OK. Here’s the thing: We live on this largeish orbiting rock, the goofy naked apes we are, inhabiting it along with all the other animal species and the five other kingdoms of organisms. On the one hand, these organisms seem to have this madly various, utterly perverse diversity of forms and behaviors, and on the other hand, we share the same biological fundamentals. We’re not only built using the same cellular tools, we also share with other organisms—and not just the ones closest to us on the tree—an eerily similar set of genes.
What, then, do we make of all these other creatures? What is the most accurate way to conceptualize our relationship to other organisms?
You might be surprised to learn that I don’t know the answer to those questions. (A blogger who doesn’t know something? What?)
But here is one view from naturalist Henry Beston that I found deserving of its own post:
They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time.
