After ~100,000 pages of research in the past some odd years, I’ve come across (I believe) 0 authors who acknowledge that humans use objects for combat and animals do not. The inability (or refusal) to note this fundamental difference is one of the biggest blind spots in scientific history. I think this might stem from a quasi-religious adherence to the Copernican principle which holds that humans and the earth are not entitled to a privileged perspective on reality. The principle was born from Copernican heliocentrism, which was the first time we were able to square millennia of astronomical data and make the Gregorian Calendar. It was confirmed when Darwin posited that humans have the same basic incentive and behavior set as any other animals.
The Copernican principle wasn’t titled until the 20th century by Hermann Bondi, but since then has become a sort of religious mantra for many mainstream scientists. Carl Sagan was probably crowned the Copernican principle’s high priest with his book, Pale Blue Dot:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
In short, the Copernican principle states that one cannot find scientific truth unless we humans are reduced or “humbled,” and the scientist must be the first to both be humbled and then proceed to do the humbling.
The Copernican principle allows the true believer to reduce all human conflict to fighting over a “fraction of a dot.” Part and parcel to this belief is a reduction of “human aggression” to “ape aggression.” There is a reluctance by the true believer to differentiate our grammatical language from bird or chimp calls. They will call up studies of chimps using signs from sign language, and they will call it “sign language.” They will call up studies of bonobos being more pacifist than we are and hint that we should maybe try adopting their lax sexual practices as a resolution to war.
If you mention humanity’s monopoly on object-based combat, they will mention chimps using tools for predation and their shaking branches in intimidation. But they will not to find any animal using an object in their specific “combat loops”. If they did this in a repeatable way, that would be their combat system, but it’s not. It’s only the human combat system.
Is it a coincidence then that humans are the only ones ALSO with grammatical language? If my theory is correct, then human object-based combat produces grammatical language, use of which causes self-domestication, lending to greater language usage and innovations, which threaten to be co-opted by language, forcing the cycle to repeat. But this theory requires abandoning the religious adherence to the Copernican principle and admitting that humans are fundamentally different here. If one sticks with the Copernican principle, then they will continue searching for the Rubicon where ape became man, and it will continue to elude them.
I wonder if some people adopt the Copernican principle not in the search of truth, but in a reactive way just to reduce people around them. When you come from a damaged home, or were subject to overly-dogmatic religious rules, I can see why you’d seek out a superior religious system that could trump all the others, even at the expense of scientific truth.
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