If we could walk to the animals
Talk with the animals
Grunt and squeak and squawk with the animals
And they could squeak and squawk and speak and talk to us!

Words & Music by Leslie Bricusse  - Doctor Doolittle -

I'm reading C.S. Lewis' The Four Loves  right now.  It's not necessarily his most engaging book, but it's good for focusing thought on the many different ways (well, the four ways) that we tend to use the term and experience the phenomenon of love.  I'm in the section on Affection, and Lewis is making some points about how silly we can be in our means of expressing affection.  That at times, we resort to non-linguistic noises and grunts and other little noises meant to convey great affection.  Lewis goes on to describe how this happens in the animal kingdom as well, with certain species that have special noises that they use only for the (seeming) purpose of expressing affection.

This is something I wonder about.

As a Biblical Christian, I reject the standard line about evolution and natural selection as an explanation for the presence of mankind,.  I do not believe that we evolved from a common descendant with the apes and other primates.  I hold with the Genesis depiction of man being created uniquely - both in manner and form - from the rest of creation.  Experience tends to bear this out, in my mind.  There is something qualitatively different from mankind than from any other creature on Earth, and of such an immense difference that no amount of equivocation and explanation about natural selection can account for it.  We are not simply glorified monkeys or primates.  We are essentially different.

And so I wonder how reasonable it is, as a Biblical Christian, to look to the animal kingdom for information about mankind.  And it seems to me that there are two ways that this can be done - for purposes of description, and purposes of explanation.  The former seems reasonable, if sometimes odd.  The latter seems inappropriate, if sometimes convenient.

As part of God's creation, it would seem that, even though radically different, we still might possess certain qualities or practices which are also shared by other creatures.  It would indeed be odd if we saw nothing akin to our own behavior amongst our fellow creatures, as though mankind were some sort of alien arrived from a totally different environment.  It makes sense that we can look to the natural world expecting to find certain behaviors similar to ours, and that we will naturally associate those behaviors with similar purposes to our own. 

However I think it is problematic to look to the animal kingdom and, finding certain similar behaviors or traits, attempt to explain our own behavior in light of theirs.  I think it problematic to say, for example, that animals have certain manners of courtship behavior that are distinct and separate from any other type of behavior, and therefore humans do as well, and therefore we demonstrate once again that mankind is really just another animal.  Of course part of this depends on your definition of animal.  But I think that we ought to be careful about assuming that if we see it out there, we expect to find it within ourselves, and visa versa. 

One example of this sort of argument that I've run across repeatedly is in regard to human sexual practices.  The argument is made by some that sexual practices such as homosexuality are not to be regarded as deviant or unnatural, because we know of certain species of animals that engage in this sort of sexual behavior as well.  In other words, because a puffin, or some other animal occasionally is observed in sexual behavior with another creature of the same gender, we can extrapolate that homosexuality in human beings is only natural.  The implication is that man is simply another animal.  And whereas we're unlikely to place moral judgments on the behavior of a puffin, we ought not place moral judgments on human behavior, either.  Or  at least human behaviors that we wish to have legitimized and justified.

And yet other animal practices are not used to legitimate equivalent human behaviors, at least not at this point in time.  The idea of a mother refusing to suckle the weakest of her offspring so that the others will survive tends to strike us as terrible, though we're encroaching on that realm with our practices of in vitro fertilization and the ability to select our children based on gender or other features.  The idea of justifying polygamy because it is practiced by many animal species would also probably disgust many folks.  Why are some behaviors justifiable and others are not?  If we're simply evolved animals, what exactly in the process of natural selection determines that some of our more primal practices are no longer appropriate?

So I attempt to not use the animal kingdom as any sort of explanation or justification for human behavior.  I'm not surprised necessarily to see that some behaviors are shared, but I try not to draw more from this than necessary.  As creatures sharing a common creation, some similarities would be expected.  But the distinct 'otherness' of humanity is explained very well by Genesis.  Humanity is not simply another animal, though it is another creature.