In the Forum
Harriet Ritvo
Professor Harriet Ritvo is in the Forum with a thought-provoking essay on humans and other animals – and on humanists and scientists.
Claims for human taxonomic uniqueness have become harder and harder to support as new discoveries about the origins, bodies, and abilities of other animals have continued to close the gap between humans and other apes. Debates about the differences in mental faculties, however, continue to rage. Language and symbolic communication, tool use and manufacture, and other criteria long used to sort humans from other creatures turn out as often as not to hinge on definitions specific to particular languages and particular historic and cultural traditions. New research by worldwide collection and participant observation, and by new modes of experimentation and comparison, have further called earlier presumptions about human uniqueness – and the exclusivity of human rights — into question.
If what it means to be human has changed, what about the meaning of being a humanist? Do claims about what makes humans unique have a bearing on who will have the authority to determine the subject matter of the humaanities and the human and natural sciences – and the relation between these? And who will be deemed qualified to make judgments on the destinies of other sentient – and in some ways arguably conscious and self-conscious – living beings?
Harriet Ritvo is Arthur J. Conner Professor of History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A specialist on the history of Britain and of the natural and environmental sciences, she is the author of The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism (Chicago UP, 2009), The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Harvard UP, 1997), The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Harvard UP, 1987), and Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals and History (Virginia, forthcoming); she is also the co-editor of Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Imperialism, Exoticism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), and the editor of Charles Darwin’s The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
Previous Contributors
Bateson, Sir Patrick. Hunting and Science
Batson, Dan. Empathic Concern and Altruism in Humans
Blier, Suzanne Preston. Animalia: The Natural World, Art, and Theory
Carroll, Joe. The Adaptive Function of Literature and the Other Arts
Deacon, Terrence. On the Human: Rethinking the Natural Selection of Human Language
Doris, John. Do You Know What You’re Doing?
Gillespie, Michael Allen. Science and the Humanities
Hacking, Ian. Commercial Genome Reading
Hayles, Katherine N. Distributing/Disturbing the Chinese Room
Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. How Humans Became Such Other-Regarding Apes
Lenoir, Tim. Contemplating Singularity
Lycan, William. Qualitative Experience in Machines
Marks, Stuart A. Wild Animals and a Different Human Face
McCarty, Willard. Who Am I Computing?
Rabinow, Paul. Biopower, Dignity, Synthetic Anthropos
Rosati, Connie S. Narrative and Personal Good
Rosenberg, Alex. The Disenchanted Naturalist’s Guide to Reality
Stoneking, Mark. Does Culture Prevent or Drive Human Evolution?
Strier, Karen B. The Challenge Of Comparisons In Primatology
Tallis, Raymond. Does Evolution Explain Our Behavior?
Tabbi, Joseph. On Reading 300 Works Of Electronic Literature
Turner, Mark. The Scope of Human Thought
Forum Calendar
Scroll ahead to see which week you’ll be able to engage your favorite Contributor. It’s a distinguished list, including:
Brian Leiter
Robert Pippin
Margaret Boden
Patricia Churchland
Elliott Sober
G.P. Beer
Bill Benzon
Recent events
The Human Spark is a PBS series exploring our evolutionary history. An examination of commonalities between us and other animals, it also emphasizes the ways in which we differ from other species. The episodes are playing on Wednesday evenings this winter on local channels around the country. Alan Alda is host and the first episode is called “So Human, So Chimp.”
Check your local listings.
In the News
In the News is a monthly round-up of recent developments in the study of humans, animals, and machines. We provide links to two references for each story, first, to the scholarly record in the professional literature and, second, to a popular media account illustrating how the research is being presented to the public. Compiled by Stephen Zachary. Read more.
