One morning in the Namibian desert, the baboon Bear unknowingly ruined several centuries of Western philosophy. The day before, he and his troop had surrounded Christine Webb's research partner with some aggression, growling at her and hitting her legs. The next morning, when Webb kept a safe distance, Bear approached her, put his hand on her leg, looked her in the eyes, and showed his teeth in what any primatologist would recognize without hesitation as an apology. He wanted to make amends.
This anecdote opens The Arrogant Monkey. Human Supremacy and Its Consequences (Crítica), a book that already incorporates a deliberate trap in its title. Christine Webb, a primatologist at the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, explains that she hoped the ambiguity would attract readers who are not yet thinking about these ideas, "so they buy the book and then are pleasantly surprised, or maybe unpleasantly surprised." One suspects that the surprise will be of the latter variety.
Webb built her academic career on a misunderstanding. She started in a primate lab in New York, having rhesus macaques interact with touch screens to measure their cognition. It was the standard method, endorsed by years of peer-reviewed literature. And it worked perfectly to demonstrate that monkeys perform worse than humans in tasks designed by humans, measured by human criteria, executed in environments where monkeys have been confined all their lives. What was actually being discovered was human skill with touch screens.
When Webb had her first contact with primates in their natural habitat, the evidence of the error was hard to ignore. "Studying animals in captivity," she explains when we meet with her, "is not only problematic from an ethical point of view, but also scientific. How can we truly study the cognition and social and physical experiences of these animals in environments where they are so deprived of stimuli?".
The book documents the systematic extent of bias. Experiments that established human intellectual superiority almost without exception compared chimpanzees raised in captivity with Western university-educated volunteers. In scientific literature, this is known as the WEIRD population (an acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) and it has long been known to be one of the most psychologically atypical groups on the planet. Comparing them with caged primates and drawing conclusions about the difference between species is, according to Webb, similar to evaluating human intelligence by giving a Western person a collection of sticks, stones, and seeds, and measuring their performance against that of a chimpanzee catching termites. The satirical publication The Onion summed it up as: "Study: Dolphins not as smart on dry land".
"Studying animals in captivity is not only problematic from an ethical point of view, but also scientific"
Linnaeus called us Homo sapiens, the wise man. At some later point, we decided that was not enough and adopted the designation Homo sapiens sapiens, "the wisest of the wise," which is basically giving oneself an outstanding gradecum laude on the exam one designed oneself. "This goes against any Darwinian notion of continuity in the branches of the tree of life."
Darwin himself, two decades before publishing The Origin of Species, already noted the problem: "Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work". Webb includes the quote as an implicit epigraph of an argument that runs throughout the volume: the conviction of our exceptionalism has less to do with scientific discovery and more with a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you start from the premise that you are superior, you design experiments to confirm it, publish the results, cite them, and the bias becomes institutionalized.
The book begins with Hamlet: "What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties!" Maybe. But we are also the only species that destroys 30% of the planet's forest cover, acidifies the oceans at a rate a hundred times faster than any comparable natural phenomenon, and has reduced wild animal populations by almost 70% in half a century. The ethical considerations bar is quite pathetic from there.
The book is dedicated to Frans de Waal, the "esteemed mentor" of Webb and "the least arrogant ape." De Waal passed away while the primatologist was finishing writing it, in March 2024, and the dedication carries that additional weight of posthumous tributes that one would have wished to have been able to make in life. "He has been an incredible influence in my life, both personally and professionally," says Webb. "He always taught me to never underestimate what other animals are capable of."
De Waal had been for decades the great party pooper of human exceptionalism, documenting empathy, justice, reconciliation, and culture in primates. His books (The Age of Empathy, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?) were clearing the ground that Webb now occupies. The question that titles De Waal's last book is, to some extent, the question Webb seeks to answer: not are animals intelligent?, but are we humble enough to measure it accurately?
The provisional answer is not entirely, but we are improving. Here appears the most counterintuitive and also the most hopeful argument of the book. Human exceptionalism, the conviction that we are qualitatively superior to the rest of life on Earth, does not stem from biology. Cross-cultural psychology and developmental psychology suggest that it is not a human universal or a bias we are born with. We learn it. "It is something we learn through exposure to the dominant culture," Webb states in the interview. We are not arrogant by nature, we are indoctrinated into arrogance. And what is learned can be unlearned.
The book carefully distinguishes between human exceptionalism and mere singularity. "Each species has developed specific adaptations to their environments," writes Webb. "From this point of view, yes, we are special, all creatures are." The problem with exceptionalism is the next step: assuming that what makes us unique is more valuable and sophisticated than the distinctive traits of other organisms. The eagle sees better than us. The dolphin echolocates. The Hercules beetle surpasses us in strength. The plant outlives us. We have resolved this uncomfortable inventory by declaring that abstract intelligence is the only criterion that matters, which is worth remembering is a decision we made unilaterally.
If a recommendation, advice, or action plan were to be given to unlearn exceptionalism, where would Webb start? "I would start with early childhood education," she responds. "For many of us who have spent time with young children and see the love and respect they have for other forms of life, I believe education is not so much about teaching them new things, but rather validating what they already know to be true about the world."
The underlying hypothesis is that we are born with something akin to interspecies humility, and schooling systematizes the process of eroding it. Children enter the classroom with their curiosity intact, and leave having learned that nature is a set of resources.
Webb adds a second lever: language. In English, animals are referred to with the neutral pronoun it, which objectifies them through grammar. Phrases like "natural resources" and "ecosystem services" commodify life with an efficiency that no corporate advertiser could improve upon. "The way we talk about the world is a reflection and a way of training our minds on how we think," she argues. Cognitive linguistics has long been documenting this.
One of the book's most unsettling, yet also most stimulating, chapters addresses the movement for the rights of nature: the granting of legal personhood to ecosystems such as rivers, forests, and glaciers. New Zealand recognized the legal personhood of the Whanganui River in 2017. Ecuador incorporated it into its Constitution in 2008.
But if nature doesn't speak our legal language, and if humans must appoint themselves "legal guardians" of ecosystems, aren't we still operating within the same power structure we're trying to overcome? "There's something inherently dangerous about that; there's a power imbalance. One entity is granting rights to another." Her response points to Indigenous communities, which lead these movements but also transcend them. Many of these traditions envision ethical interspecies relationships where what is moral, what is right or wrong, "is determined by both sides of the dynamic. It's an ethical relationship, not one entity granting rights to another, but a more reciprocal dynamic."
The book champions Indigenous knowledge through the metaphor of "seeing with two eyes," which implies integrating Western science and Indigenous wisdom without subordinating one to the other. I point out that anthropology itself documents that many tribes refer to themselves as something like "the true humans," with their own version of internal exceptionalism. Webb's response clarifies: there is a difference between anthropocentrism (being interested in oneself in relation to other human communities) and human exceptionalism (placing humans above the rest of life). Indigenous cultures, with all their internal variation, tend to share a non-hierarchical relationship between humans and nature. This doesn't make them perfect or immune to conflict, but it does make them bearers of something that Western science was far too slow to take seriously.
A classic objection to the kind of argument Webb makes lurks at the heart of any debate on animal rights and goes something like this: a jaguar kills without remorse. If we are just one more animal in the tangled evolutionary tree, why demand a higher ethical responsibility of ourselves? Wouldn't that, too, be exceptionalism?
Webb offers two answers. The first is ecological: the food chain we learn in school (apex predators at the top, prey at the bottom) is a didactic simplification. Contemporary ecology speaks of food webs, where prey animals constrain the behavior of predators, because if a predator consumes all its prey, it doesn't survive: "It's less hierarchical, more like a spider web or a net."
The second answer is more direct: "A predator consuming prey in the wild is very different from industrialized agriculture and factory farms." They are, in her words, "categorically different phenomena." They are not on the same spectrum. Webb clarifies that the book doesn't necessarily argue in favor of veganism, "but I would feel very comfortable arguing in favor of abolishing factory farms and that way of consuming and treating other life forms."
It would be negligent, in 2026, to write about a book that questions the criteria of intelligence and consciousness without asking its author about artificial intelligence. "I'm not techno-optimistic about the promises of AI," she says. Her objections are manifold. First: the debate about whether AI is conscious or sentient and whether it deserves moral rights reflects, in her view, how much society values rationality over emotion and feeling. The enthusiasm surrounding AI "focuses on a very narrow version of both intelligence and what it means to have experience, to be sentient, and to have consciousness."
Second: the ecological footprint of AI is, in her words, "deeply worrying." Third, and perhaps most interesting for projects that aim to decipher whale songs or dolphin language: "What AI decoding projects are doing is abstracting, removing, and operating in total isolation from all that information and context, essentially reducing animal communication to binary code." Human translators have long known that translation needs to be embedded in a relationship, in a context. "That hasn't worked so well with human language," he concludes, "so I don't have much reason to be hopeful that it will work with other life forms."
Webb finished the book just before the US presidential election in November 2024. Even then, he says, "the parallels between American exceptionalism and human exceptionalism were hard to ignore." Since then, they have grown. The logic is the same in both cases: the conviction of having a unique history, a special mission, the right to lead by dominating. "It's destined to fail," Webb says. "It's arrogant, but it will do a lot of damage down the road, and it already is."
The connection the book establishes between human exceptionalism and other forms of discrimination (racism, sexism, classism) reaches its political culmination here. The hierarchies that human exceptionalism establishes in nature, Webb argues, perpetuate and reinforce hierarchies among human beings themselves. The same mechanism that places Homo sapiens sapiens above baboons places, with cultural variations, certain nations above others, certain genders above others, certain races above others. Arrogance, once activated as an organizing principle, is difficult to contain.
The book's final argument, which gradually emerges from the first chapter on the Namibian baboon, is that human exceptionalism impoverishes us. It deprives us of a relationship with the world that could enrich us. "When the world is perceived as an object, its destruction is irrelevant," Webb writes. "However, when we understand that it is an animate entity, of which we are only a part, activism is not optional. It becomes a way of life."
Her students at Harvard University experience what she describes as "a fundamental transformation as they learn to see beyond the rudimentary ways in which the narrative of human exceptionalism has shaped their worldview." Their walks around campus change. Nature ceases to be mere scenery and becomes a topic of conversation.
Bear, the Namibian baboon, knew something many cognitive science students have yet to learn: that reconciliation requires recognizing the other as a subject. Without a touchscreen.