth.