The Animal Human Continuum

Ancient Egyptians placed animal and bird heads on divinities’ bodies, in an embracing worldview wherein both gods and beasts extend and transcend the human ken. In his scientific extension of this ancient mythology, Darwin’s 1872 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals explored non-human sentience. The affective neuroscientist of our era, Jaak Panksepp, pursued the social, emotional and neuro-physiological foundations of human consciousness on a continuum with the being-in-the-world of animals. He announced “the tall tale end of an intellectual era when the animal mind was deemed nonexistent or impenetrable.”

The sixteenth century materialist understanding of animal behavior, associated with Descartes’s animal automata, became the prevailing view of animals’ lives. Cruelty to Animals movements ran concurrently with this “scientific” view, leading in 1876 to Britain’s Cruelty to Animals Act. Tradition has it that in 1889, Nietzsche collapsed on seeing a horse flogged, akin to scenes from a dream, diaries, and literary passages Dostoevsky recorded as illustration of how our relation to animals reflects ethical relation to other humans.

In current neuroscience, reptiles and rodents, wild, laboratory and domesticated animals are perceived as carriers of emotion. Human-animal bonding is affirmed through anecdote, research, clinical studies, therapeutic models, and even travel regulations – reflecting broader and deeper understanding of the interactional dynamics between species. Animals are now participants in therapies for childhood development and recovery, for spectrum disorders, geriatric syndromes, and PTSD treatment of civilians and veterans. They detect both explosives and diseases.

Freud perceived termite mounds as manifestations of the sublimation of individual will to the needs of the group. Social insects’ behavior are cited as examples of inclusive fitness and eusociality, For social mammals, these overlap with empathy and “theories of mind.” How are these concepts applied in robotics and A.I., where individual “cells” are designed to act on histories inscribed in their chemistry/circuitry. Today, what do science and belief systems teach about our animal kin and our animal selves? How is human consciousness and development informed by these trends? If it is not ethical to treat humans like animals, is it acceptable to treat animals like “animals”? As Panksepp observed, it “is time for neuroscience to accept that animals are capable of many emotional feelings,” essential both for their sake and our own.