The boundries of personhood

A group of academics (psychologists, ethicist, biologists etc.) have recently endorsed a statement arguing that dolphins and whales do deserve the rights of humans, based on their intelligence, self-awareness, individuality, sociality and so forth.

 A curmudgeonly old man, who was an environmentalist but hated that he was because he didn't like to be associated with hippies, once opined to me as follows on this topic, only in much more colorful language: We can't start treating whales as though they have the same rights as humans, because if we give those rights to whales, we have to give them to apes too, and if we give them to apes pretty soon we'll be extending them to monkeys, and pretty soon antibiotics will be outlawed because they violate the inalienable rights of infectious bacteria.

I have mixed feelings about slippery slope arguments generally. Letting even minor instances of objectionable predilections (sexism, racism, etc.) slide really does seem to be a problem, on the principle that once people are used to these sentiments going unchallenged, they will feel freer to get more egregious. But we can and frequently do make different rules about the treatment of different categories of animals, and there is little likelihood of the rules that now apply to the study of chimpanzees being extended to include studies of bacteria, let alone infections. My research with live animals legally requires no review by any ethics board because I am working with invertebrates. Back when I studied birds, I needed committee approval just to go out in the woods and watch birds for scientific purposes, and my friends who study humans have sometimes had to get such approval just to reuse preexisting published and publicly available data on long-dead populations.

The fact of the matter is that we can and do make arbitrary decisions, often influenced by scientific knowledge but also influenced by emotional predilections, about who and what deserve what rights and protections. Before the US Civil War, southerners quibbled with the evidence that slaves were fully human, but more fundamentally they didn't admit that this implied that they deserved the same rights as other people. These days, American conservatives tend to want to extend the full rights of personhood to fetuses, embryos and potentially fertilized eggs. American liberals often want to extend these same rights to smart charismatic non-humans. Each side sees the other as both ridiculous and morally bankrupt. The difference underlying these wants are philosophical, moral, ethical and political, sometimes economic, but not generally founded in disagreements on scientific fact. Those factual disagreements usually follow, as each side looks for ways to justify its conclusions. I don't expect cetaceans will ever be granted the same rights as humans, but as we learn more about their mental and emotional lives, I do think it will become harder to treat them little different from large endangered fish. In other words, I think we will go part way down the slope.

Who's a demographer?

I tend to find religious fundamentalists, whatever the religion, hard to listen to. One of the habits I find objectionable is the tendency for fundamentalists of a religion to argue that others who practice the same religion differently aren't really practitioners of that religion at all. This tendency has recently been popping up in the news as Christian fundamentalists in the US argue that because Mitt Romney is a Mormon, he isn't really a Christian. I have no fondness for Mitt Romney, and frankly suspect he would claim to be a Pastafarian if he thought it would get him elected. That said, the Mormons declare themselves to be Christians (they do talk about Christ a lot), and I can't see as anyone has the authority to tell them they aren't. It is just hubris to go around telling people that you can describe their religious beliefs better than they can.

This is all a roundabout way of getting to the question of who is a demographer. Ask a demographer what is the largest annual scientific meeting for demographers, and she will probably say The Population Association of America (PAA). I consider myself a demographer as well as a biologist, but I think most PAA members would say the stuff I do isn't demography. This is for the simple reason that I mostly study non-human populations, and the PAA defines demography as the study of human population processes. Studying the same processes in non-humans is, by this definition, not demography. Last year they had a session on evolutionary demography, but all the accepted papers were on humans. This year they don't even have such a session. I think that inserting the word 'human' into the definition of demography is roughly akin to saying that anyone who doesn't follow the teachings of a particular Rabii isn't really Jewish, so I call myself a demographer.

I was recently surprised to find myself in a conversation in which the tables were turned. A colleague was arguing that most PAA members are not really demographers, but sociologists. His argument was that many human-focused hard-core demographers feel out of place at the PAA. After their meetings this spring several colleagues complained that most talks at PAA meetings are really quantitative sociology rather than demography. The distinction is a fine one, but basically classical demography has a core set of questions and methods, and these have certainly been supplanted to a considerable degree by questions coming out of sociology, mostly approached with methods that don't require the quantitative machinery of formal demography. My colleague told me, "All the talks are full of regression tables, and most of the regressions aren't even done well."

So is it fair to say that my colleagues and I, who apply classical demographic methods to non-humans are more demographery than the quantitative sociologists at the PAA? I'm afraid not. We can no more revoke their demographer label than they can revoke ours. However, since the social demographers who control the PAA aren't interested in evolutionary demography, and most of their presentations frankly aren't that interesting to us (there really are a ridiculous number of regression tables, mostly demonstrating the relationship between fertility and female education for yet another population), I'm going to let my membership lapse. I'm thinking I'll join the British Ecological Society instead. They have lots of evolutionary demography at their meetings. I don't even feel the need to call myself an ecologist.