Darwinism Promotes the Disney Effect

“If I could talk with
the animals, and
they could talk to me!”

 

by John D. Wise, PhD

Let’s analyze a recent article entitled, very appropriately and tellingly, “Animals can’t talk like humans do – here’s why the hunt for their languages has left us empty-handed,” The Conversation, 9 June 2025. Under the image of a howling (or yawning) ape, Anna Jon-And of Stockholm University and Johan Lind of Linköping University begin by asking,

Why do humans have language and other animals apparently don’t? It’s one of the most enduring questions in the study of mind and communication. Across all cultures, humans use richly expressive languages built on complex structures, which let us talk about the past, the future, imaginary worlds, moral dilemmas and mathematical truths. No other species does this.

I will have a great deal more to say about these very important highlighted portions in what follows.

Yet we are fascinated by the idea that animals might be more similar to us than it seems. We delight in the possibility that dolphins tell stories or that apes can ponder the future. We are social and thinking creatures, and we love to see our reflection in others. That deep desire may have influenced the study of animal cognition.

This paper asserts that this “may have” is a near-certainty, and I agree. It is a case of wishful thinking and reminds us that …  “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” As I asserted in our last article, evolution is faith-based, which is not a criticism, but an honest assessment of the reality.

The Wish to Believe in Animal Minds

When I taught philosophy at East Stroudsburg University of PA in the mid 2000’s thru early 2010’s, the greatest pushback I would get from students as I laid out the history of philosophy was on the ancient Greek distinction, the mental chasm really, between human beings and the rest of the animal kingdom.

My students were offended for the animals, but I assure you that no animals were offended in the writing of this paper (or the teaching of my class).

Aristotle (384-322 BC) was the true father of taxonomy, long before Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778 AD – see our article on him here). Building on the work of Socrates and Plato before him, Aristotle codified a method of definition by genus and differentia. This method proceeds by first rationally isolating the proper group, or genus,[1] to which the thing you are seeking to define belongs. If we are defining humans, the genus is animal, as we are neither vegetable nor mineral. Now, there are many kinds of animals. The trick is to ‘carve nature at her joints,’ properly dividing the various groups from one another by specifying how one kind differs from the other kinds in its genus. We accomplish this by means of the differentia, the distinguishing characteristic that no other members of the genus possess. For the Greeks this answer, too, was obvious: reason is man’s differentia from the other animals.

Thus the Greek definition: man is a rational animal.

Enter Hegel Again

What my students took exception to in this definition was not man’s rationality but the lack of animal rationality this definition implies. They were horrified by the idea that animals and humans were different in kind. Animals, they asserted, were people too. To think (and teach) otherwise was an ethical lapse on my part, they asserted. This result in every section of Introduction to Philosophy I taught, amused and alarmed me. I take it as ground-zero evidence for the hegemony of Hegelian thinking in our culture.[2]

I must confess to an agenda of which close readers of my work for Creation Evolution Headlines are probably aware. I want Christians (and everyone else, too) to see the reality and the effects of Hegelian logic and metaphysics in our world, as I believe it powerfully explains the predominance of evolutionary thinking, and the persistence of faith in its origin-story in the face of the evidence.

If we are to defeat Darwin we must confront Hegel, both in our culture and in ourselves. Unfortunately, the task of understanding Hegel is massive, as we are not dealing with discrete phenomena here and there that need correcting, but an underlying (and largely unconscious) way of processing reality itself. It is how we think and see and thus what we think and see. Its tentacles reach far, wide and deep, presenting a seemingly impenetrable web of distortion. I have felt called to confront it since my return to Christ in 2019. My years as an atheist philosopher, I think, uniquely prepared me for this role, but I have despaired of realizing it in the past.[3] Perhaps, precept upon precept this time will be different, as it is no longer abstract philosophical reasoning, but application to a concrete and visible problem – how to defeat the anti-God philosophical movement that is evolution.

What was it about my students’ pushback at the distinction between animals and humans that alarmed me? They denied the differentia (a distinctly human rationality). That is, they embraced the blurry continuum of animal kind but denied the radical uniqueness of human beings. In language that sets forth my angst over this problem, my students and seemingly the whole world around me, deny that which is evident[4] to the Greeks, to me, and (I think) to any observant, rational being.

It is in the soil of this anti-Edenic garden that evolution has taken root and thrived.

The Disney Effect

This article makes the case I have been trying to make for the last 25 years. I knew then – even looking through the evolutionary lens – that the difference between man and animal cannot reasonably be seen as merely a difference in degree. It must be seen, as the Greeks saw it, as a difference in kind.[5]

I became so interested in this phenomenon that I began to track the scientific literature on the topic, and I saw something fascinating. The literature clearly came at the question with a bias, wanting human rationality to be no more than animal consciousness taken to the next level, more of the same thing we see in animals. Even as an atheist this evolutionary assumption seemed wrong; it seemed to fly in the face of the facts. My students disagreed, often with surprising vehemence. Their pets (and by extension all animals) are as aware of the world – and in much the same way – as they are; they just can’t express it to us because we speak different languages. If only we shared a common tongue we could “talk with the animals,” as Dr. Doolittle sang. This assumption seems nearly universal today.

I call it the Disney Effect.

The technical term is anthropomorphizing. We project our own conscious experience onto the animals around us, particularly our pets. This is a well-attested practice in all times and cultures. The question is, is our projection reality, or fiction? The Greeks clearly thought it fiction,[6] and so do I. And … I enjoy this fiction. The scientific community since Darwin, however, deeply desires it to be true and keeps promoting research and stories trying desperately to make the case, to blur/deny the distinction.

Enter this article (again).

Over the past two decades, studies of thinking and language in animals, especially those highlighting similarities with human abilities, have flourished in academia and attracted extensive media coverage.

We can easily understand why the evolutionary community would like this to be true. The deeper the divide the more radical the division. If we’ve hit here a hard boundary the whole evolutionary continuum might collapse. In Darwin-world, there simply can’t be a difference in kind between animal and human intelligence. Goo to you requires you to be goo, not something radically other. During the decade or so that I observed with great interest this avalanche of scientific effort to make the evidence fit the theory, even though the discoveries were amazing and stretched my thinking on the issue, the best arguments and evidence fell far short of their goal. In this way I learned the lesson that scientists operating under a particular paradigm are often not so objective with their treatment of the evidence as is claimed.

Over-hyped conclusions and sensational headlines were omnipresent.

The Real Animal

This article shows that at least some scientists are throwing up their hands in defeat:

After decades of research on dolphin intelligence and communication in larger whales, for instance, we still cannot communicate with them using any language-like code.

The evidence is truly overwhelming:

If animals cannot represent sequences faithfully – and we see no evidence that they can – many apparent parallels with human language fall apart. The temptation to see ourselves in animals is strong, especially when their behaviour seems familiar. But surface resemblance does not necessarily imply the same underlying mechanisms.

For years I refined my own thinking on this question in my philosophy courses. I will use the language of this article to represent some of my conclusions.

Across all cultures, humans use richly expressive languages built on complex structures, which let us talk about the past, the future, imaginary worlds, moral dilemmas and mathematical truths. No other species does this.

Human rationality and language-ability[7] may be analyzed as a series of extremely “complex structures” that are quite simply absent from animal consciousness. This passage lists some of them. First, temporal awareness. I would need more space than all I’ve written so far for Creation Evolution Headlines to even begin to comment on this one, but here are the essentials. Animals exist in the present only, whereas human beings live with all three temporal dimensions – past, present and future. Second, human beings can imagine that which is not the case, pass moral judgment on what should be the case, and engage in abstract thought (e.g., mathematical reasoning). All of this depends on the unique human ability to deny the here and now, the characteristic of another trait – freedom. Animals are determined – unfree, lacking all of this. Here is a passage from the “Abstract” to the book, The Human Evolutionary Transition: From Animal Intelligence to Culture, by Magnus Enquist, Stefano Ghirlanda, and Johan Lind (one of the two authors of this article).

This book offers a unified view of the evolution of intelligence, presenting a bold and provocative new account of how animals and humans have followed two powerful yet very different evolutionary paths to intelligence. The book shows how animals rely on robust associative mechanisms that are guided by genetic information, which enable animals to sidestep complex problems in learning and decision making but ultimately limit what they can learn. Humans embody an evolutionary transition to a different kind of intelligence, one that relies on behavioral and mental flexibility. The book argues that flexibility is useless to most animals because they lack sufficient opportunities to learn new behavioral and mental skills.

Retreat to the Storytelling Habit

So, while our authors are unwilling to face the possibility that human rationality is not a product of evolution (what else, after all, could it be?), they are seeing clearly that this is a difference in kind from merely animal intelligence. What is any self-respecting evolutionist to do in such a dilemma but present “a bold and provocative new account”? That’s right, concede nothing; just tell a new story.

Animals have evolved rich and effective ways to interact and survive in a hostile world….

Nonetheless, we see no signs of their communication stretching flexibly across time and space or building up networks of abstract concepts in the way human language does. If we want to reach a better understanding of the fascinating communication systems of other animals, perhaps humans are not the best model.

After decades and longer of trying desperately to blur the distinction drawn by the Greeks (and common sense), scientists are being forced by the data to acknowledge its sharp-edged truth. In rationality a radical boundary exists between human beings and ‘the rest’ of the animals, even acknowledging all our similarities. In fact, it makes the 98% genetic question (similarity to chimpanzees) irrelevant, as we might be 100% similar, but if rationality still differentiates us, would the evolutionary case be stronger, or weaker?

Rather than chasing grammar in animals, a more grounded approach asks what cognitive difference [genus and differentia] might explain the gap we observe between humans and other animals.

It’s time for a new evolutionary approach to “one of the most enduring questions in the study of mind and communication.”

This kind of mental precision does not just power language. It changes how we see the world, breaking experience into far more distinct situations. But a richer world is also a more complex one to learn because the number of possible combinations explodes.

The Chasm of Mind: A Radical Boundary

Human rationality is a radically different way of seeing and living in this world from animal consciousness. This is the conclusion I reached long ago and taught in my Intro to Philosophy course. It was one of the many pieces of “evidence” that undermined my atheistic belief system in the twenty-teens. It is also one of the amazing conclusions that helped me see how very powerfully human beings can commit themselves to an explanatory narrative that we’ve invented with our God-given imagination.

This is the cautionary tale of Narcissus and Pygmalion.*

I am a lover of fiction, but only when I know it as fiction. I don’t want fiction in my science. The issue is not whether the story is compelling or plausible, or even if it can adequately explain the evidence, but whether it is true. The truth is that animals are not people, and we should stop thinking about and treating them as if they are. This is an evolutionary lie, a virtue (kindness/equality/inclusion) that has become a vice by being pushed beyond its proper boundary to excess. We give credence to the Hegelian/evolutionary narrative when we act as if it were true. When we blur what God has clearly defined, we break His word, His boundaries. God draws sharp lines in some cases. We are not at liberty to erase them.

Human rationality is, quite literally, the irruption of the supernatural into the natural. There is nothing like it in the natural realm. Its origin and perfection is our Creator, but its image was gifted to us.

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” … So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

To speak of the evolution of language is a category mistake. Language is supernatural, divine. Language is creative.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.

For US the eternal Word of God took both written and human form. Language, the Word, is unique to human beings because it came from and is divine.

It did not evolve.**

That is an inference to the Best Explanation.

*Narcissus, of course, gazes into a pool of water and falls in love with himself. Similarly, Pygmalion sculpts an ideal woman, Galatea, because real women disappoint him. This is the problem of self-love, of falling for a creation of one’s own making, of fleeing reality in favor of self-generated fantasy. Imagination can effectively separate us from the real world, especially when we want it badly enough.

**Note: I did not say language does not change. Language is not the progressive result of the alteration and elevation of animal calls and grunts. It came fully formed from God.

Footnotes

[1] In this case the term means simply broad category and not the more specified genus of Linnaean taxonomy. It is a relative term, as can be seen by the fact that genus would refer first to animal in the definition of man as rational animal, but then man would be the genus for the varieties of humans we might seek to differentiate.

[2] I am feeling a bit like a one-trick pony in my writing here. In every article for CREV I refer to Hegel. It isn’t that I don’t have other philosophical interests. The problem is the “evolution” part of Creation Evolution Headlines. If I am to talk about evolution, I am necessarily talking about Hegel, as the two are not just inextricably combined but one and the same from my perspective.

[3] Episodes 35-42 of The Christian Atheist explain Hegel, and “No Compromise” episodes 21-27 try to popularize it in discussions between Jenny and me. “No Compromise” is a subpodcast within The Christian Atheist.

[4] This is perhaps the fundamental thesis of the book on atheism I hope to finish.

[5] When I taught as an atheist who embraced evolutionary theory, I would have said that the difference in degree is so large as to functionally be a difference in kind. That is, with modifications, precisely the conclusion of this article.

[6] The problem is not the practice of anthropomorphizing, of imagining a parallel reality, but of confusing imagination with reality. The Greeks enjoyed their fictions of animals talking and thinking like them, but they understood them as fictions. GK Chesterton does a great job explaining this in his discussion of Greek mythology in The Everlasting Man (the whole text of which I have read for our podcast Simple Gifts). Abandoning the logic of Aristotle for evolutionary (Hegelian) logic opens the space for living in our “imaginary reality,” as if it was real. This is the space evolutionary theory inhabits.

[7] We can talk as though these are two different things analytically, but it is by no means clear that they are distinct from one another. In Greek the term for reason is logos, which also means word, and by association language. We can also talk analytically about the various “components” – freedom, temporality, imagination, abstract thought, et al., but I am convinced they are inseparable in fact.

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John Wise received his PhD in philosophy from the University of CA, Irvine in 2004. His dissertation was titled Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology and the German Idealist Tradition. His area of specialization is 19th to early 20th century continental philosophy.

He tells the story of his 25-year odyssey from atheism to Christianity in the book, Through the Looking Glass: The Imploding of an Atheist Professor’s Worldview (available on Amazon). Since his return to Christ, his research interests include developing a Christian (YEC) philosophy of science and the integration of all human knowledge with God’s word.

He has taught philosophy for the University of CA, Irvine, East Stroudsburg University of PA, Grand Canyon University, American Intercontinental University, and Ashford University. He currently teaches online for the University of Arizona, Global Campus, and is a member of the Heterodox Academy. He and his wife Jenny are known online as The Christian Atheist with a podcast of that name, in addition to a YouTube channel: John and Jenny Wise.