Humans and Elephants: We’re Not So Exceptional After All

I’m always leery of claims that humans are uniquely exceptional, that we are better than nonhuman animals (animals) at dealing with the demands of our daily lives, that we are more highly evolved, above, and separate from other animals on different misleading scales of relative intelligence, and that our big brains enable us to better cope with all sorts of risks that come our way. For those and other reasons, I was pleased to learn of a new book by experimental economists Don Ross and Glenn Harrison titled The Gambling Animal: Humanity’s Evolutionary Winning Streak—and How We Risk It All.

In their fascinating and challenging work, in which they compare humans to elephants in terms of their abilities to handle risks and adapt to various scenarios, they offer a “profoundly unsettling account of human exceptionalism” and conclude that our special strategy for collectively dealing with risk is the source both of our ecological dominance and the probable collapse of our industrial civilization. Their book reminded me of an interview I did that focused on the question, “Is human intelligence a gift or a burden?” in which writer Justin Gregg concluded that human intelligence is an inferior evolutionary solution when compared to the kinds of intelligence we find in other species.¹

Marc Bekoff: Why did you and Glenn write The Gambling Animal?

Don Ross: We’re experimental economists who specialize in responses to risk. First, we wanted to show the explanatory power of our many years of studying the risk-response functions of over 40,000 people, plus our recent extension of this study to elephants.

Second, we wanted to set the current environmental and civilizational crisis in a deeper evolutionary context: We evolved expensive brains to cope with climate change. The basic strategy by which humans have managed risks—to embed them in wider portfolios through technology and geospatial expansion—is for the first time no longer available, because the risk portfolio now bundles in everything.

MB: Who do you hope to reach in your book?

DR: We worked hard to make it accessible to any educated reader—but at the same time, to avoid simplifying arguments or evidence. The core argument is original to us; it’s not a compendium of work by others with the math stripped out.

MB: What are some of the topics you consider, and what are some of your major messages?

DR: The book addresses two puzzles: First, why, despite our not being the only animal with a very metabolically expensive brain, did Homo sapiens become the overwhelmingly ecologically dominant species? Second, why have people at population scales recurrently made huge gambles, accepting deep risks and generating bigger ones, despite the fact that most individual people are risk averse, as are other individual mammals?

One best understands any complex phenomenon not just by examining it in isolation but by comparing it with similar but interestingly different comparative phenomena. So, we examine the history of human responses to risk by comparing them with those of elephants. Their early ancestors and ours faced the same climatic risks at roughly the same place and time. Both species responded by developing costly brains to control peripatetic life histories, which in turn implied slow-developing offspring who needed to be cared for and educated by communities rather than just their own parents. Both species manage their primary challenges socially.

The key divergence in the two species’ ecological fates results from differences in their respective neuroanatomical structures. Humans’ densely folded frontal cortex makes them nature’s masters of imaginative modeling. An upside of this is the capacity for self-accelerating technological innovation. A major downside is a recurrent difficulty in distinguishing features of models from features of objective reality.

By contrast, elephant encephalisation occurred mainly in the cerebellum. This allows them to use the history of their physical movements and somatic orientation as an indexing system for stabilizing memory.

This difference has generated a cascade of consequences. Humans cope with their risk of delusional beliefs by storing records of experience in the external world, thereby creating shared reference anchors for social processing. Writing, though it came late in the human career and remained a scarce skill until recently, allowed humans to evolve powerful reality-tracking mechanisms in the form of scientific institutions.

Elephants, with their stable memories, were under no cultural-evolutionary pressure to develop external information storage. Thus, it is fallacious to infer that elephants didn’t build complex civilizations because they lack adequate brainpower; we should not be surprised that they evolved no tools for managing a form of risk they didn’t face.

Nor should we infer that they could never have developed science. In the book, we argue that they would have been able to reach it only by way of first generalizing their understanding of statistics. This would have been a more natural epistemological progression than the convoluted actual human history of science, in which deductive reasoning from hypothetical general conjectures preceded the understanding of statistics by two centuries.

In any event, human cultural evolution blocked any path to elephant civilization. The history of human collective risk management has had the structure of a ratchet. Major risks have been managed by embedding them in larger portfolios, partly through geospatial expansion and partly through technological scaling up of energy capture. Each major turn of this ratchet has created new, larger risks.

In our book, we review the major milestones in this historical process. Now, humans have expanded the risk portfolio to include the entire planetary ecosystem. It is not evident that we can manage climate change or biodiversity collapse in our characteristic way by turning the ratchet again.

MB: Are you hopeful that as people learn more about the foibles of human exceptionalism, they will come to understand the risks involved in arguing that we are above and separate from other animals and the arrogance of thinking this is so?

DR: We argue that it is unlikely that humans will go extinct. Civilizational collapse will leave descendants, and they will be highly adaptive and resourceful like all human populations. The prospects for elephants are much more precarious, but they might pull through if we can preserve a small but sustainable genetic pool and cultural knowledge pool. This means that most elephants must remain wild—until the end of our industrial civilization ceases to broil the Earth.

This will indeed require the development of a partnership model of ecological risk management, particularly in Africa, in which humans facilitate elephants’ participation in shared risk management. My next book, with a different co-author, will explore this topic.

Will the humans who survive civilizational collapse not resume cranking the risk ratchet? We can’t know, but the basis for optimism is inductively weak; management of long-run risks at the population scale has never been a notable human characteristic.