Are Humans Really Exceptional? Tom Verde Leads a Stonington Discussion of The Arrogant Ape

Are Humans Really Exceptional? Tom Verde Leads a Stonington Discussion of The Arrogant Ape Friday, Sept. 25, bringing readers together at the Stonington Free Library to examine a provocative question: Are humans actually as unique, intelligent, and superior to the rest of life as we have convinced ourselves we are?

Author and journalist Tom Verde will lead the 90-minute discussion of Christine Webb’s The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters, a 2025 book that uses primatology, animal behavior and other research to challenge the idea that humanity naturally belongs at the top of a biological hierarchy.

Participants are encouraged to read the book beforehand and arrive ready to discuss it.

What Makes Us So Sure We’re Special?

Webb begins with an idea that reaches well beyond whether a chimpanzee can solve a puzzle or a bird can use a tool.

Humans have developed an extraordinarily powerful story about ourselves.

We’re the intelligent species. The rational one. The species with culture, language, morality and complex emotions. Other forms of life are commonly evaluated according to how closely they approach abilities we’ve already decided are particularly human.

Webb argues that this can create a rigged contest.

Her book examines evidence of complexity throughout the living world, including communication among songbirds and prairie dogs, cultures among chimpanzees and reef fish and sophisticated behavior extending even into plants and fungi.

She also challenges how scientists themselves have sometimes approached comparisons between humans and other species.

The question becomes not simply whether another species can do something humans can do, but whether we’re capable of understanding another organism on its own terms.

Darwin Didn’t Put Us at the Top

One of Webb’s starting points is Charles Darwin.

Evolution doesn’t really produce a ladder with primitive organisms at the bottom and humans triumphantly standing at the top. It produces branching relationships shaped by different environments and evolutionary pressures.

Humans are one branch.

Yet Webb argues that older ideas of hierarchy survived the arrival of evolutionary theory and continue to shape how people think about intelligence, emotion and the moral value of other living things.

That matters because the belief isn’t merely philosophical.

If humans consider themselves fundamentally separate from and superior to the rest of nature, Webb argues, it becomes easier to treat animals, ecosystems and natural resources primarily according to their usefulness to us.

The Arrogant Ape connects that thinking to environmental exploitation and the ecological instability humans now face.

But Webb doesn’t frame abandoning human exceptionalism simply as a sacrifice made for other species.

She argues that humans also have something to gain.

Seeing ourselves as participants in a much larger living system can replace superiority with curiosity, connection and what she describes as humility before the natural world.

The Author Studies Our Closest Living Relatives

Webb comes to the subject through primatology.

She is an assistant professor in New York University’s Department of Environmental Studies and part of its Animal Studies program, with expertise in social behavior, cognition and emotion.

Her research with nonhuman primates has helped shape her interest in what happens when scientists stop treating human abilities as the default measurement against which other animals must be judged.

Her work also crosses disciplinary lines, bringing scientific research into conversation with scholars in the social sciences and humanities and with debates over the moral status humans assign to other animals.

The Arrogant Ape, published by Avery in September 2025, runs 336 pages and was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2025.

Tom Verde Has Spent a Career Asking Questions Across Cultures

The discussion leader brings his own unusually broad background to the subject.

Pawcatuck-based writer and journalist Tom Verde has reported from Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the United States for outlets and programs including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Marketplace, Living on Earth and The Savvy Traveler.

His magazine work has appeared in publications including Newsweek, Travel + Leisure, Reader’s Digest, National Geographic Adventure and ARTnews.

One assignment took him along the ancient frankincense trade route across the Arabian Peninsula, traveling by camel, dhow, four-wheel-drive vehicle and on foot. His public-radio work on Cairo earned a National Headliner Award for Best Radio Documentary Series as well as a New York Festivals Award.

Religion has also been a recurring subject in Verde’s work. He hosted a public-radio discussion series called What to Believe, and earlier this year the Stonington Free Library hosted him for a presentation of Queens of Islam, his exploration of Muslim women who exercised political power across centuries of Islamic history.

The September gathering is part of the library’s continuing Tom Verde Book Discussions series. In June, Verde led readers through Steven Waldman’s Sacred Liberty, examining the history of religious freedom in America.

This time, the discussion moves from what humans believe about one another to what humans believe about themselves as a species.

Read It First, Then Argue About It

This is a book discussion rather than a lecture by Webb herself.

The library encourages participants to read The Arrogant Ape beforehand and come prepared to engage with its ideas.

Copies are available through the Stonington Free Library, and the book can also be purchased locally at Bank Square Books.

That preparation matters with a book built around a proposition as large as human exceptionalism.

Webb isn’t merely asking whether animals are smarter than we’ve historically assumed.

She’s asking whether the framework humans use to define intelligence, culture, success and even our place in nature was built around an answer we had already decided upon:

Us.

Friday morning, readers in Stonington get 90 minutes to decide what they think about that.

More information is available at the Event Website link below.

Details

Event: Book Discussion with Tom Verde
Book: The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters by Christine Webb
Discussion Leader: Tom Verde
Date: Friday, Sept. 25, 2026
Time: 11 a.m.–12:30 p.m.
Location: Stonington Free Library
Address: 20 High St., Stonington, CT 06378
Program: Tom Verde Book Discussions
Audience: Adults
Preparation: Participants are encouraged to read the book in advance
Books: Available at Stonington Free Library or for purchase at Bank Square Books
Organizer: Millie Donovan
Library Phone: 860-535-0658

 

 

Featured image is an artistic representation inspired by the event and may not depict the actual people, location, or activities shown.