A Human Is Not A Lobster
Takeaway Points:
Human beings are not like cows, wolves, or lobsters - so why do we try to use animals as a source of information for how humans should act?
Exploring some of the common myths about drawing lessons from animal behavior, and how we can do it right.
In fitness, we have a concept called the “specificity principle”. If you’ve followed my blog for a long time, you’ve probably see me reference it constantly, because it’s one of the things which is simultaneously simplest to pick up and hardest for people to fully grasp. I’ve written an entire post about it, and I’ve re-explained it constantly in many posts where it’s referenced - because it’s so important that I have to.
The specificity principle states that the human body adapts to demands in very specific ways - that when you bench press, it makes adaptations designed to make you better at bench pressing. When you run, it makes adaptations designed to make you better at running. At its base, this is pretty simple.
Where it gets complex is that most people don’t understand the true depth of the specificity principle when it comes to more confusing edge cases. For example, while we can be sure that squatting is the best way to improve your squat, when is it possible that another exercise (like the leg press) might increase your squat as well? What are the cases where “only squatting” might be counterproductive to overall growth? What are the situations where we need to train with less specificity in order to maximize our long term returns?
I’ve also long believed that the principle of specificity applies to many other kinds of skill practice and acquisition as well. There’s a reason that you learn a language quickest via complete immersion and regular practice with a native speaker - because there’s no substitute for it, and nothing else (while it may be a good way to help) is quite as specific to the actual skill. The same applies to video games, to dexterity skills, playing an instrument, learning a new mental discipline, and more.
Today’s topic is the principle of specificity and how it applies to human/animal biological comparisons.
A Human Is Not A Cow
A long time ago, back when Facebook profiles were different, it was easier to see the “favorite quotes” section. A vegetarian friend of mine had posted one of her favorite quotes, attributed to Mark Twain, about the topic of vegetarianism. I cannot find this quote today for the life of me, but the gist of it was this: that anyone who insisted that human beings required meat to grow big and strong need only to look at the cows which labor in the fields daily with their rippling musculature, eating nothing but grass.
It may immediately be clear why this quote, while it seems intelligent at first, doesn’t really add up.
The first is that cows and human beings are very biologically different. Cows are herbivores, and humans are omnivores. Our bodies have the equipment to eat meat, digest it, and benefit from it — and cows don’t.
One of the big reasons that humans cannot survive on grass alone is that our bodies are not really capable of processing fiber. Fiber makes up most plant material (aside from sugar-rich fruits and other exceptions), and while it contains a lot of calories, these calories come in a form that is difficult to digest for humans - as a result, when we eat it, we get very little net energy, leading to the infamous claim that some foods like celery actually contain “negative calories”. This isn’t actually true, but it’s quite close, as the energy required to process the carbs present in most vegetables renders them effectively near-zero in terms of the net calorie gain.
Fiber is still considered an important part of the human diet because it has important effects on digestive health, and because those foods which are high in fiber are also minimally calorie dense, helping to regulate fullness and energy balance.
In contrast, cow stomachs are designed to digest this fiber much more easily, and get a much greater amount of energy out of it.
We may respect the cow for its traits, but attempting to emulate the cow in diet would be a terrible idea - because humans are just fundamentally different creatures.
A Human Is Not A Wolf
In the fitness industry (and in our greater culture) it’s common to talk about being “alpha”, in particular, being an “alpha male”. The concept of the alpha male came from the study of wolves, pack-based animals which form clear social hierarchies. The male on the top of the hierarchy is considered the alpha, and tends to lead the pack as well as receive preferential treatment from the others.
In the common mentality, this translates to an aggressive, hard-earned status won through competition and might. Packs are constantly engaged in fighting to determine who’s the alpha, with the strongest individual winning out. Since strength is all that matters, the alpha constantly has to be on guard for challengers who are waiting to usurp his position at any moment.
The reality is quite different. The actual status of the alpha male varies from species to species. Some species may have alpha females. Some species’ alphas derive their status not from being the biggest or strongest, but instead because they’re the best at coordinating the group and altruistically defending the weaker members. In contrast to the expectation, the true alphas are often more akin to political leaders, not the biggest, meanest, jacked-est ones.
The study of wolves has commonly been cited as the basis for the alpha concept, because studies of wolves in captivity provided an example of the aggressive, conflict-heavy alpha status that’s more like everyone’s expectations of what an alpha should be. But the original researcher responsible for popularizing this research later disputed it, having discovered that this was largely because the wolves studied were non-related wolves in captivity. Actual pack structures in the wild behave very differently.
In short, the only reason that these wolves were fighting to be the alpha was that none of them knew each other nor had any reason to care about their own well-being or the well-being of other wolves around them - and in the wild, wolves tend to travel in family packs where they all know each other and have incentives to behave altruistically to protect the pack.
Do human societies naturally develop around alpha types? Possibly, but this would be hard to parse, given the very different structures of human society. Humans form social structures with those in their immediate vicinity, linked to them by family structure or shared interest, and we could say that some “alpha” leaders emerge.
But these smaller structures are embedded within larger structures which they come into regular contact with - if you work within a small company for example, you may serve as an “alpha” to that company, but you probably have little to no favored status within another company or elsewhere within the world. In short, there are just too many people for these “traditional” social hierarchies to be meaningful.
Inside the larger culture of a nation as a whole, we could say that there are “alpha” individuals, but our alphas are more like celebrities, politicians, and other people with wider renown - not people known for being aggressive, violent, or vicious. Even then, a celebrity in one country may be completely unknown in another country, or may simply be unrecognized by some in their own country. In short, I think the “alpha” concept doesn’t really map well onto human social structures.
A Human Is Not A Lobster
This problem of comparing humans to animals spills out into other interpretations of human behavior as well. Evolutionary psychology, for example, seeks to find reasons for patterns of human behavior drawn from hypothetical human evolutionary history, which has connections to how we evolved and developed in tandem with animal populations. Pop psychologists draw attention for making comparisons between human behavior and other behaviors in the animal kingdom, often ignoring how these animals are vastly different from humans.
Ultimately, a human being is a human being, and is a unique animal which is not directly reducible to animal behaviors. This isn’t to say that we can’t find some parallels in animal behavior, just that we need to exercise extreme caution when using animal behaviors to provide logical justification for human ones - often we can draw incorrect conclusions about how humans “should” behave, based on how animals do. Further, our knowledge of animal behavior is generally very incomplete, and it’s very easy to draw mistaken conclusions from incomplete data.
This is ultimately a classic expression of the philosophical is-ought problem, which states that we can’t really derive the way things ought to be from the way that they are. If things always ought to be the way that they are (or closely derived from the way that they are) then there is no real opportunity for development, growth, change, or improvement. There’s only one possible model for the world, and we can’t really change it.
Worse, the way we perceive things as they “are” may be based on incorrect and biased analyses of what’s going on. Virtually everyone has plenty of stuff that they don’t know much of anything about, and thus don’t have any authority to speak on. Human mental biases and logical heuristics tend to limit the scope of our knowledge of the outside world. In short, a human being is very little like a lobster, and we shouldn’t take lobster behavior (or even other human behavior!) as a template for how any specific human behavior “ought” to be.
This is closely related to what we might call the fallacy of the appeal to nature, in which we derive statements about the way things out to be, based on what is “natural”. Just because something occurs in nature does not mean that it says anything about the way that things ought to be. What exists in nature can often be just as artificial and unnatural as our cities and technology, as the example of the wolves shows us.
Let’s bring it back to the principle of specificity, shall we?
The human being is ultimately most closely related to the ape. This forms the basis of the book The Age of Empathy, which explores behavioral lessons we can learn from studies on apes, as well as how the animal kingdom is often “kinder” and less vicious than we tend to think. If we apply the principle of specificity, we would see that the closely related apes are probably the species we can draw the most lessons from, even if they must be taken with a grain of salt due to our clear differences. I’d highly recommend checking the book out, as I think it busts a lot of myths on the topic.
The animal kingdom is not necessarily about constant conflict and inter-species warfare. Human life is not necessarily “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”, nor is it necessarily marked by constant competition. While we may be engaged in competitive behaviors in some areas, we’re also engaged in a complex web of interactions, many of which are friendly, empathetic, and benign.
Human beings are amazingly complex, and we must always avoid seeking overly-simplistic answers about why we do the things that we do.
Using animal metaphors to describe “why” human beings act, or should act, in certain ways, is likely to be a waste of time and effort.
About Adam Fisher
Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging for 5+ years, coaching for 6+ years, and lifting for 12+ years. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.
During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around powerlifting and bodybuilding.
Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cat or feeding his video game addiction.
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