‘The Arrogant Ape’: Reimagining Humanity’s Place In The Natural World
(REVIEW) In 2008, Ecuador became the world’s first nation to grant legal status to the natural world.
Mother Earth, or Pachamama, as the Indigenous Andeans refer to the planet, has “the right to exist and maintain vital cycles, functions and evolutionary processes,” the amended Ecuadorian Constitution declared.
New Zealand followed suit six years later by granting “legal personhood — with all its attendant “rights, powers, duties, and liabilities” — to the rainforest, Te Urewera, sacred homeland of the Māori tribal people. Courts in other nations, from Bolivia to India, Mexico to Pakistan, Turkey, Nepal and even the United States, have since favorably considered the question of the natural world’s legal rights, often in conjunction with cases involving Indigenous sovereignty.
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These legal movements offer a compelling challenge to the traditional, Western concept of humanity’s God-given supremacy over nature, per the famous Biblical mandate granting humans “dominion” over fish, fowl, cattle and “every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
That we have come to regard ourselves as God’s last word stems from a combination of religion and antiquated scientific tenets, according to a Harvard primatologist, who studies the behavior of primates, Christine Webb in her book, “The Arrogant Ape.” The book offers a wide-ranging reassessment of humanity’s relationship with nature and, in particular, the animal kingdom of which, lest we forget, we are a part.
While the Genesis passage is debatable (“dominion” over the earth means stewardship, not mastery, according to Biblical scholars), the Greek philosopher Aristotle’s fourth-century BCE Scala Naturae (“ladder of life”) was less ambiguous. In this hierarchy, accepted as conventional scientific wisdom for centuries, things that did not grow, like rocks, were inferior to things that did, like plants. Vegetation, in turn, was subordinate to beings that moved, i.e., animals, all of which existed “for the sake of man.”
By the Middle Ages, Christianity and Aristotelianism were tightly intertwined. (Just thumb through Thomas Aquinas sometime or recall the papal pushback against Galileo and Copernicus when they dared challenge Aristotle’s verdict that the earth was the center of the universe.) Such a classically-influenced faith had difficulty reconciling itself with competing, ancient pagan beliefs “that all beings, including other animals and plants, were imbued with spirits and souls.”
There were exceptions. Jesus enjoined us to “consider the lilies” while St. Francis famously preached to birds and conversed with animals, “treating them as rational creatures.”
But the opinion that humans are the world’s only beings composed of body and soul — a philosophy espoused by the seventeenth-century French thinker René Descartes — endured well into the early modern era. In Descartes’ analysis, animals have “no experience of any kind” when it comes to emotional or spiritual awareness. (Sheer nonsense, of course, to any devoted pet owner.)
It was Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” (1859) that finally upended centuries of hubris about the natural world being nothing but a resource for human exploitation, devoid of any independent agency.
“In one fell swoop,” Webb writes, “Darwin challenged creationist ideas that species were made by God, forever immutable, and qualitatively distinct.” Adaptation was not a divine plan, but a natural process wherein “[a]ll living beings on earth are connected through common ancestry, our minds emerging through evolutionary processes with deep roots in Nature.”
While Darwin represents “one of the great paradigm shifts away from anthropocentric thought,” we have yet to embrace many of his precepts. Why? We simply “don’t like to admit that we are animals,” Webb regretfully concludes. As a primatologist, she has had the opportunity to intimately engage with all manner of monkeys and apes, both in the wild and in the laboratory.
She numbers herself among a population of researchers in the scientific community who reject the latter setting for its cruelty and questionable results. With mounting evidence for the cognitive and emotional capacities of not only apes but birds, crustaceans and even insects, laboratory experimental data can be flawed, Webb and her like-minded colleagues assert.
Removing animals from their natural environments for the sake of experimentation “effectively transform[s] them into reactive machines,” as opposed to sentient creatures who may respond differently to stimuli in the wild. To treat them as mindless, let alone killing them in the course of research, is no less immoral than the thought of doing so to human beings, Webb persuasively argues.
No population understands this more instinctively than the Indigenous peoples of the world, from Native Americans to the Māori to Australia’s Aborigines. Intrinsic to their animist belief systems is the recognition that “the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is lived in relationship with others,” in the words of religious studies scholar Graham Harvey (who Webb quotes). In such a living, breathing system, consciousness is not proprietary, but shared.
In contrast, the anthropocentric denial of consciousness to other non-human beings reinforces the old Bible-thumping trope about humanity’s superiority over the natural world, an attitude that quickly withers when being charged by a mountain gorilla, staring down an approaching cyclone, or even being chased by an angry bee.
It is true that animals and humans can be equally cruel and compassionate. Lions kill and devour zebras, and birds gulp down worms and insects without a second thought. Yet Webb has also witnessed chimpanzees share food and affectionate embraces. “Competition and cooperation,” she concludes (echoing Darwin), “are both driving forces in evolution.”
Both the scientific and legal communities are beginning to recognize this. In addition to rainforests and Earth in general, legal personhood protections have been sought for animals most like us, such as great apes, elephants and whales.
Meanwhile, Novel Alternative Methods — such as 3D tissue modeling, AI-driven computational models and other non-animal-based practices — are gaining ground in medical research labs, including those at Webb’s own university.
Blending scientific fact, philosophical musings and a critique of religion’s misguided dogma on the inferiority of other species, this thought-provoking book humbly reexamines our relationship with our fellow creatures.
Tom Verde is a freelance journalist specializing in religion, culture, food, and history. His book, “Queens of Islam: The Muslim World’s Historic Women Rulers” was published by Interlink Books in 2025.