Anthropomorphism is an unforgivable, career-endangering sin. It wants to assert a belief about the specialness of humans that is very akin to the theological belief of the monotheisms that it loudly despises. But try to say that we share with nonhumans the building blocks of our behavior and our cognition, as we share the building blocks of our biochemistry, and the biological establishment starts to get uneasy. We are happy to accept that we got our bowels and our muscle metabolism from our nonhuman ancestors and even that the depolarizations in our brain neurons that let us love Shakespeare are caused by the same ion tides, surging through sodium and potassium gates, that let a rat home in on a piece of stale cheese. These conclusions are supposed to be accepted by all educated people as unimpeachable scientific orthodoxy. Darwin told us, over 150 years ago, that we came from the natural world that in our family albums there are, not many pages back, furred and feathered and scaly faces that we are in unbroken continuity with nonhumans.
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