If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal

If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal Plot Summary

Introduction

Intelligence has long been viewed as humanity's greatest asset - the trait that supposedly separates us from other animals and has enabled our species to dominate the planet. We pride ourselves on our cognitive abilities, technological innovations, and cultural achievements. Yet what if this narrative is fundamentally flawed? What if human intelligence, with all its complexity and sophistication, is not the unalloyed good we've assumed it to be? The paradox at the heart of this inquiry is that the very cognitive abilities we celebrate - causal reasoning, theory of mind, death awareness, complex moral reasoning, and sophisticated language - may ultimately undermine our success as a species. Through examining both human and animal cognition across multiple domains, we discover that simpler minds often generate more effective behaviors for survival and well-being. From the decision-making processes of honeybees to the ethical systems of chickens, non-human animals frequently demonstrate cognitive approaches that avoid the pitfalls that plague human thinking. By challenging our assumptions about the superiority of human intelligence, we gain a profound new perspective on what truly constitutes evolutionary success and optimal cognitive design.

Chapter 1: Why Specialists: Humans' Unique Causal Reasoning Capability

Humans are the "why specialist" species. From the moment children learn their first words, they begin asking why questions that never seem to stop: Why can't the cat talk? Why haven't we found aliens? Why do people commit murder? Why do we die? This burning desire to understand causality - not just what happens, but why it happens - separates human thinking from other animals. This capacity for causal reasoning has obvious benefits. It allowed our ancestors to control fire, develop agriculture, build particle accelerators, and compose symphonies. Understanding cause and effect gives us the ability to manipulate our environment in ways no other species can match. Consider a simple scenario where a sudden sound is heard in the forest. Both a human and a dog might freeze in response, but through fundamentally different cognitive processes. The dog relies on learned associations between sounds and potential threats, while humans use causal inference to theorize about what might have created the noise. However, this causal reasoning ability took surprisingly long to transform human society. For roughly 200,000 years, early humans lived much like their primate cousins, roaming landscapes in search of food, using only basic tools. Only around 40,000 years ago did evidence of complex causal thinking appear in cave paintings, suggesting supernatural beliefs and questions about mortality. The technological explosion that followed - farming, architecture, medicine, science - all stemmed from this why-specialist thinking. From an evolutionary perspective, this delay suggests that causal reasoning isn't necessarily as advantageous as we might think. Animals get by perfectly well without deep causal understanding. Diagnostic inference - like a dog identifying which shoe contains a treat based on sound - achieves the same practical results without needing to understand why. A pigeon trained through simple associative learning can outperform human radiologists at identifying cancerous tissue in mammograms, achieving 99% accuracy when responses are pooled. More troublingly, human causal reasoning often leads to dangerously wrong conclusions. Throughout history, our why-specialist brains have created elaborate but incorrect explanations for natural phenomena, from medieval humoral theory in medicine to scientific racism. These false causal models have caused immense suffering. Even when we get the science right, the technologies we create through causal understanding - like combustion engines - can create existential threats like climate change. The evidence suggests that being a why specialist is neither as special nor as beneficial as we assume. While it has undoubtedly enabled remarkable achievements, it has also created unprecedented dangers. Natural selection appears indifferent to cognitive complexity - it simply favors behaviors that work, regardless of the mental processes behind them. The truth may be that our vaunted causal reasoning is simply one cognitive approach among many, with significant downsides that may ultimately prove fatal to our species.

Chapter 2: The Deception Dilemma: Human Lying vs Animal Communication

Communication in the animal kingdom typically involves the transmission of accurate information. From the bright warning colors of a poison dart frog to the waggle dance of honeybees indicating food sources, most animal signals convey truthful information that benefits both sender and receiver. When deception does occur in animals, it usually involves inherited morphological traits (like camouflage) or instinctual behaviors (like a plover's broken-wing display) rather than intentional falsehoods. Humans, however, have taken deception to unprecedented levels. Consider Russell Oakes, who for years posed as a veterinarian in England despite having no medical training. Using forged credentials and a convincing demeanor, he performed surgeries, prescribed medications, and built a thriving practice. What made his deception possible was the unique human capacity for theory of mind - understanding that others have beliefs that can be manipulated - combined with language, which allows us to communicate about literally any subject, factual or fictional. Theory of mind enables humans to understand not just what others might do (behavior reading) but what they might think (mind reading). When a chimpanzee points to distract a rival and steal food, it shows a basic understanding that attention can be manipulated. But humans go further, creating elaborate fictions designed specifically to implant false beliefs in others' minds. Language amplifies this capacity exponentially, allowing us to create deceptions about things distant in time and space, or completely imaginary. Paradoxically, humans are simultaneously skilled liars and remarkably gullible. Psychologist Timothy Levine's truth-default theory proposes that humans instinctively accept communication as truthful. This creates a peculiar mismatch - we're wired both to deceive and to believe. Studies show that organ donation rates vary dramatically between countries based solely on whether consent forms require checking a box to opt in versus opt out. People's decisions are unconsciously guided by form design, yet when asked, they create elaborate rationalizations for their "choice." This tendency has escalated dangerously in the internet age. Bullshitting - communication intended to impress without concern for truth - has become weaponized through state-sponsored disinformation campaigns designed to sow confusion and distrust. The "firehose of falsehood" technique floods media with contradictory information, overwhelming our truth-finding mechanisms. Countries like Finland have recognized this threat and restructured their education systems to teach citizens to recognize manipulative communication. The human capacity for deception represents another intelligence paradox. While it demonstrates our exceptional cognitive abilities, it has created a uniquely human problem that threatens social cohesion and democratic institutions. Animals maintain communication systems where honesty remains the norm, while humans have created environments saturated with falsehoods. This suggests that our deceptive capacities, though intellectually impressive, may be more liability than asset for our species' long-term survival.

Chapter 3: Death Wisdom: The Burden of Mortality Awareness

Tahlequah, a twenty-year-old orca, carried her dead infant through the Pacific Ocean for seventeen days in what witnesses described as a "tour of grief." This unprecedented mourning behavior captivated the world and raised profound questions about what animals understand about death. Do animals experience grief like humans? More fundamentally, what does death mean to nonhuman animals? The field of comparative thanatology studies animals' understanding of death. Most animals possess what philosopher Susana Monsó calls a "minimal concept of death," recognizing two basic attributes: non-functionality (death stops bodily functions) and irreversibility (death is permanent). When an animal encounters a dead conspecific, they notice the absence of expected behaviors and, with enough observation, learn that this state is permanent. This minimal concept appears widespread across species, developed through experience rather than instinct. However, humans possess something more profound: death wisdom or mortality salience - the awareness that death is inevitable for all living beings, including oneself. This existential knowledge appears unique to our species. When children (typically around age eight) first comprehend their own mortality, they often experience profound distress - a feeling that no other animal likely experiences. The cognitive foundations for this awareness include mental time travel (the ability to imagine oneself in the future), episodic foresight, and an explicit concept of time that extends beyond immediate needs. Most animals demonstrate implicit time awareness through circadian rhythms and seasonal behaviors. Even cellular mechanisms like clock genes regulate activities in 24-hour cycles. But humans can explicitly think about time as a concept, imagining distant futures and understanding our place within them. While some animals like scrub jays and chimpanzees show limited future planning abilities, none appear to contemplate the distant future or their eventual non-existence. Death wisdom likely emerged during human evolution as a byproduct of other cognitive abilities that proved advantageous - like mental time travel and causal reasoning. The physician Ajit Varki suggests that this awareness would have been so psychologically devastating that it could only evolve alongside a capacity for denial, allowing humans to function despite knowledge of their mortality. The psychologist Ernest Becker argued that much of human culture represents "immortality projects" - attempts to create meaning that outlasts our physical existence. These immortality projects produce both humanity's greatest achievements and worst atrocities. Art, science, and religion represent attempts to transcend death, but so do conquest, genocide, and religious persecution. The human awareness of mortality also generates psychological suffering through depression, anxiety, and existential dread. From this perspective, animals may have a healthier relationship with death - they know what death is but are unburdened by the knowledge that it awaits them. Death wisdom reveals another intelligence paradox: while enabling remarkable cultural accomplishments, it creates psychological suffering and destructive behaviors absent in other species. A narwhal will never experience the nihilistic dread that plagued philosophers like Nietzsche. In this domain, simpler minds may generate greater well-being.

Chapter 4: Morality's Trap: When Complex Ethics Lead to Cruelty

All social animals live by unspoken rules that govern behavior within their communities. When a young macaque approaches a female being groomed by the alpha male, he violates a norm about social hierarchy. After being reprimanded with a smack, the young male presents his hindquarters in an act of contrition. The alpha male grabs the youngster's bottom, holding it briefly to signal reconciliation. This simple, physically-mediated interaction restores social harmony without bloodshed or lingering conflict. Humans, however, have transformed these basic social norms into complex moral systems with elaborate justifications. Consider the 1868 Sakai incident in Japan, where Japanese soldiers killed sixteen French sailors. To make amends, Japanese authorities arranged for twenty soldiers to commit ritual suicide (seppuku). During the ceremony, after eleven men had disemboweled themselves, the French commander demanded it stop, considering further deaths unnecessary. Rather than appreciating this mercy, the remaining Japanese soldiers considered it a grave dishonor, with one even biting through his tongue attempting suicide. This dramatic difference in conflict resolution highlights how human morality often produces more suffering than animal normative systems. While animals enforce social norms through emotions like fairness, empathy, or indignation, these feelings operate largely at the unconscious level. Humans, by contrast, have developed explicit, formalized moral codes with philosophical and theological justifications. We don't just feel that something is wrong; we construct elaborate explanations for why it's wrong. The developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello traces human morality to our evolution as an "ultracooperative primate." Early hominids hunting in pairs developed "joint intentionality" - understanding that another has the same goal as oneself. Later, as groups grew larger, this evolved into "collective intentionality" - the sense of "us" versus "them." Combined with language and theory of mind, this collective sense spawned formal rules governing group behavior. The dark side of this moral complexity becomes evident in historical atrocities justified on moral grounds. The Canadian residential school system forcibly removed Indigenous children from their families to assimilate them into Western culture. Government officials and church leaders considered this a moral imperative despite the physical and sexual abuse, disease, and death that resulted. Similarly, Nazi officers justified the murder of Jewish children as necessary for the security of future German generations. Perhaps most telling is how human morality has created problems that don't exist for other animals. Homosexual behavior occurs naturally in hundreds of species without social penalty - from female Laysan albatross pairs raising chicks together to bonobos' frequent same-sex interactions. Yet humans have invented moral prohibitions against homosexuality that have led to criminalization, violence, and execution in many societies. The paradox of human morality is that our sophisticated ethical reasoning often produces more cruelty than the simple normative systems of other animals. While animals resolve conflicts through direct, physically-mediated interactions that restore social harmony, humans create abstract moral principles that justify violence, oppression, and genocide. Our moral thinking, despite its complexity, frequently fails to achieve what animal norms accomplish naturally: minimizing suffering and maintaining social cohesion.

Chapter 5: The Consciousness Question: Animal Experience and Human Qualia

Consciousness - defined as subjective experience - has traditionally been considered uniquely human. However, converging evidence suggests this view is fundamentally mistaken. In 2012, a group of neuroscientists signed the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, stating that "nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess the neurological substrates that generate consciousness." Two lines of evidence support this conclusion. First, the brains of many animals contain structures analogous to those that generate conscious experiences in humans. Second, animals behave in ways that suggest conscious awareness. Elephants seek out alcohol at concentrations that induce euphoria but avoid stronger solutions that cause discomfort - behavior only explicable if they consciously experience pleasure. Bruce, a kea parrot who lost his upper beak, demonstrates intentionality by selecting appropriate pebbles to help him preen his feathers, showing problem-solving driven by conscious goals. Most surprisingly, evidence suggests that even insects have conscious experiences. Despite having only one million neurons (compared to humans' 85 billion), honeybee brains can form up to a billion synaptic connections, creating neural networks capable of impressive processing. As neurobiologist Lars Chittka argues, "In bigger brains we often don't find more complexity, just an endless repetition of the same neural circuits over and over." Experiments show bumblebees can learn to move balls to targets for rewards - a task nothing like their natural foraging behavior - and even improve upon strategies they observe other bees using. What makes human consciousness seem different is not its fundamental nature but the cognitive processes available to it. Using an improv theater metaphor helps explain this distinction: consciousness is like a spotlight on a stage, illuminating whatever performer currently has the audience's attention. For all conscious animals, this spotlight works the same way, broadcasting subjective experience throughout the mind. However, humans have more performers (cognitive processes) potentially available to step into this spotlight. These human-specific "performers" include various forms of self-awareness (temporal, bodily, and social), metacognition (thinking about thinking), and a vast repertoire of complex emotions that animals may lack. When humans report feeling "more conscious" than animals, they're really saying they're conscious of more things, not that their consciousness itself differs fundamentally. This understanding leads to a crucial insight: humans are not "more conscious" than other creatures - we simply have different contents available to consciousness. A honeybee drone likely experiences pleasure when consuming honey, just as humans do. What differs is the range of cognitive processes that can enter awareness. Humans can contemplate their mortality or analyze their own thinking, while bees cannot. But both experience equally real subjective states. The intelligence paradox emerges again: our expanded consciousness, while enabling remarkable cultural and intellectual achievements, doesn't necessarily produce greater happiness or well-being. Even the most privileged human probably doesn't experience more pleasure than a well-cared-for chicken or a Buddhist monk who has mastered his mental states. Consciousness is universal across the animal kingdom, varying not in its fundamental nature but in what cognitive contents it illuminates.

Chapter 6: Prognostic Myopia: Our Shortsighted Farsightedness

Capability Brown, England's most celebrated eighteenth-century landscape gardener, is partially responsible for the impending extinction of humanity. His naturalistic garden designs, featuring sprawling lawns, influenced American estates like Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, eventually spreading to suburban homes nationwide. Today, Americans maintain 163,812 square kilometers of domestic lawns - roughly the size of Florida - consuming nine billion gallons of water daily and producing 4% of annual US carbon dioxide emissions from lawnmowers alone. This environmental disaster springs from a uniquely human cognitive flaw: prognostic myopia. Prognostic myopia describes our paradoxical capacity to think about and alter the future coupled with an inability to genuinely care about long-term consequences. Humans can foresee future outcomes of current actions in ways other animals cannot, yet we remain stubbornly fixated on immediate rewards and problems. This mismatch between intellectual foresight and emotional shortsightedness threatens our very existence. Consider everyday decisions. When offered the choice between practicing music with friends past our bedtime or getting proper sleep, we often choose immediate pleasure despite knowing we'll be exhausted tomorrow. When tempted to watch a movie instead of working, we surrender to distraction despite understanding the potential consequences of missed deadlines. In both cases, our capacity to intellectually project future outcomes fails to generate sufficient emotional motivation to alter present behavior. This disconnect exists because human decision-making involves two competing systems. Unconscious System 1 thinking generates quick, emotion-driven decisions based on heuristics and biases. Conscious System 2 thinking enables deliberate, logical reasoning about future consequences. While System 2 can envision distant outcomes, System 1 remains focused on immediate rewards. Studies reveal how unconscious biases frequently override rational thought - like how organ donation rates vary dramatically between countries based solely on whether forms are opt-in or opt-out. The consequences of prognostic myopia become catastrophic when applied to global challenges. The Global Challenges Foundation calculates a 9.5% chance of human extinction within a century, primarily from nuclear holocaust, climate change, and ecological collapse. Despite scientists warning about fossil fuel dangers since 1968, humanity continues increasing carbon emissions. Even with overwhelming evidence of impending disaster, political and economic systems built on short-term thinking fail to generate sufficient response. This failure represents the ultimate intelligence paradox. Our cognitive capacity to anticipate future problems doesn't translate into motivation to solve them. As psychologists Edward Wasserman and Thomas Zentall explain, "Urgent survival needs (believed to be mediated by older brain systems that we share with many other animals) mean that we still engage in impulsive behaviors... which once promoted our survival and reproductive success." These ancient decision-making systems, designed for immediate survival, now undermine our long-term existence when faced with complex, gradual threats. Climate activist Greta Thunberg, who credits her autism with helping her focus on future problems, struggles to inspire adequate global response. "I want you to panic," she implores. "I want you to feel the fear I feel every day." Yet most humans cannot emotionally engage with distant threats, regardless of intellectual understanding. This disconnect between our farsighted intelligence and shortsighted decision-making may ultimately prove fatal to our species.

Chapter 7: The Exceptionalism Paradox: How Intelligence Undermines Survival

Eric Barcia, described by his grandmother as "very smart in school," carefully measured the height of a railroad trestle at seventy feet. An amateur bungee enthusiast, he taped together cords until he had created one seventy feet long. When he leapt from the bridge in July 1997, his body was found on the concrete spillway below. He had forgotten that bungee cords stretch when pulled. This tragic story encapsulates what might be called the Exceptionalism Paradox: human cognitive complexity often produces behavior that is, from an evolutionary perspective, remarkably stupid. Barcia's death resulted not from stupidity but from complex cognition gone wrong. A chimpanzee would never tie a rope around its ankles and fling itself off a bridge. The less intelligent animal behaves more intelligently precisely because it is less intelligent. Consider another example: bedbugs. Despite having simple minds operating on basic associative learning, these insects regularly outsmart humans in a hide-and-seek battle. When we deployed DDT to eradicate them in the 1940s, we nearly succeeded - except for those bedbugs that had developed resistance. These survivors multiplied until bedbugs returned in force by the 2000s, now resistant to almost every pesticide. Moreover, our "intelligent" solution backfired spectacularly: DDT has contaminated the environment so thoroughly that every person in America has trace amounts in their body, causing multi-generational health problems through epigenetic changes. When evaluating evolutionary success, simple cognition consistently outperforms complexity. Bacteria - with no cognition whatsoever - remain the most successful life form on Earth by any numerical measure. There are more bacteria in your morning bowel movement than humans alive on the planet. Crocodilians, with relatively simple minds, have survived virtually unchanged for 95 million years, outlasting the dinosaurs. The sea squirt actually digests its own brain and spinal cord upon reaching maturity, demonstrating that natural selection sometimes favors removing cognition entirely. The ultimate measure of evolutionary success is not cognitive complexity but biological fitness - survival and reproduction over time. By this standard, humans' 300,000-year existence represents barely a blip compared to many "simpler" species. Our cognitive abilities have enabled remarkable achievements - space exploration, medicine, art - but have also created unprecedented threats to our survival. Climate change, nuclear weapons, and ecological destruction all stem directly from human intelligence. Some might argue that measuring success through biological longevity misses the point. Perhaps intelligence should be valued for enabling conscious experiences, cultural achievements, and understanding of the universe. Yet even by this measure, human intelligence falls short. Studies suggest that privileged humans likely experience no more pleasure or happiness than well-cared-for animals. Even the world's happiest humans - like Buddhist monks who have mastered their mental states - cannot claim to experience more positive qualia than animals living in optimal conditions. The ultimate paradox is that humans possess the unique capacity to intentionally create more pleasure for other minds, yet consistently fail to do so. We understand that our actions can generate pleasure or suffering for other creatures, and have the cognitive and technological ability to maximize well-being for all beings. Yet we choose not to. Our intelligence allows us to envision utopian futures but rarely motivates us to create them. Human intelligence may be the most spectacular cognitive experiment in Earth's history, but natural selection has yet to render its verdict. If we fail to overcome our cognitive limitations and become extinct within the next century, intelligence will have proven itself a failed adaptation - a grand but ultimately fatal evolutionary detour.

Summary

The intelligence paradox reveals that our most celebrated cognitive traits may ultimately undermine our survival. While humans possess exceptional abilities for causal reasoning, deception, mortality awareness, moral reasoning, and conscious metacognition, these capacities frequently generate behaviors that are maladaptive from an evolutionary perspective. Our understanding of cause and effect enables technological advancement but also ecological destruction. Our capacity for deception creates societal mistrust and disinformation. Our awareness of mortality produces existential dread and destructive immortality projects. Our moral reasoning justifies atrocities no other species would commit. And our consciousness, while rich in content, provides no greater happiness than that experienced by simpler minds. What makes this paradox particularly troubling is that evolution seems indifferent to cognitive complexity. Species with simple minds have thrived for hundreds of millions of years through basic associative learning and instinctual behavior. Meanwhile, human cognition has created unprecedented dangers that threaten our continued existence. The ultimate intelligence paradox may be that in developing minds capable of understanding the universe, we have inadvertently engineered our own extinction. Unless we can overcome prognostic myopia and apply our intelligence toward long-term survival, human cognition may prove the most spectacular failed experiment in evolutionary history.

About Author

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Justin Gregg

Justin Gregg is science writer and author of the books Twenty-Two Fantastical Facts about Dolphins and Are Dolphins Really Smart? He writes about animal behavior and cognition, with articles and blog posts appearing in The Wall Street Journal, Aeon Magazine, Scientific American, BBC Focus, Slate, Diver Magazine, and other print and online publications. Justin produced and hosted the dolphin science podcast The Dolphin Pod, and has provided voices for characters in a number of animated films. Justin regularly lectures on topics related to animal/dolphin cognition. He also blogs about science and humor/nerd/pop culture topics on his personal blog at justingregg.comJustin received his PhD from the School of Psychology at Trinity College Dublin in Dublin Ireland in 2008 having studied dolphin social cognition. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at St. Francis Xavier University, and a Senior Research Associate with the Dolphin Communication Project. Justin has a research focus in dolphin social cognition, and a background/interest in linguistic and the evolution of language. A list of Justin’s academic publications can be found at this link.Follow Justin on twitter: @justindgregg

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