Beyond Human Exceptionalism with Christine Webb

As humans, we tend to see ourselves at the top of a natural hierarchy — the most intelligent and successful species on Earth. What if that conviction isn't just wrong, but also dangerous?

In this episode of our season on planetary diplomacy, we sat down with Christine Webb, a primatologist and Associate Professor at New York University, to help us rethink humanity’s place in the web of life.

Christine is the author of The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why it Matters, a scientist’s plea for more humility toward the more-than-human world and an argument for how de-centering humanity could help us better understand not just other species, but ourselves.

In this conversation, we dig into the stubborn myth of human superiority — what it is, why it persists, and what it might take to finally leave it behind.

This season is part of the Planetary Embassy, a global initiative across the Swissnex network. Discover more at https://swissnex.org/planetary-embassy/

Tectonic is a production of Swissnex in Boston and New York. Find us online at https://swissnex.org/boston/ 

Transcript

Brendan Karch

This season of Tectonic is all about planetary diplomacy, asking how we can represent the interests of other species and ecosystems in balance with our own human interests. To build such a planetary diplomacy would require wholesale transformations in scientific discovery, in our governance structures, and also in our human-centric beliefs and assumptions. And in this episode, it's this last part, the human-centrism, that we want to address. 

Because taking the rest of the planet seriously means, in some sense, de-centering ourselves and rethinking our self-importance and self-regard as a species. Because for a very long time, human cultures, or more specifically, scientifically driven Western cultures, have put ourselves on a pedestal above all other species, more intelligent, more social, more moral. And yet, here we are in the midst of a climate and planetary crisis. So clearly, whatever sets us apart from other animals isn't all for the best. 

But how can we step out of human-centrism, which is so deeply embedded in our beliefs and institutions that we often hardly notice it? 

Welcome back to Tectonic. I'm your host, Brendan Karch. 

In this episode, we tackle these questions with Christine Webb, a primatologist and assistant professor at New York University and the author of the 2025 book, The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters. She draws on years of fieldwork to argue that the belief in human superiority is not just ethically flawed, but also makes for bad science. In our discussion, Christine will help us understand what human exceptionalism actually means, why it has proven so stubborn in the face of mounting evidence against it, and what it might look like to build a culture and a science that finally moves beyond it. 

Brendan Karch 

Welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you with us today, Christine Webb. We're here to talk mostly about your book, The Arrogant Ape. And for those who haven't read the book, no, the book is not about an actual sort of what you might think — an arrogant chimpanzee or ape. The arrogant ape is us, right? The arrogant ape is the human beings.

So I'd like to maybe start off just by asking how you came to this subject of The Arrogant Ape, how you came to be interested in how you see humans as defining themselves as an exceptional species. And in particular, I know that you trained as a primatologist, you trained as somebody who studies our closest living relatives, to humans. So how did this journey of studying non-human apes come to make you realize that our forms of human exceptionalism are flawed?

Christine Webb

Sure. So first, thanks so much for having me on the podcast.

Like many of us, I fell in love with other animals from a very young age. I was so curious about their lives and their interests and their motives and their emotions, and I befriended other species, and there were no hierarchies in my relationships with other forms of life. I just wanted to get to know them on their terms.

I learned about evolutionary theory for the first time in high school biology. I had a great teacher and was really captivated by Darwinian theory because it gave a scientific credit to that childhood sense of kinship I had felt with other forms of life and said, well, all species are related and stem from common origins. So it wasn't just something that you felt and experienced, but something that can be shown scientifically.

And then fast-forward a number of years, and as an undergraduate at college, I had the opportunity to take a primate behavior class from a world-renowned primatologist, Frans de Waal, who later became my mentor. And I couldn't believe that I could actually get paid to watch and study other animals and get to know them.

It was really important because even at the time, I don't think I had heard of Jane Goodall or these other primatologists. I didn't realize this was something that you could pursue. And I decided from then on that I wanted to make a career out of this. Looking back on it, I think primatology was especially appealing to me, not just because of my love of other animals and my interest in evolutionary theory, but because our closest living primate relatives challenge the supposed divide between human and animal, right? They really straddle that supposed boundary and trouble it. 

Brendan Karch

There's this gripping image in your book of you being in Manhattan, I think you were in graduate school at that point, and going to a lab that is on the, I forget what it is, 10th or 20th floor of a Manhattan building that might look anonymous from the outside, but you take the elevator up and you emerge into this primate lab.

And there you are as a primatologist studying primates in what is very much not their natural environment. And it seemed like you had a little bit of an awakening then that not all was correct or right with the way that primatology was functioning and the way that science was sort of studying other creatures. Can you tell us more about that experience?

Christine Webb

Sure, yes. That was at the New York State Psychiatric Institute up in Harlem, and I was just about to begin graduate school when I first went to this lab, and this was a primate cognition lab studying the physical and social cognitive abilities of rhesus macaques, and they were singly housed. It was a very barren environment. I can still remember the smell of chlorine and ammonia, to sterilize these very man-built environments that seemed very problematic ethically speaking, right? We're studying these animals because they're our closest living primate relatives. We're assuming some kind of biological and psychological similarity and yet we're studying them in these highly deprived conditions. There's a paradox that is embedded, right? It would be unethical to study humans in such conditions, and yet the reason that we're studying them and the questions that we're asking have to do with understanding human evolution and the evolution of these same cognitive abilities in our own species.

I hated going to the lab. I hated going to work. I dreaded it. I had nightmares about it. These were not happy monkeys, and it wasn't until the following summer, about a year later, when I first had the opportunity to study other primates in their natural environment, I went to South Africa to study chacma baboons at Cape Point, right at the, the Cape of Good Hope, that I started to realize that this wasn't just problematic from an ethical point of view, but this was incredibly limiting to our science as well. Because if we're interested, as I was interested in at the time, in social cognition and how other animals navigate their complex social lives and all of the rewards and challenges that come from living in a group, how can you actually address those questions studying singly housed monkeys? 

And so during that field season, I was empowered to really question this way of doing science, not just because of the ethics that are concerning, but because of the scientific concerns that the comparison raised for me. And to this day, I continue to emphasize both in my work, right? That's the way that we study other animals not only has ethical implications, but it has implications for the science that results.

Brendan Karch

Yeah, definitely. And I want to return to this question of the science a little bit later. As I understand it, your book basically has one major goal, it is a plea or a call to stop thinking in terms of human exceptionalism and to open up our eyes to the ways in which we are embedded within natural systems and live by and through our relationships with the natural world.

Now, human exceptionalism, you say, is not perhaps unlike other exceptionalisms. Every animal, you say, is exceptional. Every animal is in some fashion exceptionally capable to adapt to its own environment. But human exceptionalism is different from other forms of exceptionalism, you argue. So to put it bluntly, what's exceptional about human exceptionalism?

Christine Webb

I've had a number of angry people email me since the publication of this book saying things like, well, of course humans are exceptional. We don't see other apes or monkeys sending each other to the moon. They're not writing books and developing computer technologies and giving talks about baboon exceptionalism. And I agree with those people. Of course, other animals are not doing those things — although we should just add that I would very gladly read such a book, if it had been written by a baboon. 

I am not altogether opposed to this notion that humans have unique qualities that distinguish them from other species. But let's just say we want to do that. And in theory, I guess I can get on board with this idea of humans being unique. If we do that, then we need to do the same for all forms of life, as you were saying. If humans are unique, then every species is unique. Each is adapted to its own environmental niche. 

But human exceptionalism is different than human uniqueness because human exceptionalism suggests that what is distinctive about humans is somehow more worthy and advanced than the unique features of other forms of life. So it's not simply different from, it's better than. And that is a very important distinction and one of the reasons why I use the term human exceptionalism and not something like human uniqueness or even something like human supremacy because exceptionalism to me highlights both the notion of difference and hierarchy.

Brendan Karch 

Part of what you do in the book is you go somewhat systematically through a lot of these categories, a lot of the ways that philosophers have attempted to distinguish humans from other species. And you sort of go through them one by one, and you check them off — nope, nope, nope. None of these actually, in your eyes, fully work to say that humans are an inherently somehow better or more advanced species. So what are some of these ways of distinguishing humans that you think are most common and perhaps most flawed?

Christine Webb

Historically, this attempt to define the characteristics that set human apart from animal or from the rest of nature have taken many forms from the capacity to have rationality, to language, self-awareness, the capacity to make and use tools, to develop technologies, to be self-aware, to have empathy and theory of mind, to have a sense of time, right, of future, and the ability to plan. 

I mean, this list goes on and on and on, and it seems like every time we've found this characteristic in other forms of life and sometimes we've found forms of it that far exceed human abilities. There's been many studies on how other animals act far more rationally than humans do, even in very human-centric economic decision-making games.

Every time we've discovered this capacity in another animal, we switch the goalpost and then we develop a new hypothesis for what is the cognitive Rubicon that separates humans from the rest of nature. It seems that every single time we found some version of what we thought was distinctive to human beings and other animals, and it makes me question at what point do we consider abandoning this hypothesis altogether?

In science, when a hypothesis is repeatedly disproven, you're supposed to move on from that hypothesis. But we keep resurrecting it with new traits that had not yet been considered. 

Brendan Karch

Yeah. Most of the examples we've been hearing from you so far working to debunk human exceptionalism are from what people might consider our closest friends or are the most intelligent other species that are out there, dolphins, dogs, other apes. But your book makes an effort to drill down much further in what people might, assume is the hierarchy of animal life, right? Down to the level of insects, down to the level of trees, of fungi. So what are some of the ways that — let's go way down, let's go way down in people's hierarchical assumptions. Let's go down to trees and fungi, right? What are the ways that scientists have been showing that even these radically other species have forms of intelligence that might challenge our sense of human hierarchical exceptionalism?

Christine Webb

There's been a surge of research in recent years examining the intelligence of plants and forests and fungal networks underground who connect the different trees in a forest. And it's pretty incredible because it's challenging conventional definitions of intelligence and mindedness that suggest a nervous system is a prerequisite for being able to think and feel and behave in very complex ways.

And already we had some other animals who were challenging this, who don't have a central nervous system, right? Like octopuses, for instance, or who have very simple nervous systems like sponges and their ability to engage in very complex behaviors and solve problems and to use tools and to relate to one another socially in very rich ways. And that already started to trouble this notion that intelligence, cognition, maybe even consciousness relies on a central nervous system. 

And when we expand that out beyond the animal kingdom to think about how plants and fungi and even bacteria and viruses behave, it really starts to challenge the so-called neuro-exceptionalism, right? Which is related to human exceptionalism. Because again, coming back to so many of these qualities, right? Like plants can distinguish themselves from others and they can distinguish amongst kin and non-kin and they are highly cooperative and they have senses that we lack altogether. They have learning and memory.

And so it's so important to me as a primatologist who studies our closest living primate relatives to not fall into primate-centrism or chimpo-centrism, right? By assuming that only those who think and act like us are intelligent and, and matter morally. No, because that's just another version of human exceptionalism. We have to think about the radically different ways that mindedness can manifest in nature, and that moral worth can manifest in nature. And, and that certainly doesn't stop at primates. It certainly doesn't stop at animals.

Brendan Karch

Yeah, completely. Now, one thing that your book tries to get at is alternatives to this mentality which are also in some senses alternatives to the climate crisis and the planetary crisis. There are many places you can look for alternatives, but one of the most common and probably fruitful places to look for alternative thinking about humans' place in the world is to look at various strands of indigenous thought that may exist in various parts of the world.

So what do you see as the sort of takeaways that we should have in a very, again here, very surface level sort of broad examination of how various forms of indigenous thought can help us get out of the shackles of human exceptionalism?

Christine Webb

So human exceptionalism is not a human universal. Human cultures past and present all around the world have managed to live in a much less hierarchical relationship with other forms of life, and I believe we have much to learn from those alternative ideologies and sciences and relationships. And Western science and Indigenous science often have a lot more in common or can complement one another in ways that are often overlooked. And fortunately, I think we're starting to see past that false boundary and, again, sort of hierarchy that, oh, we have to validate Indigenous science with the tools and technologies and theories of Western science, but know that they can operate simultaneously and inform one another, without being ranked. I think that's such an important direction that the field is moving in now. Can't get there fast enough, in my view.

Brendan Karch 

Yeah. Do you see promising signs? Do you see promising science happening that you feel is achieving the aims of your book of dismantling human exceptionalism, dismantling this hierarchy?

Christine Webb

I do. I see it in all sorts of fields and ways. I mean, in biomedical research, for instance, there is a replication crisis and a translation crisis where we know that most treatments that worked in an animal model actually fail in human clinical trials. It's something like one in nine or one in ten actually succeed. And there's increasing recognition in biomedical science that part of the reason for the translation and replication crisis is because we're keeping animals in these conditions, and that we need to move away from animal models and rely on a number of alternatives now that in particular, you know, technological advancements are allowing us to potentially rely on.

So that's one area where I see a lot of promise. And another area is just all of the different work on animal cognition that is taking seriously the umwelt, the sensory worlds of the beings that they're studying, trying to do so with animal welfare and animal ethics, again, at the forefront, right? We'll never manage to address the questions that we think we're addressing or that we want to address if we study them in a human-centric way. I think these ideas are becoming more mainstream. And it's not to say that it has been without pushback, but the overall direction it's moving in, I see is, encouraging and, and hopeful.

Brendan Karch

Good. Maybe we can end then, talking less about the science and just about the deep-seated cultural assumption of human exceptionalism. So what can somebody who is not a practicing scientist but who is just living their lives, how can they start to undo some of these assumptions that might be baked into the way they see the world? What could I wake up and do tomorrow?

Christine Webb

I always tell my students, just start where you're at. Human exceptionalism has embedded so many of our institutions. It's not just science, right? It's in our food systems, in our legal systems, in our education systems, and much more. So if you're a teacher, you could think about how to challenge some of the anthropocentric assumptions that are embedded within mainstream pedagogy, right? And teach kids to develop ecological literacy so that they're as fluent in the animals and plants who live around them as they are in reading and math. 

In your personal life, I think, you know, there's so much one can do. I spend a lot more time outdoors than I used to. I try to go on at least a two-hour hike every day if I can. I don't get to do it every day of the week. I wish I could, but as much as possible. And not just doing it in a way where I'm, you know, listening to podcasts, though no offense if you're listening to this right now on a walk. But I try to really be attending to the world around me and listening and not distracted, but in deep attention with other beings and with my environment. That's so crucial, and it's also really not just important for our culture to move past human exceptionalism, but very healthy psychologically and physically. 

So I think there's a piece here for everybody to be working on if they can.

Brendan Karch

So yeah, sounds like enmesh yourself in nature, approach it with open eyes, open ears, open senses, and a sense of awe and wonder at the amazing diversity of life around us.

Christine Webb

Yeah. So go do it. Get out of here. 

Brendan Karch

Tectonic is created by Swissnex in Boston and New York, a Swiss science consulate promoting exchange in education, research, innovation. Production and editing of the podcast is done by Frederic Atwood and Hayley Bartley. I’m your host, Brendan Karch.