What’s the Most Important Human Trait?

Hint: it’s what makes people different from animals

What’s the most important thing to say about our species?

If you asked most folks, they’d probably say it’s that we were specially created by the master of the universe, known as “God” or some other spiritual force for good. But that would be only an archaic, naïve way of saying something else.

That something else is that we’re not slaves to natural selection in the way that animals are, which means that as people, we’re liable to be alienated from the wild environment, as opposed to having a natural home, or “habitat.”

You can explain the normal traits and behaviours of animals by showing how they naturally evolved, or how they’re genetically produced, and how those genes became dominant because of the environment’s killing of the species’ mutants that lived in alternative, “unfit” ways.

When the environment is stable, animals find a niche because of the variety of options churned up by the sexual mixing of their genes, and some body types and mindsets excel in the environment while others don’t. Crucially, then, animals are defined by their fitness to their proper environment, and that kind of Darwinian explanation accounts for the species’ main characteristics, as in both the hardware and the software (the physiological traits and the adapted behaviours).

We, too, have animal bodies that are still evolving, but this can hardly be called natural evolution. Instead, some species in our genus overhauled their mental programs with the advent of “behavioural modernity,” that being the preoccupation with abstract symbols that spurred us to conquer all natural environments by turning them into artificial ones. Signs of this cognitive revolution were apparent for tens of thousands of years in prehistory, but the agricultural revolution and the settling of large cities, kingdoms, and civilizations beginning only twelve thousand years ago brought the revolution to fruition.

And from that point onward, our species largely took control of its evolution in ways that no other known species has done. It’s not just that we’ve found a cognitive niche, rather like how birds excel at flying, mammals at running, and fish at swimming. Flying, running, and swimming work only in some natural contexts, whereas thinking is a meta-skill that works in all of them. Thinking, then, is virtually supernatural in that it has the potential to overcome whatever nature throws at us.

This is why it’s inconceivable that another known animal species could leave our planet and live on Mars. We have the potential of doing so because the thinking, freedom, and creativity that make up our personhood aren’t bound by natural selection, that is, by the environment’s selection of our genes to program our body types and behaviours. The selection of our traits and lifestyles is largely artificial, as in cultural and personal.

For instance, you can explain why bears have fur by looking at the biological functions of that trait. Bears have fur because of their formative environment’s selection of the genes that produce that mode of preserving the animal’s body temperature, camouflaging the animal, providing sensory input, and so on.

But why, on the contrary, do some humans, called “monks,” shave their head and live in monasteries? We can reach for an evolutionary explanation, or a “just so story,” such as that the bald head is a social signal that the monk has opted out of the sexual selection process and wishes to be treated as an “omega” member of a group. But this kind of evolutionary psychology is often more theological than scientific. The more obvious and relevant explanation will be cultural: the monk shaves his head to demonstrate his devotion to an imagined ultimate being such as God.

It’s like that for practically everything we do that distinguishes us as a species. We’re culturally and technologically saturated and are thus subject mainly to artificial rather than natural selection. That’s just a fancy way of saying that we decide how to live because we’re largely free from our genes. Our genotype keeps us on a long leash, thanks to our brain’s flexibility. Due to our meta-cognitive skills, our brain can adapt to practically any environment since we can model or simulate countless possibilities with abstract, linguistic symbols.

Eventually, we excel at whatever we practice. Set a child down and teach him or her daily how to hunt, and the child will grow up to be a hunter. Teach the child instead how to value all life, and the child may grow up to be a diplomat or a spiritual leader and a pacifist. We can learn to live in freezing cold environments or in deserts, in forests or on the coasts, deep under water or even in outer space. We’re flexible in those ways because we’re relatively free, and what we’re free from — largely but not entirely — is natural selection.

What this means, in short, is that we’re people rather than animals, given the pejorative sense of “animal.” Wild animals are slaves to their genes, and thus to the environments to which those genes are adapted. Our body type limits us in numerous ways, but we overcome those limitations with technologies that augment our physiological traits, and that are the fruits of our neural plasticity.

Nature still “tries” to kill us off, as it were, for being unfit to survive its fluctuations. Diseases and natural disasters still plague us, but we have scientists, engineers, social planners, and other specialists working around the clock to correct for that wild indifference. Doctors, for instance, look for drugs to immunize us from ailments, or they operate on our bodies to fix what undesirable genes have wrought. These are artificial, not natural “selections,” in that they’re rationally chosen rather than accidental.

If nature’s a cosmic wilderness, we aim to be civilized and thus unnatural. Here is the great divide, the source of perennial alienation for countercultural intellectuals who see beyond the myths that keep the peace for the most domesticated members of society. Most unphilosophical folks are slaves not to nature but to public opinion. Still, all people are freer than animals, which compels us to struggle with the question of what we should be doing with that autonomy.

Why nature would have evolved such an anomalous genus might seem like an unfathomable mystery. But remember that the emergence of life from nonlife is hardly less strange. Why would physical, chemical, and astronomical norms coalesce to generate creatures that are all as free from physical reflexivity as persons are from natural selection?

Personhood is a doubling down on a prior anomaly, not the emergence of something altogether novel. After all, the most unwitting slaves are things that aren’t subject to biological, psychological, social, or cultural explanations, things like rocks, stars, and most molecules. All living things go their distinctive ways, rather than adhering to nature’s universal way. Organisms aren’t just physical objects since they work against entropy by ingesting food, clinging to life in a universe that’s mostly hostile to this odd property.

All living things, then, are anomalous in the outer wilderness. Our planet happens to create and to shelter biological processes. But there are degrees of freedom. Animals are freer, as in more self-controlling than rocks and atoms. Dolphins, chimpanzees, and crows are more intelligent and imaginative than many insects and fish. And our variety of primate is freer, more creative, and perhaps vainer than anything else on the planet.

This, then, is our most important trait, the freedom to create something relatively unnatural, the freedom to imagine what we think of as “good” alternatives, whereas most of nature is perfectly blind to how things should be. Of course, we owe this trait, in part, to the wilderness since that’s our point of origin. But this trait of free, self-directed creativity is paradoxical because it drives us away from that origin, even setting us at odds with all things wild. We domesticate plants and animals, and master our wild impulses as encultured children because we aim to transcend nature.

Nature overcame itself by evolving organisms that would eventually turn into far-seeing, reflective people. Even human creativity, then, isn’t miraculous, as in apocalyptically novel, since nothing is more creative than the simplest elements, forces, and conditions of natural order that have shaped the universe over eons.

Still, human creativity has introduced a daring opportunity, one that may deify us or condemn us as a pack of fools. Either we’ll merge with our technology to become transhuman masters of nature, or we’ll destroy ourselves trying, and we’ll do so to escape the alienation that’s at the heart of what we are: liberated animals, homeless, and repulsed by our mindless maker.

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