If Humans and Chimps Are 15 Percent Genetically Different, What Difference Does That Make?

Think about how often you've heard it said that the genetic difference between human beings and chimpanzees is only slightly more than 1 percent, and therefore humans are 99 percent similar to chimps.  It is also said that this proves that chimps--and also bonobos--are our closest living evolutionary relatives.  This seems to be confirmed by the fact that chimpanzees and bonobos are more genetically similar to humans than to gorillas.  This 1 percent difference between humans and chimps fits the evolutionary timeline of five to eight million years since humans and chimps diverged from their last common ancestor.

But now an article published last May in Nature (Yoo et al., 2025) reports that a complete sequencing of ape genomes shows that the genetic difference between humans and chimps is a lot greater than 1 percent--more like 15 percent!  And yet perhaps I shouldn't say this article "reports" this because if you read the main article, you won't see this claim of a 15 percent difference.  You have to go to the Nature website and print out the "Supplementary Data" for the article, and even then, you have to work through the technical jargon to find the 15 percent difference.  Casey Luskin has posted a helpful article at the Discovery Institute website that digs deep into the "Supplementary Data" to uncover this remarkable finding.  You would think that such a surprising discovery would be prominently announced in Nature and in press releases: "The Chimp-Human Genetic Difference Is Not 1% But 15%!"  I think Luskin is right to suggest that the editors at Nature must have worked hard to hide this finding because it refutes the popular claim about "only a 1% difference" separating humans and chimps.  

Luskin says this refutes one of the "icons of evolution," as Jonathan Wells called them--that is, widely believed assertions about evolution that the proponents of "intelligent design theory" and "young-Earth creationism" deny.  It's not surprising, therefore, that creationists like Ken Ham have cited Luskin's article as proving that the creationists are right to deny that there is any common evolutionary ancestry linking humans and apes.  Ham explains that Bible teaches us that God created the "ape kind" and the "humankind" separately and created humans as a unique kind made in the image of God.

And yet I don't see that this newly discovered "15% difference" provides any support for the intelligent design theorists or the creationists in their denial of evolutionary science.

But first we need to understand how this new research allows us to calculate genetic difference and similarity.  The title of the article in Nature is "Complete Sequency of Ape Genomes."  The emphasis is on "complete," because the first human and ape genome sequences were incomplete.  They excluded extremely repetitive sequences and large-scale structural differences such as inversions and duplications of genomic sequences.  So the first reports of only 1% differences between human and chimp genomes were based on incomplete drafts of the genomes.  But now the complete sequency in this article allows for a fuller comparison of similarities and differences in the sequences.

The authors found two kinds of differences--"gap divergence" and "single nucleotide variation" (SNV).

Luskin prepared this figure to illustrate the difference between "SNVs" and "Gaps" between two genomes.  Gaps represent nucleotides or segments of nucleotides that don't exist in one of the genomes.  SNVs represent places where the nucleotides are different for the two genomes.  In this illustration, we have 30 nucleotides of the target genome with 3 SNVs and 9 gaps relative to the query genome.  So SNV divergence is 10%, and gap divergence is 30%, which means a total divergence of 40%.

If you go to the Supplemental Data for the Yoo et al. article, you will see that Figure III.12 shows the SNVs in comparing the genomes for humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans--the four "great ape" species who belong to the Hominidae family.  When the human genome is the "target" genome, the "gap divergence" for the gorilla genome is 27.3 percent, for the Sumatran orangutan it's 16.5 percent, for the bonobo it's 14.4 percent, and for the chimpanzee it's 13.3 percent. 

Figure III.11 shows the SNV divergences, which are 2 percent for the gorilla, 3.6 percent for the Sumatran orangutan, 1.6 percent for the bonobo, and 1.6 percent for the chimpanzee.

If we add the gap divergences to the SNV differences, we get these total degrees of difference between human and ape genomes: 29.3 percent for the gorilla, 20.1 percent for the Sumatran orangutan, 16 percent for the bonobo, and 14.9 percent for the chimpanzee.  That's how we get the estimate of almost 15 percent difference between the chimp and human genomes, which is a lot higher than the purported 1 percent difference.  

It should be noted that these comparisons are for the 44 non-sex chromosomes in the human genome--that is, excluding the X and Y chromosomes.  As compared with chimps, the human X chromosome has a 4.4 percent gap divergence and 1.1 percent SNV divergence, while the human Y chromosome has an amazing 56.6 percent gap divergence and 3.9 percent SNV divergence.

Although this new research shows that the genetic differences between humans and apes are greater than had been previously reported, this does not deny the evolutionary story of the common evolutionary ancestry of humans and apes.  The genetic similarity between humans and apes is still very great--85 percent!  And humans are more genetically similar to chimps and bonobos than they are to orangutans and gorillas, which supports the claim that chimps and bonobos really are our closest living evolutionary relatives.

ALL IN THE GENES?  OR FOUR DIMENSIONS OF EVOLUTION?

There is an obvious problem here, however.  All of us have seen chimpanzees in zoos.  And many of us have seen bonobos if we have gone to zoos in San Diego, Milwaukee, or Cincinnati that have bonobos.  Those zoos often have displays that say something about the 1 percent difference between humans and chimpanzees.  Now those displays might have to be changed to read 15 percent.  But even so, when we look at those apes and compare them with humans, it's very hard to believe that the difference is only 1 to 15 percent.  It's simply not true that humans and apes are 85 percent the same.  The gap between the mental achievements of human beings and those of the apes is staggering.

Most human beings don't believe that evolutionary genetics can fully explain that gap, and that's why so many people reject the science of evolution, and why so many believe that the superiority of the human mind over the ape mind can only be explained by the supernatural work of an Intelligent Designer or Divine Creator.

They are right to believe that evolutionary genetics cannot fully explain the achievements of the human mind.  But that's because genetics is only a small part of evolutionary science.  As I have indicated in some previous posts, there are four levels of evolutionary inheritance--genetics, epigenetics, culture, and symbolism (Jablonka and Lamb, 2005).

The genetic inheritance system is the foundation for the Neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. But genetic reductionism and determinism fail to see how gene action depends on the complexity of interacting causes within the genome, within cells, within organisms, within groups of organisms, and within ecological circumstances. Except for a few single-gene genetic disorders, "genetic astrology"--the idea that genes directly control specific traits--must be dismissed as foolish.

The epigenetic inheritance system is evident in the differences between specialized cells. Brain cells, liver cells, and skin cells are very different, although the nucleus of each cell has the same genome. Their differences are epigenetic, rather than genetic, because they have arisen through their developmental history in which there were different patterns of gene activation and interaction within the cell. This developmental information is passed on as these cells divide to produce more cells of the same kind. It is possible for evolution to occur through heritable epigenetic variation even without genetic variation. Just as a musical recording transmits interpretations in musical performances of a musical score, so does an epigenetic inheritance system transmit interpretations of the information in DNA, so that there is a Lamarkian inheritance of phenotypes instead of genotypes. One version of such inheritance that is now under active study is DNA methylation: strands of DNA are chemically modified during development, and these modifications can be transmitted through reproduction.  The chemical modification in epimutation is not in the DNA itself but in the chromatin marking. Methylated DNA has a small methyl group attached to some of its bases. The pattern of methylation influences which regions of DNA are expressed. The different kinds of cells in the human body have the same DNA, but the different patterns of methylation regulate the expression of DNA.

The behavioral inheritance system is the transmission of information among animals through social learning. For example, among some animals (including human beings) mothers transmit food preferences to their offspring, because information about what mother is eating is transmitted either in the womb or through suckling, so that the offspring inherits a preference for that food. More complex forms of social learning come through animal culture. For example, some chimpanzees can discover how to open nuts with a stone and then pass on this practice within their group so that it becomes a social tradition. Different communities of chimps in Africa have different cultures based on distinctive profiles of traditional practices transmitted by social learning. As opposed to genetic evolution, cultural evolution is not blind but targeted to functional change.

The symbolic inheritance system is uniquely human because it shows the qualitative leap that defines our humanity as based on our capacity for symbolic thought and communication. Other animals can communicate through signs. But only human beings can communicate through symbols. The evolution of human language was probably crucial for the evolution of symbolism. Symbolic systems allow us to think about abstractions that have little to do with concrete, immediate experiences. Symbolic systems allow human beings to construct a shared imagined reality. These symbolic constructions are often fictional and future-oriented. Art, religion, science, and philosophy are all manifestations of human symbolic evolution. 

To explain why humans are somewhat similar to the great apes and yet radically different from them, we have understand how all four levels of human evolution have shaped human beings to be the unique animals that they are.

COMMON DESCENT OR INTELLIGENT DESIGN?  OR BOTH?

Although Casey Luskin is an advocate of intelligent design theory as the best alternative to evolutionary science, he stresses that he is not pointing to the new estimate of 15 percent difference between humans and chimps as evidence that refutes evolution.  As long as the five to eight million years since humans and chimps diverged from their last common ancestor is enough time for this 15 percent difference to evolve, then the evolutionary story of common ancestry is still defensible.  

But still, Luskin suggests, intelligent design theory has a better explanation for this genetic similarity--85 percent--between chimps and humans:  "Functional genetic similarities between humans and chimps could be explained by common ancestry or by common design.  Common ancestry is not the only way to explain genetic similarities.  Intelligent agents can re-use functional code in different designs.  Common design can explain shared functional genetic similarities just as well as common descent can."

There are two mistakes in Luskin's reasoning, however.  First, he mistakenly assumes a dichotomy between common descent and common design, as if they were mutually exclusive.  As I have noted previously, one of the leading advocates of intelligent design theory--Michael Behe--argues (in The Edge of Evolution) that the genetic similarity between humans and chimps is evidence that human beings evolved from primate ancestors shared with chimpanzees.  He explains that intelligent design is required to explain the emergence of the higher taxonomic levels of life (kingdoms, phyla, classes) but not the lower levels (orders, families, genera, species).  This means that the evolution of species could be fully Darwinian.

Behe is an intelligent-design evolutionist, because he insists: "The possibility of intelligent design is quite compatible with common descent, which some religious people disdain.  What's more, although some religious thinkers envision active, continuing intervention in nature, intelligent design is quite compatible with the view that the universe operates by unbroken natural law, with the design of life perhaps packed into its initial set-up" (166).  Luskin refuses to recognize Behe's position.

Luskin is also mistaken, however, in assuming the plausibility of the arguments for intelligent design.  He thus ignores my objection that the arguments for intelligent design are fallacious in two respects.  First, intelligent design reasoning depends completely on the fallacy of negative argumentation from ignorance, in which intelligent design proponents argue that if evolutionary scientists cannot fully explain the step-by-step evolutionary process by which complex living forms arise, then this proves that these complex forms of life must be caused by the intelligent designer.  This is purely negative reasoning because the proponents of intelligent design can offer no positive explanation of their own as to exactly when, where, and how the intelligent designer caused these forms of life.  

The second fallacy is the subtle use of the fallacy of equivocation--in the equivocation between human intelligent design and supernatural intelligent design.  We have all had the experience of seeing how human intelligent agents create artificial products by intelligent design.  But it does not follow logically from this that we have all had the experience of seeing how supernatural intelligent agents create artificial products by intelligent design.

CREATED BY GOD IN HIS IMAGE?  OR EVOLVED IN THE IMAGE OF PRIMATES?  OR BOTH?

Ken Ham (2025) argues, on the contrary, that even if we have not seen with our own eyes God creating everything out of nothing, this has been revealed to us through the Bible; and part of that revelation is that God created all the "kinds" of plants and animals separately, and He created the "chimp kind" to be utterly different from the "humankind," which was created in His image.

But as I have said in my previous posts on Ham and his two museums in Kentucky--the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter--he mistakenly assumes that he is conveying the clear meaning of the Bible and that the Bible's clear teaching is incompatible with Darwinian evolution.

The Bible says nothing about God creating apes and humans as separate "kinds."  The Book of Genesis never mentions apes.  Actually, in the whole Bible, the Hebrew word for "ape" appears only twice (I Kings 10:22, 2 Chronicles 9:21), and never in the context of creation.  And while Genesis speaks of God creating plants and animals "after their kind," it never identifies human beings as a "kind."  Consider Genesis 1:26--"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness."  The phrase "after our likeness" takes the place of "after their kind," suggesting that in being created in the likeness of God, man is not bound by a "kind."  So there is no Biblical basis for Ham to speak of "humankind."

Moreover, the Hebrew word min that is translated as kind in the King James Bible is ambiguous.  In the Latin translation of the Bible, min is translated as the Latin word species.  Consequently, for almost two thousand years, Biblical believers assumed that God's creating "kinds" meant that God created each "species" separately, and that each species was eternally fixed.  But then after Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, in which he argued against the "theory of special creation" that God had created each species separating, some Christians began to believe that the created "kinds" in the Bible referred not to "species" but to some higher level of taxonomy.  Then, in 1941, the Christian biologist Frank Marsh coined the word baramin (combining the Hebrew words for "created" and "kind") as the best term for "created kind."  He argued that a "created kind" was not at the taxonomic level of "species" but at or near the level of "family."  This allowed Biblical believers to accept Darwin's theory of the origin of "species" by natural selection while also believing that God had created the "families" of plants and animals to be fixed and separate.  So, for example, we could say that God originally created the "family" of the finches, but within the limits of that "family," the separate species of finches endemic to the Galapagos Islands evolved by natural selection to be adaptive to those islands.

Notice what this means for the taxonomic classification of human beings.  If the "kind" of human beings refers to their taxonomic "family," then in modern taxonomy, human beings belong to the "family" of Hominidae, which includes chimps, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutan.  Even the young-earth creationist Todd Wood (2010) accepts this Hominidae classification of humans with the great apes, although he identifies the "human holobaramin" as the genus Homo.

This idea of "created kinds" was crucial for Ham in solving an old problem with Noah's Ark.  If the Ark carried all the "kinds" of land-based plants and animals, how could the Ark be big enough to hold all of the land-based species--which could be numbered in the millions?

Ham's creationist researchers have solved this problem by calculating that among these land-dependent vertebrate species, there are fewer than 1,400 known living and extinct kinds (that is, families).  This allows them to estimate that Noah had to have fewer than 6,744 individual animals on the Ark.  Once these animals left the Ark, speciation by natural selection within kinds could create all the living and extinct species that we know today.  The Ham's Ark Encounter is designed to show how as many as 6,744 animals and 8 human beings (Noah and his extended family) could survive on the Ark for almost a year.  But notice that this is a speculative reading of the Bible that never defines "kind" in this way.  This is not the clear meaning of the Bible, as Ham claims.  Indeed, if you go to the Ark Encounter in Kentucky, you might notice one display that speaks of the need for "Arktistic license" in making up details in the story of the Ark that have no basis in the Bible.

Since the Bible is so obscure in its creation story, and since so much of that story sounds like a figurative folk tale that was not meant to be a literal account of natural history, many Christians (like C. S. Lewis, Francis Collins, and Deborah Haarsma) have decided that the Bible could be read as allowing for theistic evolution or evolutionary creation.  According to this conception, God created the universal laws of nature at the beginning of the Universe, but then He allowed all the forms of life to emerge by natural evolution.  God is the "primary cause" of everything.  But the evolutionary process unfolds through the "secondary causes" of nature.  Even Darwin himself accepted this metaphysical conception of "dual causality" that reconciles belief in God as First Cause with acceptance of evolutionary science.  At various points in the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter, there are displays that acknowledge that many if not most Christians accept some version of this theistic evolution.

But what about the creation of human beings in the image of God?  If the "image of God" refers to the God-like intellect of man, then we might argue that the extraordinary mental capacities of human beings could have evolved through the evolution of the primate brain.  I have argued that the evolution in the size and complexity of the primate brain passed over a critical threshold so that now there are 86 billion neurons in the human brain, and of that total, 16 billion are in the cerebral cortex, which includes 1.3 billion neurons in the prefrontal cortex.  That emergent evolution of the brain created the uniquely powerful human mind.  We were created in the image of the primate brain.

Even if we are only 15 percent genetically different from chimps, we are different in kind from chimps because we have the mental capacities for language, morality, and symbolic abstraction that they do not have at all.  That's the difference that makes all the difference.

REFERENCES

Behe, Michael. 2007. The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the  Limits of Darwinism. New York: The Free Press.

Ham, Ken. 2025. "Study Finds Chimp DNA Is Not '99% Identical' to Ours." Answers in Genesis. Ken Ham Blog. May 27. Online.

Jablonka, Eva, and Marion J. Lamb. 2014. Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life. Revised edition. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Luskin, Casey. 2025. "Fact Check: New 'Complete' Chimp Genome Shows 14.9 Percent Difference from Human Genome." Science and Culture Today, May 21, online.

Wood, Todd Charles. 2010. "Baraminological Analysis Places Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, and Australopithecus sediba in the Human Holobaramin." Answers Research Journal 3: 71-90.

Yoo, Dong Ahn, et al. 2025. "Complete Sequencing of Ape Genomes." Nature 641: 401-418.

The Evolutionary Symbolic Niche Construction of Liberalism Through Lockean "Consent"

Locke's teaching that government arises from the consent of the people is well known.  But it's not well known that Locke explains the emergence of all social institutions as created by popular consent.  Human beings have created not only government (ST, 95-99) but also languages (ECHU, III.2.8), families (ST, 74-83), morality (ECHU, 28.10), and money (ST, 36) by consenting to their existence.  This is what I have called the evolutionary symbolic niche construction of Lockean liberalism.  Of course, Locke does not use this terminology, but it's the best way to explain what he means in claiming that human beings create social institutions by consenting to them.

We should start by seeing that Locke was answering the fundamental question of modern intellectual life.

HOW MANY WORLDS ARE THERE?

If we accept the modern scientific explanation of the natural world as it arose in the seventeenth century, how can we explain the human mind and human society?

There are at least three ways to answer this question.  One way is to assume that there is only one world, and therefore the mind and society must be explained as arising somehow from the natural world as studied by modern science.  Another way is to assume that there are two worlds, because the natural world of science is separated from the human world of mind and society.  A third way is to assume that there are three worlds--the natural world of objective facts, the mental world of subjective experience, and the cultural world of social ideas and practices. 

According to the first way, the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities should become parts of one universal science of nature.  According to the second way, there is an unbridgeable gulf between the natural sciences and the human sciences.  According to the third way, the unbridgeable gulf separates three realms of thought about three different worlds: the natural sciences are separated from the psychological sciences, and both are separated from the social sciences and humanities.

As should be evident from many of my posts, I think the first way is best.  There are two different intellectual strategies for achieving this one-world vision--reductive physicalism and emergent evolution.  According to reductive physicalism, the complete unification of all knowledge of the natural world would ultimately require explaining everything through physics.  According to emergent evolution, which is the position that I take, the history of the universe is a history of emergent complexity, in which higher levels of complexity arise from lower levels, and while those higher levels are consistent with the lower levels, the higher cannot be fully reduced to the lower.  

So, for example, biology must be consistent with physics and chemistry, but biological phenomena have an emergent complexity that cannot be fully reduced to physics and chemistry.  The mind and society are also emergent phenomena that must be compatible with the laws of physics and chemistry, but without being fully reducible to those physical and chemical laws.  Some of my posts elaborating these points can be found here, here, here, and here.

My thinking here largely coincides with the thinking of John Searle, particularly in his book Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (Oxford University Press, 2010).  Like me, he thinks the fundamental questions of modern intellectual life are about how to explain human life in a manner that is compatible with modern natural science.

"How can we give an account of ourselves, with our peculiar human traits--as mindful, rational, speech-act performing, free-will having, social, political human beings--in a world that we know independently consists of mindless, meaningless, physical particles?  How can we account for our social and mental existence in a realm of brute physical facts?" (ix)

Like me, Searle assumes that we live in one world--that we live in one reality with physical, mental, and social aspects--and that our explanations of mental and social life must be compatible with the physical sciences but not simply reducible to those sciences.  And so, for example, in Making the Social World,  he offers an explanation of social reality as created and maintained by language, while explaining language as a natural product of the human biological evolution of the brain that enabled the human mind to create social institutions through what he calls "collective intentionality."

I mostly agree with Searle about all of this.  My one major point of disagreement is that Searle fails to see how his account of how human beings create social institutions through collective recognition or acceptance of those institutions is a Lockean social contract theory of morality and politics.  If one sees this, and also sees how Lockean social contract reasoning can be understood in modern evolutionary theory as symbolic evolution and niche construction, then Lockean liberalism can be understood as the symbolic niche construction of liberal institutions.  This can also be described, as it is by Deirdre McCloskey, as a transformation in ethical ideas, moving from an aristocratic ethics that scorned the pursuit of economic gain to a bourgeois ethics in which life in a commercial society became virtuous.

We live in a world of institutional facts that constitute our social reality.  Consider one of Searle's favorite examples--the twenty dollar bill.  Because of its institutional status, I can use that twenty-dollar bill to buy goods and services.  As a physical object, it's only a piece of paper with some ink marks on it.  But as long as we accept its institutional status as currency of the United States, with its stipulated value, it has power as a medium of exchange.  Searle would say that this institutional reality of the twenty-dollar bill has been created by a linguistic or symbolic representation that we can call a Declaration of Status Function, which has the form "X counts as Y in C."  We agree that this piece of paper counts as money in the context of the monetary system of the United States.  It has the status of money that can function as currency because of our agreement to regard it as such.  Remarkably, we have created the social reality of money by declaring our agreement that it should count as such, as long as the paper money has the correct symbols, such as the words "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private."  (Searle does not realize that he is following Locke here, because Locke stressed that the "invention of money" was "by consent" [ST, 36].)

Similarly, Donald Trump is President of the United States, and has all the rights and duties of the presidency, because we have agreed to count as president anyone who wins a presidential election according to the procedures for the Electoral College and who satisfies the qualifications prescribed in the United States Constitution.  

I am a husband, a professor, and a citizen of the United States.  I own a house, a car, and other property.  I have the rights and duties created by the formal laws and informal social norms of my neighborhood, my city, and my country.  Social facts like these enable us to live a civilized human life.

The mystery here, as Searle indicates, is how we can have an objective knowledge of this social reality that is created by human subjective opinions.  The human capacity for language and symbolism enables us to create a reality by representing that reality as existing and agreeing among ourselves to accept that reality as existing, which allows us to create a social and institutional reality out of language, symbolism, and collective intentionality.

To explain scientifically how this subjective creation of social reality is possible in a natural world of physical facts, we would need to explain the natural evolution of the human brain that created the human capacity for language and symbolism.  Searle offers a conceptual analysis of how language as a natural, biological phenomenon could have evolved among human evolutionary ancestors as an extension of prelinguistic forms of intentionality.  Within evolutionary biology, there is continuing study of the evolution of human language.

Other animals have some capacity for communication and social learning that can create animal cultures of inherited behavioral traditions.  But human beings are probably unique in their capacity for language and symbolism that allows them to create imaginary social realities.  (As I have indicated in a previous post, Eva Jablonka argues well for the evolution of symbolic culture as being uniquely human.)

So, for example, some primates have social orders in which some individuals are treated as alpha males.  But this falls short of the human capacity of moral symbolism by which we agree to recognize some individuals in specified circumstances as having the right to rule over us.

Here we see the moral power--or "deontic power" as Searle calls it--implicit in the human creation of social reality.  "Deontic" is derived from the Greek word deon, denoting something we must do or ought to do--our ethical duty.  In creating social facts, we create ethical facts, because we create formal laws or informal norms of social life that constitute rights and duties of individuals in specified social roles.  As a husband, professor, and citizen, I have the rights and duties of those socially created roles.  Moreover, as a human being, I might have the human rights and duties that arise from my socially recognized status as a member of the human species.  Searle argues that this is indeed the case--that our social reality does include the reality of natural human rights, which include the natural rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, as rights rooted in our biological human nature.

This sounds a lot like John Locke's argument for natural rights and social order constituted by a social contract.  But, oddly, Searle rejects Locke and social contract reasoning, without realizing that his thinking largely coincides with that reasoning.  Searle doesn't see that in explaining how status functions arise from "collective intentionality" or "collective acceptance or recognition of the object or person as having that status" (8), he is adopting the Lockean argument for social authority as arising from the consent of human individuals.

Searle offers two criticisms of Locke and the social contract theorists.  He says that they are wrong about the state of nature, because they don't understand that once human beings have a shared language, they have a social contract and a society.  "If by 'state of nature' is meant a state in which there are no human institutions, then for language-speaking animals, there is no such thing as a state of nature."  His second criticism is that Locke "gives no evidence of seeing that any account of language could show how language underlies society" (62).  Both of these claims are mistaken.

Locke makes it clear that in the state of nature, when human beings lived in bands of hunter-gatherers, there was no formal government, but there were human institutions--particularly, marriage, families, private property, economic exchange, and social norms of moral conduct that Locke calls "the law of nature."  There was a kind of informal government in the governing of children by their parents and in the episodic authority of military leaders in time of war (Second Treatise, pars. 74-75, 94, 105, 107-109, 170).

This was the first human society that was created by informal consent--collective recognition or acceptance--through language, and language itself was a social creation in which certain sounds were given symbolic meaning by a "tacit consent" (ECHU, III.2.8).  But this society was not a political society, because there was not yet any consent to a formal government or legal system (First Treatise, pars. 86-93; Second Treatise, pars. 6-14, 25-35, 77-90).  Searle is mistaken, therefore, in assuming that Locke thought there were no human institutions in the state of nature.

Searle is also mistaken in assuming that Locke did not recognize how language creates society.  In fact, Locke explained in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding that social institutions were created by human beings through the language of "mixed modes" for use in social intercourse (II.2.22; II.28.2-4; II.31.3; III.1.1, III.2.8; III.5).  Echoing Locke's terminology, Searle speaks of "the mode of existence of social entities" (5).

Mixed modes are important for social and political thought, because most of the words used in theology, ethics, law, and politics are mixed modes.  Locke's examples of mixed modes include adultery, incest, murder, parricide, justice, gratitude, glory, and ambition.

Locke emphasizes the arbitrariness of mixed modes.  The ideas of mixed modes are "made very arbitrarily, made without patterns, or reference to any real existence.  Wherein they differ from those of substances, which carry with them the supposition of some real being, from which they are taken, and to which they are conformable.  But, in its complex ideas of mixed modes, the mind takes a liberty not to follow the existence of things exactly."  Mixed modes are "the workmanship of the mind" (III.5.3-4). 

This is the same arbitrariness that Searle sees in institutional facts that exist only because we think they exist and say that they exist.  Searle declares: "God can create light by saying 'Let there be light!'  Well, we cannot create light, but we have a similar remarkable capacity.  We can create boundaries, kings, and corporations by saying something equivalent to 'Let this be a boundary!' 'Let the oldest son be the king!'  'Let there be a corporation.'" (100)

But since both Searle and Locke stress the arbitrariness with which human beings freely create their social norms by collective consent through speech, we have to wonder whether this denies that there is any natural foundation or standard for judging our moral ideas.  And if so, wouldn't this contradict Locke's claim that there is a natural law knowable by natural human reason and Searle's claim that human rights are rooted in human nature, which suggest a natural standard rather than arbitrary creation?

Locke says that while mixed modes are made "very arbitrarily," they are not made "without reason" or "at random" (III.5.3, 6-7).  Although our moral ideas are not copied from nature, they are made by human beings for the purpose of communicating standards of conduct that facilitate human social life; and the requirements of such a life are shaped by the natural desires and inclinations of human beings.  The ultimate natural standard for judging social norms is whether they satisfy the natural human pursuit of happiness (I.2.3; III.21.42-73).  In that way, human nature does set standards for our moral ideas.

So, for example, if human beings say that intentionally killing an innocent human being is murder, but killing a sheep is not, this distinction is not simply discovered by just looking at human beings killing one another and killing sheep.  This moral distinction is made by human beings to serve the natural desire of human beings to preserve their lives against attack and to punish those that threaten them (III.5.5-6; FT, 86-88; ST, 7-11).  And if we distinguish the killing of a father or mother as worse than killing others, it's because we agree to recognize the different heinousness of the crime that demands a distinct punishment that fits the crime (III.5.7).  Similarly, if we create the idea of an incest taboo, it's because human beings naturally express moral disgust in response to incest, although there will be cultural variation in how incest is defined based on variable kinship systems.

Like Locke, Searle appeals to human biological nature as the natural standard for natural human rights.  And from that standard, Searle derives a minimal list of human rights that looks much like what Locke would endorse: "the right to life, including the right to personal liberty, the right to own personal private property (such as clothing), the right to free speech, the right to associate freely with other people and to choose with whom one associates, the right to believe what one wants to believe, including religious beliefs as well as atheism, the right to travel, and the right to privacy" (185).

But while Searle sees these rights as status functions created by human beings through their collective intentionality, he recognizes that many people have believed that such rights are insecure if they are not seen as part of the natural order of things or created by God.  He sees this in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident" that all men "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights."  Searle suggests that this belief in divine creationism is false (107, 118-19, 183).  And he indicates that this creates a problem for his theory of social institutions.  In such cases, "the status function only works as a status function precisely because it is believed not to be a status function but a brute intentionality-independent fact about the universe."  But then, he indicates, all that matters is that the people do collectively recognize or accept the system of status functions, even though the collective acceptance is based on a false belief in a divine moral law (119).

Although Locke rejects the idea of the "divine right of kings," he does appeal to the creationist theology of human beings as having a special moral dignity because they are the "workmanship" of God who created them in His image (FT, 30, 52-54, 85-86; ST, 6, 56).  He also, however, grounds the moral dignity of human beings in their self-ownership as beings who claim a property in their own persons (ST, 27, 172-73).  And some readers have wondered whether this could provide a purely natural ground for Lockean natural rights, without the need for appealing to supernatural creationism.

But then when the Declaration of Independence appeals to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God," this suggests a natural creationism--that is, Nature's God creates through natural law, perhaps through a natural evolutionary process.  And indeed many Christians are theistic evolutionists who see God working through natural evolution.  Locke often speaks of the "Laws of God and Nature" (Second Treatise, pars. 1, 4, 60, 66, 142, 195).

Men might be created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights through the human evolution of a large and complex cerebral cortex that allows them to collectively recognize human equality of rights.

In any case, evolutionary biology can recognize the practical efficacy of religious belief--particularly, religious belief in a moral God who cares for human beings and enforces moral law through rewards and punishments.  Research in cross-cultural economic game experiments indicates that those who belong to one of the world religions tend to show a sense of fairness in their playing of the games.  And evolutionary biologists like David Sloan Wilson have argued that religious belief evolved through group selection to support cooperation within groups.

Evolutionary biology could also recognize the success of Lockean liberalism in promoting its moral and political ideas as an expression of symbolic niche construction.  "Niche construction" is a modern term in evolutionary theory that refers to plants and animals constructing the environment to which they are evolutionarily adapted.  For example, beavers alter their environment by building dams, and beavers have adapted this constructed environment (Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman 2003; Odling-Smee 2024) 

This idea was first developed in Darwin's last book--The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms (1881)--in which he studied how earthworms continually alter the surface of the Earth by breaking down soil into fine particles, thus they construct the environment to which they are evolutionarily adapted.  

We can also see the cultural history of animals as niche construction, in that cultural animals create cultural traditions that are inherited by later generations.  Human beings do this not only through behavioral traditions of culture but also through their uniquely human creation of symbolic realities, including the symbolic systems of religion, morality, and politics.

As a political philosopher who supported the radical Whig program, Locke was engaged in a rhetorical project to transform the religious, moral, and political ideas of England to create what would later be called liberalism.  This was an exercise in symbolic niche construction.  The success of that project began to appear with the success of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and it emerged even more clearly later in the 18th and 19th centuries with the success of Lockean Whig ideas and the emergence of the Bourgeois Era and the Industrial Revolution.

The triumph of Locke's liberalism required a rhetorical change in moral ideas so that a bourgeois way of life could be seen as virtuous.  This is what Deirdre McCloskey has been writing about in her series of books on the "bourgeois virtues."  In a recent article, McCloskey has argued that Searle's social ontology supports her reasoning, because we can see the Bourgeois Era as arising from a status function declaration:  Commercial life counts as honorable in the Bourgeois Era ("Max U vs. Humanomics: A Critique of Neo-Institutionalism," Journal of Institutional Economics 12 [2016]: 1-27.).

Although I generally agree with McCloskey, I do have some questions about her argument.  In her criticism of Douglas North's institutional explanation for the modern move into open access societies, she sets up a stark opposition between social institutions and moral ideas, and argues that it was a change in ideas rather than a change in institutions that explains the modern revolution.  But her acceptance of Searle's social ontology suggests that what she really wants to say is that social institutions rightly understood are created by the social acceptance of the moral ideas that constitute and maintain those institutions.

Another question that I have for McCloskey is also a question for Searle:  Do they give enough weight to violence and war in shaping the moral history of social institutions?  Occasionally, Searle acknowledges that social institutions have to be backed by force, although "forms of organized coercion are themselves systems of status functions" (88, 97, 104, 141-42, 163, 171, 173). 

Locke goes farther than either Searle or McCloskey in stressing the importance of trial by battle when there is some deep controversy over who has the authority to settle disputes over political power.  This is what Locke calls the "appeal to Heaven," the appeal to the God of battles (ST, 19-21, 109, 155, 168, 176, 232, 240-43).

Locke himself was involved in the Whig conspiracies for assassinating and rebelling against Charles II and James II.  Because of that involvement, he was forced to flee to Holland to avoid being tried and executed for treason.  While he lived in Holland, he had to worry about being captured by the King's agents and extradited to England for trial. He supported the Revolution of 1688, and despite its reputation as a "bloodless" revolution, there was a lot of violence in the Revolution (as Steven Pincus has shown in his 1688: The First Modern Revolution [2009]).  Ultimately, the success of the Revolution depended on the defeat of the Jacobite armies that tried to restore the Stuart monarchy.  The military threat of the Jacobites was not finally put down until the battle of Culloden in Scotland in 1746.

The evolutionary history of liberalism is a rhetorical history of persuasive speech, but it is also a military history of war that has turned on the unpredictable contingencies of battle.  

As Winston Churchill observed, "Great battles, whether won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all must conform" (Marlborough: His Life and Times).

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE AS LOCKEAN SYMBOLIC NICHE CONSTRUCTION

If Lockean social contract reasoning can be understood as symbolic evolution and niche construction, then Lockean liberalism can be understood as the symbolic niche construction of liberal institutions.  We can see this manifested in the Declaration of Independence, particularly in its famous second paragraph that echoes Locke's Second Treatise ("We hold these truths to be self-evident . . .).

The Declaration of Independence is what Searle calls a Declaration of Status Function, which has the form "X counts as Y in C."  The American Revolutionaries declared that "these United Colonies [X] are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States [Y]" in the European system of states [C].  The success of that Declaration depended on whether in their "decent respect to the opinions of mankind," they could persuade world opinion to recognize their status as "Free and Independent States."  

Their success depended on both the intellectual persuasiveness of their reasoning in the Declaration and the forceful persuasiveness of their winning the Revolutionary War.  Of those people both inside and outside the American colonies who were not persuaded by the intellectual argument of the Declaration, many were persuaded to accept it once the Americans had won the war.  Going to war to settle the dispute was what Locke called the "Appeal to Heaven"--the appeal to the "God of Battles."

In March of 1776, the Continental Congress asked for prayers "that it may please the Lord of Hosts, the God of Armies, to animate our officers and soldiers with invincible fortitude."  In the following October, King George III issued a Proclamation "putting Our Trust in Almighty God, that he will vouchsafe a Special Blessing on Our Arms, both by Sea and Land" (Shain 2014: 407-408).  This is the same as what Abraham Lincoln saw in the Civil War: "Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other" (Second Inaugural Addess).  The "God of Armies" will decide.

The first major victory for the Americans was in the Battle of Saratoga in 1777.  When French King Louis XVI saw this, he agreed to a formal Franco-American alliance.  This proved to be a turning point in the war (Weddle 2021).  If the British had won that battle, that might have been enough to refute the Declaration of Independence.  As I have argued in previous posts, there is a sense in which might does make right.

The Continental Congress was a practical demonstration of the truth of the Lockean principles of the Declaration of Independence.  Acting in a state of nature, the Congress exercised the Lockean executive power of the law of nature in punishing Great Britain for violating that natural law, in establishing the Continental Army to settle the dispute by force of arms, and in instituting a new government to secure their natural rights.

THE RIGHT TO DUE PROCESS OF LAW AS SYMBOLIC NICHE CONSTRUCTION

In writing new constitutions for governments at both the state and national levels, the Americans had to debate what kind of constitutional language would best secure their natural rights.  Beginning with the Virginia Bill of Rights of 1776, it was common for the state constitutions to have a list of rights that must be protected.  The U.S. Constitution of 1787 did not have a bill of rights, but many of the state ratifying conventions recommended amendments that would provide a bill of rights.  In the First Congress of 1789, James Madison and others proposed such amendments, which were ratified in 1791, and these first ten amendments became known as the Bill of Rights.  Here then is another example of symbolic niche construction through a declaration of status function:  the American people agreed to recognize the first ten amendments as a statement of human rights in America as secured by constitutional law.

One of those stipulated rights is due process of law as stated in the Fifth Amendment: "No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."  A similar provision became part of the Fourteenth Amendment: ". . . nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."

But as I have indicated in some recent posts, Trump has recently claimed that as President he has the power to suspend the right to due process of law--particularly, in his deportation of immigrants who have been sent to a prison in El Salvador.  Trump's argument is that this cannot be an absolute right for all persons in the United States, because in time of emergency, the President must have the power to remove people from the United States without due process of life if he identifies them as dangerous threats to America.

Trump has appealed to the Alien Enemies Act as giving him this power to protect America from "invasions," and he claims that illegal immigrants constitute an "invasion" of the U.S.  The Courts, however, have said that as used in the Alien Enemies Act, "invasions" clearly means military invasions.  And since Venezuela has not invaded the U.S. militarily, Trump cannot deport Venezuelans without due process of law.

There are reports that Trump is considering suspending the writ of habeas corpus, which would be another way to suspend the right of due process of law.  He could cite the Constitution's provision in Article I, Section 9, Clause 2: "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."

Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ at the beginning of the Civil War, claiming that the Confederacy was clearly in a "rebellion" against the United States, and the public safety required that his commanders in the field needed to suspend the writ to arrest and detain people suspected of being spies or saboteurs for the Confederacy.

Trump would have to convince the courts and the American people that the many illegal immigrants in the U.S. count as an "invasion," which makes it necessary for the President to suspend the writ to protect the public safety of Americans threatened by the criminal violence of illegal immigrants.

Trump could also claim that he was exercising what John Locke identified as executive prerogative--the power of the executive "to act according to discretion, for the public good, without the prescription of the Law, and sometimes even against it," which could include suspending individual rights in time of emergency (ST, 160).

This is an illustration of how Americans often have to debate the meaning of their symbolic niche construction of individual rights.  If Americans have agreed to the establishment of due process of law as an individual right, must they agree that this is an absolute right never to be infringed?  Or are their circumstances--perhaps a national emergency of some sort--in which the public good would require suspending that right?  But if so, what counts as a true emergency in which the public good would require allowing the President to exercise dictatorial power in denying individuals the natural rights that we usually want to protect?

The courts and the American people will have to decide.

The Darwinian Emergence of Aristotle's Political Animals and de Waal's Moral Animals: A Reply to Cheryl Abbate

In various publications (Arnhart 1990, 1994, 1998, 2009), and in some blog posts, I have argued that a Darwinian science of animal behavior can support Aristotle's biological science of political animals.  Aristotle's statement that "man is by nature a political animal" is famous.  But it is often falsely assumed to mean that human beings are by nature the only political animals.  As Aristotle explains in his biological writings, the political animals include ants, bees, wasps, and cranes.  But even if humans are not the only political animals, Aristotle indicates, they are distinctive in that they are more political than the other political animals, because humans have a biological capacity for logos, which allows them to organize their political communities through shared symbolic conceptions of justice.

In his biological works, Aristotle sees that some animals are solitary and others gregarious.  Of the gregarious animals, some are political.  Some of the political animals have leaders, but others do not.  The distinguishing characteristic of the political animals is that they cooperate for some common work or function.  Humans, bees, ants, wasps, and cranes are all political animals in this sense.

The uniquely human capacity for speech or rhetorical persuasion makes humans more political than the other political animals, because while other animals can share their perceptions of pleasure and pain, humans can use speech to share their conceptions of the advantageous, the just, and the good.  Through speech, humans cooperate for common ends in ways that are more complex, more flexible, and more extensive than is possible for other animals.  Through speech, humans can deliberate about the common interest as the standard of justice.  A just political community can be judged to be one that serves the common interest of all or most of its members, as contrasted with an unjust political community that serves only the private interest of its ruling group.

I have argued that Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory of morality and animal social life supports Aristotle's biopolitical science.  I have also argued that the biological study of animal behavior over the past 60 years (beginning with Jane Goodall's arrival at the Gombe Stream Preserve in 1960) has largely confirmed this Aristotelian science of animal politics.

Recently, I noticed that Cheryl Abbate (2016) has disagreed with my reasoning in what is essentially a critique of my 1990 article in Social Science Information.  I also noticed that Edward Jacobs (2018) has written a response to Abbate's article, and Abbate (2018) has replied to him.

Abbate's critique consists of two arguments.  First, she claims that my defense of Aristotle's teaching contradicts the Darwinian principle of the psychic continuity between humans and animals--the idea that humans differ from other animals only in degree and not in kind.  Second, she claims that recent studies of animal behavior show that some highly social nonhuman animals have a sense of justice, and so Aristotle is wrong in thinking that this is unique to human beings.

As you might expect, I believe she's mistaken on both points.

DARWIN ON EMERGENT DIFFERENCES IN KIND

Abbate correctly quotes from the crucial passage in Aristotle's Politics (1253a) where Aristotle declares that a human is much more a political animal than other political animals, because "man alone among the animals has speech [logos]," and through speech, "he alone has a perception of good and bad and just and unjust," which is the uniquely human basis of human politics (Abbate 2016, 57).

She then claims that this contradicts the Darwinian principle of "evolutionary continuity"--that all differences between species are only differences in degree and not in kind (Abbate 2018, 160).  She correctly quotes from Darwin's apparent endorsement of this idea in The Descent of Man:

"Nevertheless, the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.  We have seen the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals" (2004, 151).

Abbate is silent, however, about the fact that despite Darwin's explicit statement that humans differ only in degree, not in kind, from other animals, he implicitly recognized human differences in kind.  That is to say, Darwin saw that human beings have some moral and mental traits that other animals do not have at all.

In The Descent of Man, Darwin noted that self-consciousness is uniquely human: "It may be freely admitted that no animal is self-conscious, if by this term it is implied, that he reflects on such points, as whence he comes or whither he will go, or what is life and death, and so forth" (105).  Morality is also uniquely human: "A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions or motives, and of approving or disapproving of them.  We have no reason to suppose that any of the lower animals have this capacity. . . . man . . . alone can with certainty be ranked as a moral being" (135).  And language is uniquely human: "The habitual use of articulate language is . . . peculiar to man" (107).

Darwin was thrown into self-contradiction--both affirming and denying that humans are different in kind from other animals--because he failed to see how he could affirm emergent differences in kind without affirming any radical differences in kind.  Emergent differences in kind can be explained by evolutionary science as differences in kind that naturally evolve from differences in degree that pass over a critical threshold of complexity.  So, for example, we can see the uniquely human capacities for self-consciousness, morality, and language as emerging from the evolutionary development of the primate brain, so that at some critical point in the evolution of our hominid ancestors, the size and complexity of the brain (perhaps particularly in the frontal cortex) reached a point where distinctively human cognitive capacities emerged at higher levels of brain evolution that are not found in other primates.  With such emergent differences in kind, there is an underlying unbroken continuity between human beings and their primate ancestors, so there is no need to posit some supernatural intervention in nature--the divine creation of the human soul--that would create a radical difference in kind in which there is a gap with no underlying continuity of natural causes.

Edward Jacobs points to this when he describes the evolution of the human mind.  "The moment a certain threshold of mental development was reached (and logos is as good a placeholder name for this threshold as any), we became able to make and grasp persuasive accounts," which made humans more political than the other political animals (155).

Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka (2019) have shown how an evolutionary neuroscience could explain this emergence of the human mind as passing through the three levels of mind identified by Aristotle in De Anima (On the Soul). The basic nutritive and reproductive soul belongs to all living things--plants and animals.  The second level--the sensitive soul--belongs to all animals.  The third level--the rational or symbolizing soul--is specific to humans.  The crucial evolutionary transition marker of the rational soul is language.  The rational soul gives humans the capacity for grasping and sharing the abstract symbolic values of the good and the just that make human politics unique.  Ginsburg and Jablonka suggest that all three levels can be explained by evolutionary biology.

I have written some previous posts on emergent evolution (here and here).;

BEKOFF AND DE WAAL ON THE MORAL LIVES OF ANIMALS

Abbate relies heavily on two cognitive ethologists--Marc Bekoff and Frans de Waal--for providing the evidence that some nonhuman animals have a sense of justice, and therefore Aristotle is wrong in saying that humans alone have a moral sense, which makes them more political than the other political animals.  For Abbate, this proves that humans differ only in degree, not in kind, from other animals.

Bekoff is best known for his studies of canid social carnivores--wolves, dogs, and coyotes--and his argument that their social play shows that they have "codes of conduct" that indicate a moral life of "wild justice" (Bekoff 1995; Bekoff and Pierce 2009; Pierce and Bekoff 2012).

De Waal is best known for his Chimpanzee Politics and other studies of primate colonies in captivity.  He has endorsed what he calls my "Darwistotelian" view of human politics and morality as showing an evolved political nature shared with chimps and other primates. A sample of my many posts on de Waal can be found here, here, here, here, and here.

She does not notice, however, that Bekoff and de Waal show the same self-contradiction that one can see in Darwin.  On the one hand, Bekoff says that "animal morality is different in degree but not in kind from human morality."  On the other hand, he says there are "bona fide differences in kind" (Bekoff and Pierce 2009, 139-40).  He admits that "human morality is unique," because humans are unique in their capacities of language and judgment (Bekoff and Pierce 2009, 132, 139-42).  Similarly, de Waal sometimes seems to say that morality is not unique to human beings, but then he concedes that morality at the level of judgment and reasoning is uniquely human (de Waal 2006, 20, 173-75).

Abbate might say, however, that this is not necessarily contradictory.  If de Waal is right about there being three levels of human morality, and if nonhuman animals show some elements of the lower levels but not of the higher levels, then the fullest expression of human morality is uniquely human, although some animals show some features of the moral life.  Thus, there is both continuity and discontinuity in the moral psychology of animals.  At some levels of morality, there is only a difference in degree.  At other levels, there is a difference in kind.  This is exactly what one would expect from the emergent evolution of animal morality.  And, I suggest, this is Aristotle's position, even though his biology did not have a fully developed evolutionary theory.

According to de Waal, the moral sentiments constitute the first level of morality--the emotional building blocks of morality that include empathy, reciprocity, retribution, a sense of fairness, and reconciliation to resolve conflicts and restore harmonious relationships (de Waal 2006, 166-75).  All of this can be seen in some form in other animals

In stressing the importance of the moral sentiments for moral psychology, de Waal belongs to the philosophic tradition of sentimentalist ethics that includes David Hume, Adam Smith, Darwin, and Edward Westermarck--a tradition that is set against the Kantian tradition of rationalist ethics.  I have written many posts on this, including here, here, here., and here.

De Waal identifies social pressure as the second level of morality.  Through social pressure, individuals are habituated to conform to the social rules of their group that maintain the good order of the community.  These rules are enforced through reward, punishment, and reputation.  In these ways, morality serves as a social contract for a cooperative society. Some of this can be seen in some nonhuman animals.  For example, high-ranking males in chimpanzee groups show "policing behavior"--males break up fights among others, and their intervention seems to be remarkably evenhanded.  Nevertheless, the human morality of social pressure goes beyond animal morality by formulating social rules that are more abstract and systematic than is the case for other animals.

Finally, judgment and reasoning constitute a third level of morality, and this is uniquely human.  So, for example, we are like other social animals in that we care about our reputations--how we appear in the eyes of others--so that we want to be praised and not blamed by others; but we can also use our distinctively human capacity for abstraction and imagination to see ourselves mirrored in the eyes of an "impartial spectator" (as Adam Smith said), so that we can want to do what is praiseworthy, regardless of whether we are actually praised by anyone. We care not only about our real reputation but also about our imaginary reputation.  From this we develop an internal sense of self-esteem or conscience.  There is no evidence for anything like this in nonhuman animals.  (I have written about Smith's concept of the "impartial spectator" here.)

Like de Waal, Aristotle saw both continuity and discontinuity between human beings and other animals in their moral psychology.  In his History of Animals (588a15), he wrote:

"In most of the other animals, there are traces of the qualities of soul that are more evidently differentiated in human beings.  For there are both gentleness and savagery, mildness and harshness, courage and timidity, fear and confidence, spiritedness and trickery, and, with respect to intelligence [dianoia], something like judgment [sunesis], similar in many ways. . . . For some of these qualities differ only more or less with reference to human beings. . . . For nature passes little by little from the inanimate to animals, so that this continuity prevents one from seeing a border or perceiving on which side an intermediate form lies."

Aristotle argues that the moral psychology of wild animals is like that of children: they can have natural virtue and habitual virtue, but they cannot have the deliberative virtue that requires fully developed logos (Politics, 1332b1; Nicomachean Ethics, 1144b1-1145a5).  They can have the natural virtue that comes from being born with a good natural temperament that inclines them to do the right actions.  And they can have the habitual virtue that comes from obeying social rules so that they habitually do the right actions.

Only human adults are capable of deliberative virtue, which requires logos. And logos is the capacity for grasping explanatory accounts--for understanding both theoretical and practical syllogisms (Moss 2014).  In ethics and politics, explanatory accounts do not just prescribe right actions, they also explain why these are right.  Children and animals can be trained to know what they ought to do but without understanding why they ought to do it.  Virtue in the strict sense requires deliberate choice and prudential judgment with full knowledge of both what should be done and why it should be done.  This deliberative virtue with prudence corresponds to what de Waal identifies as the third level of morality--reasoning and judgment.

Because of their unique capacity for logos, human beings are more political than the other political animals--and more moral than the other moral animals--because this capacity for grasping explanatory accounts means that rather than just habitually obeying social rules of justice in their group, human beings will want to know why these are the rules, and they will argue over whether there might be better rules.  For that reason, human politics is always a rhetorical activity in which people have to persuade one another that what their community is doing is just, right, or noble.  That's why Aristotle's Rhetoric is a crucial text for his moral and political philosophy.

The importance of rhetorical speech for human politics and human morality explains why language is the critical marker in the evolutionary transition to uniquely human symbolism and rationality, as Ginsburg and Jablonka have indicated.

ADDENDUM--SEPTEMBER 3, 2025

Abbate's article has been recently reprinted in a book edited by Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey--Animal History: History as If Animals Mattered (Eugene, Oregon: Resource Publications, 2025).  In this new version of her paper, she makes no attempt to answer my objections.  Is that because my objections are irrefutable?

REFERENCES

Abatte, Cheryl E. 2016. "'Higher' and 'Lower' Political Animals: A Critical Analysis of Aristotle's Account of the Political Animal." Journal of Animal Ethics 6:54-66.

Abatte, Cheryl E. 2018. "Redefending Nonhuman Justice in Complex Animal Communities: A Response to Jacobs."  Journal of Animal Ethics 8:159-165.

Arnhart, Larry. 1990. "Aristotle, Chimpanzees, and Other Political Animals." Social Science Information 29:479-559.

Arnhart, Larry. 1994. "The Darwinian Biology of Aristotle's Political Animals."  American Journal of Political Science 38:464-485.

Arnhart, Larry. 1998. Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Arnhart, Larry. 2009. Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question.  Ed. Kenneth Blanchard. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic Press.

Bekoff, Marc. 1995. "Play Signals as Punctuation: The Structure of Social Play in Canids." Behaviour 132:419-429.

Bekoff, Marc, and Jessica Pierce. 2009. Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Darwin, Charles. 2004. The Descent of Man.  Second edition. Ed. James Moore and Adrian Desmond. London: Penguin Classics.

de Waal, Frans. 2006. Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press

Ginsburg, Simona, and Eva Jablonka. 2019. The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul: Learning and the Origins of Consciousness.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Jacobs, Edward. 2018. "Aristotle and the Zoon Politikon: A Response to Abbate." Journal of Animal Ethics 8:150-158.

Moss, Jessica. 2014. "Right Reason in Plato and Aristotle: On the Meaning of Logos." Phronesis 59:181-230.

Pierce, Jessica, and Marc Bekoff. 2012. "Wild Justice Redux: What We Know About Social Justice in Animals and Why It Matters." Social Justice Research 25:122-139.

A Thousand Posts (2)

2009
In January, my post on "Evolutionary Psychology's Slow Acceptance of Darwinian Morality" pointed to the most important turn in the recent history of evolutionary psychology--the acceptance of Darwin's evolutionary theory of morality in The Descent of Man. 

In his famous lecture on "Evolution and Ethics" in 1893, Thomas Huxley adopted a Kantian transcendentalist view of ethics and invoked the is/ought dichotomy in rejecting Darwin's claim that the evolutionary explanation of morality was part of the evolutionary science of human nature.  For over a century after Huxley's lecture, most Darwinian biologists--including George Williams and Richard Dawkins--agreed with Huxley's rejection of Darwin's evolutionary ethics.  Therefore, they were disturbed by Ed Wilson's efforts--in Sociobiology (1975) and Consilience (1998)--to revive Darwin's evolutionary study of morality.  In the 1980s and 1990s, I had argued in agreement with Darwin and Wilson, but my argument was scorned by the leaders of evolutionary psychology.  Remarkably, however, by 2009, the tide had turned as the growing research on the evolutionary psychology of morality confirmed that Darwin was right after all.  One of the leaders of this movement was Jonathan Haidt.  I wrote my first post on Haidt's research in November of 2009.  I returned to Haidt in September of 2012 and October of 2016.  In January of 2011, I wrote a post on how Sam Harris had persuaded Richard Dawkins to change his mind and accept Darwinian ethics.

An evolutionary moral psychology assumes the reality of an evolved human nature.  But my colleague at Northern Illinois University--David Buller--has dismissed the idea of human nature as a superstition in his book Adapting Minds, which is a general critique of evolutionary psychology.  In January, I wrote a post arguing that Buller's denial of human nature depends on a silly definition of human nature as consisting only of traits that satisfy three conditions--first, they must be unique to human beings and thus not shared with any other animals; second, they must be invariably and exactly the same for all human individuals everywhere; and, third, they must be eternal essences that are not historically contingent.  It is easy for Buller to argue that human evolution has not produced a human species with such traits. But a sensible definition of human nature does not require these conditions. We could define human nature as constituted by regularities in that suite of generally recurrent anatomical, physiological, and psychological traits that characterize the human species.  These regularities do not have to be uniquely human, invariably the same for all individuals, or eternal essences.  These regularities of human nature include what I have identified as the 20 natural desires.

I elaborated some of these points in April in posts on nature and human nature and on Marjorie Grene's account of natural teleology and the concept of species.  In September, I defended the Aristotelian and Darwinian understanding of species.

In the spring, I taught a graduate seminar on David Hume. In May, I wrote a long post on "A Research Program for a Humean Science of Human Nature."  In his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume laid out his grand vision of a comprehensive science grounded on a science of human nature.  Every topic that I have taken up on this blog could be understood as part of this Humean science of human nature rooted in Darwinian evolutionary science. This science could be sketched out according to at least ten broad themes running through my blog posts: (1) Darwinian liberal education, (2) deep history, (3) ethology, (4) behavioral game theory, (5) neuroscience, (6) social history, (7) moral psychology, (8) evolution of religion, (9) evolutionary aesthetics, and (10) the Darwinian future of human nature.

In May and June, I travelled around England and Scotland, and I wrote a series of posts on the natural history of Great Britain based on my travels.  During this trip, I visited Darwin's house in Down and wrote some posts on that.  As I indicated, some of my first reading of Darwin included the notebooks that he began writing after he returned to England from his trip on the Beagle.  I was impressed with those notebooks as showing Darwin's mind at work, and my writing of this blog is in some ways following the style of Darwin's writing in his notebooks.

My visit to Darwin's house and reading about his family life led me to write about how Darwin's pondering the suffering and death of his daughter Annie manifested his understanding of love and death.  I wrote this in response to Peter Lawler's assertion that Darwin advanced an "impersonal theory of evolution" denying the personal reality of love and death.

From the end of June to the end of September, I wrote many posts on the history and philosophy of Platonic moral cosmology, in which I set up a debate between Remi Brague and C. S. Lewis, on one side, and Catherine Zuckert and Joseph Cropsey, on the other.  Brague and Lewis see Plato's dialogues (particularly the Timaeus and book 10 of The Laws) as defending a divinely designed teleological cosmology as setting the cosmic standards for the moral and political life of human beings, but they also see this Platonic moral cosmology as overturned by modern science (including Darwinism) in a way that promotes moral nihilism by teaching that the cosmos is indifferent or even hostile to human concerns.  By contrast, Zuckert and Cropsey see Plato's Socrates as denying, or at least questioning, that moral cosmology taught by Timaeus and the Athenian stranger, and suggesting that instead of finding moral guidance in the cosmos, humans need to look to their own human wants and desires.  Even if the cosmos does not care about or for us, we care about and for ourselves.  This Socrates identified by Zuckert and Cropsey belongs to a tradition of Socratic skepticism that includes Cicero, Hume, and Darwin.

If Zuckert and Cropsey have the correct interpretation of Socrates' position, then Socrates is close to my position--that human morality and politics depend not on a cosmic teleology but on an immanent teleology of human natural desires.  If human beings are by their natural desires directed to certain ends or purposes, then we can see those ends or purposes as intrinsic to their nature, regardless of whether those ends or purposes have any cosmic reference.  Darwinian biology supports such an immanent teleology because it recognizes the goal-directed behavior characteristic of various animal species, including the human species.

While some Straussians like Zuckert and Cropsey reject Platonic cosmic teleology as false, others insist that it needs to be supported as at least a "noble lie" that sustains popular conceptions of natural right, and that the Darwinian denial of cosmic teleology is (as Nietzsche put it) "true but deadly."

In September, I endorsed the "Midwest Straussianism" promoted by Catherine and Michael Zuckert.  The Straussians seem to have affirmed three propositions that are contradictory: 1. America is modern. 2. Modernity is bad. 3. America is good.  To overcome the contradiction, the West-Coast Straussians have denied #1, the East-Coast Straussians have denied #3, and the Midwest Straussians have denied #2.  I agree with the Midwest Straussians that modernity is good, and for me this includes not only modern political thought, but also modern natural science.

From October to December, I wrote many posts on the evolutionary biology of human rights as rooted in evolved human nature, and in doing so, I argued that the idea of human rights does not depend on any religious belief in the creation of human beings in the image of God.  As part of this discussion, I wrote about the debate over female genital mutilation as a violation of human rights.

2010
In January, I travelled to England to direct a week-long seminar at Oxford University on "Evolution and Ethics."  The participants were mostly philosophy professors and students from China.  In October, we met again in China (Beijing) for a conference to present papers coming out of the seminar.  This led to a series of posts on the evolutionary psychology of ethics.

As I anticipated, much of the discussion at the seminar turned on the debate between the Platonic or transcendentalist view of ethics and the Humean or empiricist view. A Darwinian evolutionary understanding of ethics is on the side of the Humean view that sees ethics as rooted in human nature, particularly in human emotions, beliefs, and desires. On the other side, the Platonic view taken by those like Kant looks to a transcendent conception of the Good that is somehow woven into the order of the cosmos. (As I have indicated in various posts, the careful reader of the Platonic dialogues might doubt whether Plato himself--or Plato's Socrates--was a Platonist in this way.)

A growing number of leading philosophers today are adopting a Humean/Darwinian moral psychology supported by recent research in evolutionary science, neuroscience, anthropology, and animal behavior. But one can still see the powerful influence of a Kantian transcendentalism in moral philosophy that regards morality as an autonomous realm of pure reason totally separated from the empirical realm of nature as studied by natural science.

Kantian philosophers like Richard Joyce worry that evolutionary ethics promotes moral nihilism by teaching that morality is fictional. Joyce agrees with Kant that by definition moral judgments presuppose belief in a transcendent world of moral facts beyond the empirical world of natural facts. But since he denies the truth of that belief, because there really are no such moral facts, he concludes that we cannot know that morality is true, and therefore we cannot know that moral rightness and wrongness really exist. Moreover, he argues that evolutionary ethics necessarily leads us to this conclusion that morality is fictional, because an evolutionary account of morality explains it as arising from the natural facts of human desires and capacities without any reference to any distinctively moral facts.

I agree that believing in a moral law grounded in divine will or transcendent reason might strengthen the moral motivation of people with such a belief. But it seems clear to me that people can still have a strong motivation for moral conduct when they believe that morality has no other ground than the evolved human nature of our moral emotions.

That a Kantian philosophical idealism does not necessarily support good moral judgment is indicated by the fact that most of the German philosophers who supported Nazism were Kantian idealists. For me, as I indicated in a post in January, this suggests that the evils of Nazism flowed from a metaphysical tradition of idealist utopian philosophy that stretches from Plato to Fichte to Nietzsche to Heidegger.

My reasoning for rejecting Kantian categorical normativity is clarified in my post on "Philippa Foot and the Hypothetical Imperatives of Natural Goodness" (March).

In 2010, I wrote a lot about the natural evolution of religious belief.  I have identified the desire for religious understanding as one of the twenty natural desires rooted in our evolved human nature. Human beings generally desire to understand the world as governed by gods or God, because this satisfies their natural longing to make sense of things that would otherwise be incomprehensible.

The recent research on the evolutionary and cognitive causes of religious belief goes a long way to substantiate my position. The general reasoning for how religious belief evolved as an innate disposition of human nature is laid out by David Hume and Charles Darwin. This new research provides elaborate theoretical and empirical grounds for their naturalistic account of religion.

One of the proponents of this research is Justin Barrett, whom I met at the Oxford seminar. He is an evolutionary psychologist who argues that the evolved propensity of the human mind to detect intelligent agents supports a natural tendency to believe in divine agents. Barrett is a Christian evolutionist.  His work largely confirms what Hume says in his Natural History of Religion. Barrett is a Christian who sees his evolutionary explanation of religious belief as compatible with his own Christian belief that God has created human beings so that they can discover him.  I have also written about Jesse Bering (in February of 2011), who explains the evolutionary psychology of religious belief in a way similar to Barrett's explanation, but Bering is an atheist.

Also in 2010, I wrote about Rebecca Goldstein's philosophical novel on the "36 arguments for the existence of God" (February), the evolution of Heaven and Hell (April-May), the evolutionary game theory of how religion supports cooperation (April), and Confucianism (June, August, October).  My writing on Confucianism was drawn from my paper on Darwinian and Confucian Ethics for the conference on "Evolution and Ethics" in Beijing in October, which included some of the same Chinese professors and students who were at the Oxford conference in January.

Religious belief is uniquely human because it arises from the uniquely human capacity for symbolic thought and communication that allows human beings to construct a shared imagined reality.  In February, I wrote about how Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb have explained human symbolism as one of four dimensions of evolutionary inheritance: genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic.  Recognizing these four levels of evolution helps to explain the "animal culture wars" (April): if "culture" is defined as inherited behavioral traditions, then some nonhuman animals have culture; but if "culture" is defined as inherited symbolic traditions (like religious belief), then this is uniquely human.

In 2010, I wrote a lot about Aristotelianism.  In March and April, I wrote a series of posts on Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl's Aristotelian liberalism and showed how a Darwinian moral and political psychology supported this.  In the fall, I was teaching a graduate seminar on Aristotle, and I wrote some posts in September, October, and December, on "Aristotle's Darwinian Ethics," which went into my paper on "The Darwinian Science of Aristotelian Virtue" for the conference on "Science and Virtue" organized by Peter Lawler and Marc Guerra at Berry College (Mount Berry, Georgia) in November.  In 2013, the papers for this conference were published in The Science of Modern Virtue: On Descartes, Darwin, and Locke, edited by Lawler and Guerra (NIU Press).

In July, I pointed to my essay for "Cato Unbound" on "Darwinian Liberalism," which would lead to papers and lectures in later years on the Darwinian psychology of classical liberalism.

My list of 20 natural desires includes the natural desire for courage in war, because human beings generally desire war when they think it will advance their group in conflicts with outside groups.  The is the one desire that has provoked the most criticism from people who are uncomfortable with the idea that war might be rooted in evolved human nature.  In 2010, I began to write the evolutionary psychology of war in various posts (in February, June, and December).  I returned to this issue in 2011, in response to the publication of Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature.

Also, in 2010, I began writing about anarchism (June) and equality in the Lockean state of nature (July), and I would return to these topics in subsequent years.

To be continued . . .