FACT: Humans Are 100% Animal
The one thing that lurks at the heart of nearly every majorly divisive social issue debate is the religious vs. the secular viewpoints. The religious side speaks for God. The secular side speaks for Reason.
One side puts us on a pedestal above the animals, created separately and apart from the animals. The other side says we evolved from animals and are in fact animals. THIS one fact is very important to get right. It can’t be both ways and only one is right. But…it’s not irreconcilable either! One only has to adjust the Creation part to the animals first or the AWESOME godlike potential for animals to evolve out of a single cell and, voila, both sides can be happy and right! As they say, God works in mysterious ways so why would He/She be so boring as to just create a different “special” creature using the exact same basic parts of: skeletons, muscles, nerves, blood, guts, organs, skin, hair, etc.? Why not use special, different parts for humans since they are so different and after all God is omnipotent so could construct something better than mere animals, right?
Religious views are constantly adjusting through various reforms and enlightenments. For example, at one time it was Religious Dogma that the Earth was the center of the Universe and the Sun crazily revolved around this tiny rock in space, which they also thought was quite huge if not infinite in size since so much was undiscovered. Then came Copernicus and Galileo and Newton and the church relented and was forced to face the fact: The Earth revolves around the Sun like the other planets and the Moon revolves around the Earth like Galileo saw with his own eyes, the moons of Jupiter doing. ALL sides were forced to agree with what the eyes and the mind and the mathematics and the observations were telling them. End of that story.
I won’t go into disparaging people’s deeply held beliefs one, because I have plenty of religious friends and two, I don’t think they are crazy and I have had my own spiritual and religious experiences. But I will fight back on this one point of human biology and emergence as a species. We are 100% Earth animal and Reason and Observations prove it.
Common Traits
Take any familiar animal with a skeleton be it dog, cat, bear, horse, ape, porcupine, mouse, etc. Each has a skull. Each has appendages. Each has a spine. Each has ribs. So do we.
Checkbox #1—Seems like an animal type of thing to have a skeleton. But that’s not all.
Crack into the bone and examine the contents and the structure like biologists have done for centuries and you find more similarities such as marrow, blood, calcium, etc. So do we. God didn’t give us a different bone made of titanium or carbon fiber. We got a bone that could bend a little, heal itself when it broke, make white blood cells and all sorts of handy stuff just like animals have.
Checkbox #2 — Seems like an animal type of thing to have similar bone structure.
There’s more. Now examine the bone under a microscope and look at the bone cells.
Checkbox #3 — Cells seem very similar in all animals, including us.
Now days, we humans can look even deeper. We see in the nucleus of each cell a fantastic godlike molecule, DNA which is basically a blueprint for programming the entire body!
Checkbox #4 — Seems like an animal type of thing to have DNA. So far, not so different are we?
Whether cat, iguana, chicken or human look into the contents of the body and you will basically find the same things moved around, modified and at a different size. The Blue Whale has a heart the size of a VW Beetle! We animals tend to have: a brain, a heart, lungs, a stomach, an intestine, a liver, etc. Thank God they are mostly hidden away because they are messy and pretty gross to look at and so we all get pretty neat packaging for the whole animal kit in the form of skin and hair or feathers.
Checkbox #5 — Seems like an animal type of thing to have the same organs and guts. Even insects seem to need many of the same parts to operate.
Each organ likewise is comprised of similar cells and each cell contains the same DNA the bones had. Nature doesn’t mess around! When it wants to copy stuff, it make trillions of copies like nobody’s business.
Checkbox #6 — Seems like an animal type of thing to have specialized cells with DNA in each organ.
Same with nerves. Each animal uses nerves to send signals around the body and coordinate actions and senses. The nerves are also made of similar cells and also contain DNA.
Checkbox #7 — Seems like an animal type of thing to have specialized cells with DNA in each nerve, just like us.
If we aren’t an animal, then why did God use the same exact stuff in all of us? Is it because these are perfect for operating a body in Earth’s environment so He just had to use the same parts, down to the molecular level to make us work? Or was it that He simply set awesome evolution in motion and these same parts evolved because they helped us survive as the “fittest?” Now I know some of you are jumping ahead and saying, “Hey, He gave us a soul and a bigger, more powerful brain, dummy. Duh!” And that would be fine except for a few important details that have emerged in our biological knowledge over the last 80 years in the form of genetics. Also, I didn’t see it written where animals don’t have souls either so I question the uniqueness of that trait.
Almighty DNA
When Watson and Crick discovered DNA in the 1950’s it completely revolutionized our understanding of how bodies miraculously build themselves as they grow from a clump of cells into a completed creature with all the aforementioned parts. Since then, we have learned how to compare DNA from different creatures, even single cell ones and see the exact differences between our DNA and theirs. Shockingly, some animals closer to us on the tree of life such as chimpanzees share 98.2% of the EXACT same DNA as we have so the only bodily differences are found in the 0.8% that is different.
Checkbox #8 — Seems like we aren’t all THAT different from chimpanzees.
But we have way more than DNA to work with these days. We have fossil records, carbon dating and even preserved samples of DNA found in bones or also frozen bodies of ancient animals or those encased in amber and hermetically sealed for the ages. The newer the sample, such as remains of earlier humanoids like Neanderthals, the more we can compare them to ourselves. We have thus discovered that Neanderthal DNA has indeed been passed into modern humans and therefor at some point they bred with Homo Sapiens. That is already a fact that can’t be easily swept under the rug. If we are related to Neanderthals, then we are equally related to the Neanderthal ancestors as well.
Now we are starting to piece together the full story of our ancestry and each new fossil recovered and DNA analysis shows very clearly we are not at all on a different Tree of Life than not only humanoids but all of the animals! But before we even get to the deeper ancestors and just examine current humans around the globe we can ALL be linked to common human ancestors in Africa. That’s right, whatever race you are anywhere in the world, you are of African origin be it Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Native American, European, Aboriginal. Everybody! This will also disturb certain racist types and they will not like to hear this and will seek to discredit the science that proves it. However, science doesn’t care what you think. It proves what it says beyond a shadow of doubt through rigorous, peer-reviewed methods. You might as well argue that 1 + 1 does not equal 2 at some point.
Animal Behavior
He’s such an animal! How many time have we heard that? Besides all of those similar biological traits we have plenty of common behaviors with the other animals. We all eat. We all poop. We all pee. We all sleep. We all have sex. We run from danger. We build shelters. We hunt. We gather. We play. Sure, this is where we greatly diverge from the other animals because we do all sorts of things they don’t do but we definitely share the basics. You’d think God could have at least made our poop smell better while He was setting us aside, but nope. Same if not more disgusting than other animals. Rabbit pellets and cow pies are a bit more civilized than human sewage.
Checkbox #9 — Seems like an animal thing to eat, poop, pee, have sex and play.
Indeed, each animal enjoys its peculiar traits and behaviors and specializes at being that animal. Pound for pound, the other animals tend to be way stronger than us. Way faster (except for sloths). Have better endurance. Can even fly without a machine assist! As we observe and learn more, we are seeing even advanced social traits in other creatures that we thought were unique to us. Elephants mourn their dead like we do and even mourn humans they like and will travel many miles to pay tribute. People befriend animals all the time and develop deep bonds that seem to go both ways. Even an octopus was recorded befriending a human in My Octopus Teacher. We play with our dogs and cats and they obviously enjoy it and show their delight. We see all manner of young animals fooling around and sometimes annoying their parents. We see birds and chimps using tools.
Checkbox #10 — Seems like an animal thing to develop complex social behavior and use tools to get things done.
Human Behavior Is Animal Behavior
Yes, we have better tools and we think differently but when it comes down to it we are usually using these advantages to get food, cook it, protect ourselves, heal ourselves, etc. Even our higher thinking in the realms of language, math, science, medicine, engineering, poetry and the arts is for us a way to pass time or to survive, something all animals do. We can’t pass time the same way as dogs who can smell 40,000 better than us in some cases. And as lofty as we get, we still find ourselves scrounging for food and in the bathroom a few hours later, just like animals.
It’s not exactly that we are so special of an animal, it’s that animals are so special THEY can even invent new tools and languages and computers and rockets. They can evolve and develop new skills and new ways to get around and they have! Animals are us and we are animals. Yet in all our cleverness, we have decided we are THE superior animal even as we destroy each other, spoil the environment and do all sorts of horrid, stupid things the other animals have never done, certainly not on such a massive scale. It’s almost as though we took some of the worst animal behaviors and amplified them in ways that don’t make sense for our own survival. Where they would kill a cow to eat, we will set up a factory to make hamburger out of millions of cows. Where they would create a burrow or a nest, we will create a subdivision of identical houses. The same basic purpose, but on a different scale, out of balance with Nature.
Why It’s Important
It is important for us to know we are animals for numerous reasons:
- We need the humility of knowing we are part of a vast legacy of evolution and deeply embedded in the web of life.
- We need to see the other animals as our distant cousins and show them more respect for their skills and legacy we share.
- We need to stop injecting religion into so many important decisions about how we treat each other as fellow animals.
- We have to appreciate the differences between each other as animals as we do with the other animals and quit trying to conform to some model of ideal human animal that never existed.
- We have to not worry about being an animal and instead work on being a good animal that doesn’t act monstrously.
- We have to make sure we protect the world for ALL animal life, not just ourselves since our fates are all tied together.
- We have to learn from other unbiased animals such as dogs, whales and dolphins how to peacefully co-exist for time immemorial.
- We have to de-emphasize the human animal as above all other forms of life and let the other animals have some space and enjoy life too.
- For those that believe in God, they need to expand the power of their God to give pure freedom, and not control every moment and free will and survival skills and the ability to evolve from simpler forms through the struggle of life.
- We need to give ourselves permission to be animals, advanced though we may be, and know that animals can even have godlike abilities to create, preserve and destroy life that must be carried out with integrity and without malice and for a real purpose.
Conclusion
Calling someone an animal is stating a fact. It’s not an insult either or it’s certainly not a very clever one. Most reasonable people will not even argue this point because it’s so obvious. If we are not an animal then why do we check off so many of the exact same parts and behaviors as the other animals? Why are we just as gross as them inside and bleed the same way as they if we are so special? Face it, you and your family and friends are all animals. This is the reality and it changes nothing about your life which is already well underway with or without this knowledge.
However, you can also use this knowledge to take yourself down a peg and not be feeling all superior because you can easily kill other animals or make their lives hell as well as your own. Just because we evolved differently doesn’t make us essentially better or superior. Each animal has been around longer or as long as we have or in a way all of us have been around just as long but on different branches of the same Tree of Life. I wrote this article to hopefully help folks pay more attention to the Whole Tree and not just our branch and to enjoy and celebrate being on this One Tree with all those fantastic cousins out there as well as our own species!
