Not So Different
Finding Human Nature in Animals
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- $26.99
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- $26.99
Publisher Description
Animals fall in love, establish rules for fair play, exchange valued goods and services, hold "funerals" for fallen comrades, deploy sex as a weapon, and communicate with one another using rich vocabularies. Animals also get jealous and violent or greedy and callous and develop irrational phobias, just like us. Monkeys address inequality, wolves miss each other, elephants grieve for their dead, and prairie dogs name the humans they encounter. Human and animal behavior is not as different as once believed.
In Not So Different, the biologist Nathan H. Lents argues that the same evolutionary forces of cooperation and competition have shaped both humans and animals. Identical emotional and instinctual drives govern our actions. By acknowledging this shared programming, the human experience no longer seems unique, but in that loss we gain a fuller appreciation of such phenomena as sibling rivalry and the biological basis of grief, helping us lead more grounded, moral lives among animals, our closest kin. Through a mix of colorful reporting and rigorous scientific research, Lents describes the exciting strides scientists have made in decoding animal behavior and bringing the evolutionary paths of humans and animals closer together. He marshals evidence from psychology, evolutionary biology, cognitive science, anthropology, and ethology to further advance this work and to drive home the truth that we are distinguished from animals only in degree, not in kind.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a thoroughly enjoyable and accessible style, Lents, professor of molecular biology at the City University of New York, compares the behavior of humans with many other animals. His overarching goal is to demonstrate that "the suite of programs that underlies animal behavior is remarkably similar to that which underlies human behavior." He succeeds by examining a broad array of behaviors, with separate chapters focusing on such topics as play, morality, justice, and sex. Lents provides ample documentation of fascinating behaviors and builds his arguments convincingly using two tactics. First, he differentiates between anecdotes and data arising from controlled experiments, setting his work apart from some non-scientific texts claiming to ascribe various, occasionally fantastic, powers to animals. Second, he situates his analysis within an evolutionary framework. For example, after demonstrating the distress of many mammals, including monkeys and dogs, when they observe unfair treatment, Lents concludes that "intolerance of inequity is being observed in a diverse and growing list of mammals, which would push its origins back... to well more than one hundred million years ago." He also makes it clear that, beyond behavior, animals also share many emotions with humans. Whether Lents is discussing love, grief, greed, or envy, he provides ample evidence that animals have a rich inner life.
