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The most dangerous myths are the ones we don’t see. Human exceptionalism—the belief that humans are fundamentally separate from and superior to the rest of nature—is one of those myths. It’s embedded in religious doctrine, textbooks, political campaigns, advertising, and everyday language. This worldview is not hidden because it’s obscure—it’s hidden because it’s everywhere, taken for granted, and rarely named or questioned. That’s precisely where its power lies. I think human exceptionalism is the most powerful unspoken belief of our time.
But what struck me most in writing The Arrogant Ape was just how thoroughly this belief has infiltrated science—an institution meant to challenge our biases, not reinforce them.
In my field of primatology, for instance, we routinely compare the intelligence of captive chimpanzees—raised in highly restricted, human-made environments—with that of fully autonomous Western humans. And then we conclude that humans are cognitively superior. But that’s not a fair comparison. Imagine testing a child raised in isolation and concluding they have no empathy or desire to cooperate. When we observe our closest living relatives in richer socioecological contexts, we witness striking prosocial behavior.
When we measure the world with a ruler made for humans, other species inevitably come up short.
Or take research on self-awareness. For decades, we believed only humans and a few other primate species could recognize themselves in mirrors, a supposed benchmark of self-awareness. But the mirror test is biased toward vision. Dogs experience the world primarily via scent. They pass an olfactory mirror test with ease—demonstrating self-awareness in their dominant sensory modality.
When we measure the world with a ruler made for humans, other species inevitably come up short.
Yet we persist in treating the human brain as the blueprint for intelligence and consciousness. We assume that minds are special only insofar as they resemble our minds; that there is a hierarchy of mindedness, with us standing comfortably at the apex. Evolutionary diagrams tend to reinforce this view, depicting a neat, linear trajectory: bacteria, plants, worms, fishes, rats, dogs, monkeys … all the way up to us. Even our taxonomic name—Primates, from Primata, meaning “of the first rank”—betrays the same assumption.
This isn’t just bad evolutionary thinking—it’s a profound failure of imagination. And its consequences are far-reaching. Human exceptionalism supports the belief that the Earth exists solely for human benefit, reducing other species to mere resources. This mindset rationalizes exploitation not just of other animals and ecosystems, but also of other human beings who are deemed “sub-human.” But when we expose and challenge this myth, we don’t just unsettle our assumptions—we open the door to better science and deeper relationships with the rest of the living world.
Many people treat human exceptionalism as a natural conclusion. But recent studies in developmental and cross-cultural psychology suggest otherwise. Beliefs in human exceptionalism aren’t an inevitable outcome of our biology—they instead reflect a cultural worldview, one largely shaped and codified by dominant Western traditions.
When researchers presented American children and adults with moral dilemmas—such as saving one human or multiple animals—adults overwhelmingly favored humans, even when the trade-off involved 100 dogs or pigs. Children didn’t. They often chose to save multiple animals over one human, valuing human and nonhuman lives far more similarly. This pattern has now been replicated in multiple European countries. In such Western contexts, children are also far more likely than adults to judge it wrong to harm animals for food, and less likely to ignore information about the minds of animals typically considered food.
These findings suggest that the anthropocentric moral frameworks commonly held by adults are not the biological default. They emerge over time through cultural learning—particularly as children become increasingly exposed to the ways other forms of life are used and valued in our society.
Children often chose to save multiple animals over one human.
Research across human cultures also reveals that human exceptionalism is far from a universal view. Many Indigenous and non-Western knowledge systems reject such natural hierarchies. They recognize other animals, plants, rivers, forests, and mountains as kin: sentient, agentive beings embedded in a shared moral and ecological world. Far from immature or naïve, these are sophisticated cosmologies grounded in millennia of observation, relationship, and reciprocity with the living world. Within these frameworks, the notion that humans are separate or superior simply doesn’t hold.
Writing The Arrogant Ape introduced me to various alternative cosmologies and traditions that reject the ideology of human exceptionalism. These worldviews don’t simply critique the ideology—they model ways of living in greater balance with the rest of the natural world (as just one example, studies reveal that Indigenous-managed lands often have equal or higher biodiversity than formally protected areas). Encountering these alternative relationships exposed the narrowness of my own upbringing and education. And it made me aware of the cultural and historical forces—especially colonialism and capitalism—that helped globalize the myth of human exceptionalism under the guise of progress and science.
If we see ourselves as separate from nature, we treat the Earth not as a community we belong to, but as a set of resources to extract, manage, or “fix.” Recognizing this changed how I think about the ecological crisis. It’s easy to blame global warming on fossil fuels, industrial excess, or political inaction. But we don’t just need to reform these institutions—we need a new relationship with the living world, and a different story about who we are within it.
Some today maintain that humans are the most evolutionarily “successful” species. Success, in this view, is measured by ecological dominance—our capacity to spread across the globe while manipulating and controlling our environments. But in reality, the most resilient ecosystems—and the most sustainable ways of living—are not built on domination, but on interdependence. What if cooperation were the faculty by which evolutionary “success” was measured and achieved? In ecology, cooperation and mutualism are just as prevalent and essential to life as competition and predation. Yet recent research shows that more than two-thirds of the publications in the journal Ecology study “competition,” while less than 2 percent investigate “cooperation.” We’ve constructed our scientific models around struggle and individualism, even though life on earth is held together by relationships and co-evolution.
The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the dangers of this worldview. It likely emerged, in part, because of human encroachment into wild habitats. And yet, media narratives celebrated human ingenuity in vaccine development while ignoring the systemic exploitation that made the outbreak possible. Militarized language—the “war” or “battle” against the virus—cast nature as the enemy to be conquered and destroyed once again. Similar thinking surfaces in climate discussions, where technofixes like solar geoengineering or colonizing Mars promise salvation through further domination.
These fixes rely on the same logic of control: that we can outmaneuver the planet’s limits instead of learning to live within them. They assure us that humanity will prevail after all, but they echo the very mindset that brought us to the brink in the first place! We are not above nature—we are expressions of it. Our bodies, minds, and cultures evolved in deep entanglement with the earth over millions of years. To imagine ourselves as exempt from ecological constraints is not foresight; it’s delusion. This is not to say that technical innovations have no role in addressing climate change. But I think some of them are best understood as new—and arguably more powerful—forms of human exceptionalism.
We often conflate dominance with success, mastery with genuine understanding. But real insight comes from humility—acknowledging what we don’t know, listening to others (including other species), and recognizing the limits of our conventional frameworks. Writing The Arrogant Ape was humbling in the best sense. It taught me that seeing ourselves clearly—not as rulers, but as participants in a larger web—is one of the most urgent scientific and moral challenges of our time. 
Lead image: captures_by_ap / Shutterstock
