Are Humans Really Wise Animals?

English translation

AI-assisted English translation. The Japanese original remains authoritative.

Are Human Beings Really Wise Animals?

Takao Suzuki
Professor Emeritus, Keio University; Senior Adviser to this Academia

I think many people know that the animal we call the human being is currently given the scientific name Homo sapiens. Homo is the Latin word for “human being,” while sapiens is a Latin adjective meaning “wise.”

A scientific name is a universally shared name formed by putting two Latin words together, as in Homo sapiens. When natural history, zoology and botany deal with living things from different parts of the world, confusion could arise if people in countries speaking different languages each used a different name for the same thing, the same object of study. This system avoids that problem.

The first part, Homo, which denotes the larger grouping, is called the genus name; the following part, sapiens, which denotes a particular distinguishing characteristic, is called the specific epithet. It may be easier to understand if we think of Homo as a family name and sapiens as an individual member of the Homo family.

Why is Latin used for scientific names? Because in eighteenth-century Europe, when the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linne, who devised this naming method known as binomial nomenclature, was active, Latin was still the common language of scholarship throughout Europe.

Lately, however, I have begun seriously to wonder whether the specific epithet given to human beings—sapiens, meaning “wise”—really describes this animal accurately. Let me explain why.

We do not know in detail why Linne originally assigned human beings the specific epithet “wise.” As a Christian, however, I believe he would naturally have accepted the Christian teaching that humans were created in God's image and are distinguished from all other animals in that they alone were endowed with language and wisdom. The notion that human beings stood at the summit of creation, that they were the most excellent of all beings, was a matter of common assumption in the Western world of his time. I think this was why Linne unhesitatingly made our specific epithet sapiens: “wise.”

Yet, as I have repeatedly said, it has lately become clear that most of the extreme weather events continually causing serious damage around the world, the advance of large-scale desertification and the widespread deterioration of water resources arise from humanity's excessive expansion of economic activity and the rapid population growth accompanying it.

Experts warn that, if we continue to allow the uncontrolled expansion of the economy, it is almost certain that human destruction of the environment will, in the fairly near future, exceed what our finite planet can tolerate in various respects.

Although the Club of Rome had already pointed this out in 1972, politicians in the advanced countries that play a leading role—the United States, Europe, Japan and others—still aim at endlessly rising development and an ever-larger economy. This is hardly worthy of the designation Homo sapiens. Thinking along these lines, I am led to wonder whether we should change the specific epithet, or leave it unchanged and accomplish a fundamental transformation in our thinking with the wisdom that would make us worthy of it. Or perhaps it is about time to bring the era of human leadership to an end and entrust that authority to other animals and plants.

Japanese people originally possessed a deeply rooted belief that countless deities dwell in all things. This should by no means be dismissed as a primitive religion. Might it not embody the idea that wisdom consists in living together with other animals and plants, mountains and rivers, rather than conquering them or becoming as arrogant and self-important as human beings are today?

I would ask readers to notice how this Manyo-shu values the character of its times. While reflecting the abnormal age of the twenty-first century just as it is, it shows the next generation, the generation after that, and those who will come hundreds of years hence, an attitude of seriously confronting these problems.