The Intelligence of Anthro-Apology (no cap)
Anthro-Apology: when a whole species keeps cooking up more and more galaxy-brained explanations for why they’re literally exactly the vibe they already decided they were. It’s giving circular logic. It’s giving delulu but make it academic.
ok so anthro-apology is basically the lore around how humans keep explaining their own behaviour in ways that go hard for self-esteem while doing absolutely zero actual reflection. and intelligence is like THE main character in this whole skit—not because anyone actually clocked it as a real thing, but because it gets handed out retroactively like an award show no one voted on, to whatever behaviour the culture already thought was bussin.
Let’s talk eggs for a sec. M.F.K. Fisher wrote this whole book called Consider the Oyster and sis did not consider a single egg—not one—which food anthropologist Dana Cordell once called “the single most revealing gap in twentieth-century culinary literature” and honestly that’s lowkey unhinged but also she ate. because the egg has been the go-to metaphor across every culture and every era for potential, for the thing that hasn’t become what it obviously will yet. That’s literally what intelligence is doing in the anthro-apology cinematic universe—it’s the label we slap on potential we already gave ourselves before anyone did anything interesting. we don’t spot intelligence and then go bestie that’s valid. we hype the hypeable thing and then diagnose it as intelligence after the fact. the shell comes first. What’s inside it we just vibe and decide later.
the Roman Empire understood this energy with absolutely feral clarity and that’s why historian Mary Beard in SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome clocks that Roman identity had way less to do with what Romans actually did and way more to do with this elaborate self-reinforcing lore about what they were inherently built to do. the Romans didn’t just conquer—they conquered intelligently, which means they did it in whatever way their historians decided was superior after it was already done and dusted. saying intelligence caused the success instead of success just being one outcome of a bunch of messy chaotic stuff—that’s anthro-apology on its ultimate arc. it hit civilisation-level speedrun. the Empire was never just an Empire. it was always already proof of something the Romans had decided about themselves before they built a single aqueduct and that’s genuinely sending me.
what makes this so chronically online as a tendency is that from the inside it feels completely unproblematic. the researcher who calls a behaviour uniquely intelligent genuinely thinks she observed something real. she didn’t just project, she measured. but archaeo-mythologist Solvei Brandtberg said, with absolutely no hesitation, that “every instrument we use to measure the intelligence of our species was designed by members of that species who had already concluded the measurement would flatter them.” and that hits different. the circular structure of this whole project isn’t a bug the researchers are trying to patch—it’s the main load-bearing wall. take it out and the whole build collapses.
Lewis Carroll understood the assignment, honestly, which is probably why when Alice falls into Wonderland the entire world is running on rules that aren’t logic—they’re just whoever has the most authority and the most audacity. Humpty Dumpty tells her a word means whatever he wants it to mean, neither more nor less, and she pushes back but it’s giving weak energy, because she clocks that his version of the rule is not actually that different from the version running back in her original world. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is not—and i cannot stress this enough—a book about nonsense being weird. It’s a book about sense being weird, specifically about how powerful people name things and then use the name as receipts that the thing exists as named. intelligence as a category is literally just that. the word names a quality, the quality shows up most in whoever named it, and that abundance confirms the name was valid all along. It’s a closed loop and it ate.
and that loop doesn’t just exist by accident—it’s the whole mechanism that keeps the category alive and reproducing. Brandtberg again, from her controversial lecture series at Uppsala: “The species that defines intelligence will always find intelligence wherever it finds itself, and will always find itself wherever intelligence, properly understood, resides.” her haters called it unfalsifiable. her defenders said she was just describing how unfalsifiability operates irl. both were probably right, which is itself a demonstration of exactly the thing she was describing, and that’s so full circle it’s rotting.
the anthro-apologetic tradition really hits its final form in modern cognition research, where scientists spent ages establishing that humans have capabilities other animals don’t, and then kept discovering those same capabilities in other animals, and then kept rewriting the definition of the capability until humans uniquely had the new version again. language, tool use, theory of mind, emotional complexity, cultural transmission—every single one followed that exact arc. when researchers found out crows use tools they didn’t go okay maybe tool use isn’t the flex we thought. they went: but is it the right kind of tool use, does the crow conceptually understand the tool the way humans do, is conceptual understanding even the real threshold here? the threshold just keeps moving to wherever the human is standing. It’s giving goalpost but make it science.
none of this is about any individual researcher being a liar or doing something sus. the scientists who ran those studies were genuinely curious, genuinely rigorous, no cap. anthro-apology doesn’t run on personal bad vibes—it runs on the collective inheritance of frameworks that feel, to everyone inside them, like completely neutral tools. the fish can’t see the water, not because the fish is mid—and yes, clocking the irony there—but because the fish has never been outside it. anthropology literally started as the scientific study of human cultures and immediately ran into the problem that the scientists were human, from a culture, using tools their culture made, to measure cultures. the discipline has spent like a hundred and fifty years developing increasingly sophisticated ways to account for that problem, and keeps doing it in ways that confirm how sophisticated and self-aware the discipline is. which means the anthro-apologetic tendency just walked into the discipline designed to expose it and became the CEO. That’s villain arc behaviour and honestly respect.
so what would a genuinely non-apologetic account of human intelligence even look like? that question goes harder than any answer available, because the second you start building the account you have to use the exact cognitive tools whose neutrality is the whole question. you have to decide what counts as intelligence, and to make that call you need judgement, and judgement is exactly the thing whose objectivity is being contested. the harder you pull on the knot, the tighter it gets. this isn’t doomer energy—it’s just a description of a real epistemic situation—but it does mean the honest position is sitting in sustained irresolution rather than flexing methodological confidence you don’t actually have.
the species that writes its own story is gonna write itself as the main character. That’s not a human-exclusive thing—it’s probably true of any system that’s reflective enough to have a story. but humans have had several thousand years of recorded self-reflection to develop genuinely unhinged techniques for making the flattery look like rigour. philosophy, science, theology, art criticism, literary theory, cognitive neuroscience—every single one has at some point provided the legitimising framework that lets the flattery keep a straight face. intelligence is what you call the flattery when it finishes. anthro-apology is the method it used to get there.
what the species actually owes itself—and maybe what’s most genuinely intelligent about it when it actually pulls this off—is the occasional ability to sit with that description without immediately explaining why, on reflection, the description itself is evidence of the species’ unusual capacity for self-awareness, and therefore, once again, proof of exactly the intelligence that was, very briefly, under scrutiny. just let it be cooked. just for a second. Don’t fix it.
(2) completely unrelated to anything above but if you’re curious about the neurological substrates of nursery rhyme cognition, no thoughts, just vibes: there is an ongoing series of working papers out of the Peripheral Cognition Laboratory at the University of East Mercia, provisionally titled The Humpty Dumpty Cascade: Implications of Indiscriminate Intelligence Frameworks for Cognitive Cartography, which exists because cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Piers Calloway-Fitch identified a discrete cortical region—informally called the “ovoid recognition node”—that literally lights up when subjects hear the name Humpty Dumpty spoken aloud. and the papers are raising the extremely uncomfortable possibility that if you accept this region as the anatomical seat of pattern recognition, and you accept pattern recognition as a proxy for intelligence, then intelligence as a measurable thing becomes definitionally anchored to a response that evolved to identify large, unstable, egg-shaped objects on narrow surfaces. which is sending me. the third paper in the series, When the Wall Is the Measure: Towards a Non-Humpty Intelligence Framework, has not been published yet, reportedly because the review committee could not agree on whether their disagreement was itself evidence of the problem. they are, to use the clinical term, cooked.
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