Work didn’t start with humans - it just looks different for us.

One defining characteristic of western thought in the present moment is the centralization of work  - the mental or physical effort that goes into completing a task. In many ways, the work you do defines your position in society. The last century has seen an immense transformation in how we do work. We have seen the rise of automation, first of the machine age and now of the technological age. Few jobs have been rendered completely obsolete through mechanization - only the elevator operator - but many are at risk. A 2013 study by a group at Oxford suggested that 47% of total US employment is at risk for automation.

That’s huge! In the US alone, that’s roughly 150 million people. What this means is that in the next hundred years or so, we’re going to have to figure out what the meaning of work is in a world that doesn’t actually need that many people to actually go to work. Given my experience studying biology, I was curious to see if there is such a thing as work in the animal kingdom and if there is, how it could be used to contextualize human work. I attempt to answer the following questions: Is work uniquely human? Is it what sets us apart from other animals? Or is it the way in which we work that sets us apart? And, finally, what if historical ways of working aren’t the best ways to ensure further survival of the species?

Who’s at work?

It turns out that all animals, plants, and even bacteria are working all the time. From the moment they wake up to the moment they fall asleep, animals spend most of their time working on the difficult task of survival. They must find food, defend their territory from those who would encroach on it, build nests, find a mate, nurture their young, and then repeat it all over again if there’s any time left to live. Some, like the mayfly, only get one chance - they live for a day or two, passing through all phases of a lifecycle in the blink of an eye. Dolania americana has the dubious distinction of being the shortest lived adult of any species - females live for only about five hours. On the other hand, Methuselah, a Great Basin Bristlecone pine, had been quietly reproducing for 4,851 years until it was cut down by an unwitting park ranger in 1964. There are more differences between these creatures than there are similarities, but one thing stands out - every minute of their lives, these creatures were hard at work.

One could argue that finding food, converting sunlight into ATP and sugar, reproducing, aren’t what we talk about when we talk about work. While all living beings work, it’s hard to imagine anyone except a human at a job. So is there any evidence that animals are on their way to organizing, getting jobs, and adopting an idle hands make for the devil’s playthings perspective?

Such a Tool..

One possible metric for a more complex approach to work is tool use. Why tool use? Because there’s an extra step required of the animal. This extra step requires forethought, a conceptualization about the future that we used to think was absolutely unique to humans. This shift in understanding is the kind of paradigm shift scientists regularly undergo when studying poorly understood phenomena. In the 1960s Jane Goodall was the first to recognize tool use in chimpanzees, and in the years since the catalog has expanded to something like 300 discreet tool-use behaviors.

Since her observations in the 1960s, there have been other pieces of appearances of tool use. Elephants, macaques, dolphins, the entire corvid family, and certainly others that have escaped human detection use tools for a few different purposes that can be binned as “food” and “other.” Anecdata on elephants says that they’ve been observed dropping rocks on electric fences and plugging watering holes with chewed bark plugs.  Dolphins in Shark Bay, Australia use sea sponges on their noses to protect them from chafing when rooting around in the sea floor. Macaques use rocks to break open seashells. Gorillas, not known for their fine motor control, use their fists and teeth for most food gathering - but have been seen using long walking sticks to evaluate the depth of water in swampy terrains. 

This sort of behavior could easily be viewed as something instinctual, performed without any real consideration, but the full story is a little more complicated. Chimpanzees grown in captivity don’t know how to use a standard collection of chimp tools for food gathering until they’re enculturated - i.e taught how to use them. Macaques in at a Prang Sam Yot shrine in Thailand, where they’re worshipped as servants of God, steal human hairs for flossing their teeth. They don’t do this in any neighboring areas, implying a localized cultural event. Couple this to the fact that mother macaques have been shown to exaggerate their motions and repeat behaviors in the presence of offspring, and it’s evident that there is an aspect of transmission, a “this is how you do it” that appears over and over in the animal kingdom.  

This sort of behavior, the ability to solve problems with modified materials from the environment, has a sense of being very work-like. Swap in a bug in the termite mound for a bug in the code, and suddenly there’s a sense that the reward isn’t THAT different. 

Where does the difference lie?

To start with, it’s worth pointing out that animal behavior is on the continuum. A behavior seen in one species is rarely, if ever, completely absent in others. This is what makes it difficult to search for the origin point of a behavior. The idea of an origin in general is somewhat reductionist, a model-based simplification that simply suggests that the model breaks down right around there.

Work didn’t start with humans - it just looks different for us. Many centuries of large-scale projects have led to a degree of accomplishments that appears unique to humans - infrastructure, medicine, decreased warfare, christ, the washing machine. These have all required massive mental and physical investments by unrelated individuals working on an abstract goal far in the future. It’s hard to imagine even the most advanced animal coming together to design something like a steam engine for keeping their burrows from flooding during the rainy season… even though it would improve their lives immeasurably.

That, in many ways, is where the difference lies: a fixed mindset vs a growth mindset. Somewhere along the line, the proto-humans experienced a shift in culture, a loosening of norms that allowed for a creative expansion of how things are done. There was a switch that happened in humans, one that must have shifted the focus towards accumulation of power rather than simply survival. Instead of doing things as they had always been done, some group of hominids realized that maybe it could be better.

It could be argued that the power wielded by some members of the human species has had devastating consequences alongside the miracles worked by modernity. Whole forests, entire ecosystems, complex ecological networks groan under the burden of our power to extract, manufacture, and consume. In many ways, the West has followed the discourse of power to it’s logical end. We’ve passed through all forms of labor - from slavery to corporate CEO - and have found it a pyrrhic victory. The rest of life on earth is alienated and disappearing. It seems like we’ll be the last ones at the party while the whole place comes down around our ears. 

The aim of these next decades is to determine the ways in which humans, as a species, can work together without having to destroy so much. The systems that have brought us the prosperity of today are valuable beyond measure. The goal is not to destroy them as much as it is to shift the paradigm what work means, to ask the question of how to grow into something better.