EconTalk · Russ Roberts

Humans Are Overrated (with Christine Webb)

September 1, 2025·1 hr 11 min·5 clips

A baboon named Bear bared his teeth in a pacifying gesture to show he knew what the primatologist was thinking.

Christine Webb opens by explaining that the arrogant ape in her book's title refers not to any individual or culture but to a worldview inherited unconsciously, akin to the hubris of Greek tragic protagonists, that places humans outside and above the rest of life on Earth. She argues this worldview is a root contributor to the ecological crisis because it prevents humans from feeling that their well-being is connected to the well-being of other species and their environments. The more developed and distinctive argument of the book is that human exceptionalism actively limits science by producing invalid experimental comparisons. Webb describes how comparative cognition studies typically pit chimpanzees who were separated from their mothers at birth, housed in labs or zoos, and isolated during testing against Western, educated, wealthy humans and their children who are comfortable, with family, and tested with familiar human materials. She coins this the WEIRD problem, Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic, and notes that these humans are also unrepresentative of global humanity, compounding the bias. She introduces the analogy of European and American football teams: testing cognitive abilities with human tasks is equivalent to inviting a European soccer team to play American football, which tells you nothing about their actual relative athletic ability. Webb then shares personal field encounters including a juvenile baboon named Bear who, after a frightening aggressive incident with a colleague, approached Webb calmly the following day and performed a pacifying teeth-baring gesture typically used between baboons to signal benign intent, suggesting he understood that Webb was scared of him and that he chose to address that fear through a social gesture. Roberts engages productively while expressing skepticism about the overarching thesis, noting that acknowledging animal intelligence is compatible with human exceptionalism in specific domains. The tone is substantive and collegial, with both speakers exploring the real epistemological challenges of studying animal minds without projecting human frameworks.

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