Anthropomorphism

A sign above the turtle tank reads DO NOT ANTHROPOMORPHIZE.
The turtle drifts to the surface and blinks like a man waking from a nap on a Sunday couch. Of course he does. We’re cousins in shells—the same old carbon folded into different rooms.

In the aquarium they wheel a mirror to the glass and dab a dot above the dolphin’s eye. Clipboards gather. The water folds and unfolds; a gray body turns, angles, turns again. If the dolphin’s gaze lingers where the paint sits, someone nods. A checkmark blooms.

Plants, too, must audition for kinship. In the greenhouse the pea vine reaches. Electrodes listen for whispers in the phloem; graphs translate sap into something we can hold. If the tendril curls toward the trellis, we allow ourselves to call it choosing. The oak shares water through its roots like a grandmother doling out soup in the Depression.

In the mangroves, roots trade sugars the way cities trade light after dark— pulse for pulse along an underground tongue. We mapped it and called it network; the fungi were already fluent. Ants braid themselves into bridges; we call ours “infrastructure” and pretend we were first to think of spanning and load. We keep asking the same question of everything that moves or breathes: are you like us?

The dolphin must prove it loves, the crow must demonstrate memory, the octopus has to show us play. We measure intelligence in mirrors and puzzles, in whether an animal will press a lever to save its kin, because otherwise we cannot believe. If a dog does not look like grief, we insist he does not.

A dolphin remembers the shape of a hand and returns the lost snorkel like a neighbor bringing back a casserole dish. Crows cache bright things the way we tuck cash into coffee cans for storms, for later, for a fear we can’t quite name. Of course they do. Hoarding is an old hymn with many choirs.

Once, we drew the heavens in rings around our hunger. The sun performed its morning duty, the stars were sequins for the story we were telling. Later, we learned to say ellipse and aphelion and dark, and still our throats wanted a center. We point a telescope outward and keep asking for resemblance. It is the same refusal that kept us from believing Earth was ordinary.

For centuries, we placed ourselves at the center because the alternative felt like exile. The sun circled us, heaven hung just beyond the clouds, close enough to fold into scripture. We fought against Copernicus not because of the math, but because of the loneliness.

In the telescope’s eye, we see the truth we delayed: the dust of creation scatters everywhere, and we are a dot on a dot, a flicker in the glint of a sun circling.  We are not the period at the end of creation's sentence— we are one word in a library with no last page.

Now we whisper don’t project about animals like we did about the sky, like a spell against arrogance, as though the embarrassment was not that we once believed we were singular—central hearth, final draft, the universe rehearsing for us.

Of course Earth is ordinary; that’s the miracle. We belong to the ordinary. Watch the horse nose a newborn forward until it stands. Watch a man in a grocery store coax his father toward the automatic doors, palms under the old elbows, murmuring. The choreography is the same: lift, lean, breathe, almost there. We share the blueprint for helping. Beavers slow a river with sticks; we slow our days with calendars and alarms.

Termites air-condition their towns; we install thermostats and argue over degrees. The rhyme is not metaphor; it’s lineage. We’re all working the same problem sets—oxygen, hunger, heat, danger, time—scribbling different notes in the margins.

Even our mess has cousins. Slime mold solves a maze and leaves no thesis; we call that intuition when it wears our shoes. Of course a murmuration feels like a crowd at a stadium, and a stadium feels like a murmuration. The body knows kin when it sees it.

I try to keep a day in that register.
Morning: the cat blinks slow—consent, trust, truce. I blink back. Treaty signed.
Noon: a line of ibises tills the median like monks in white habits, heads down, single file.
Evening: the oak drops a limb and I feel the house take a breath to accommodate the new math. Everything agrees quietly without me. Somewhere, still, a lab prints the protocol: avoid projection, require evidence, remain cool.

Fine. Here is mine: skin that goosebumps in a breeze, a heart that speeds at rustle, pupils that widen in dusk—the standard kit. The raccoon wears it. The deer. Me. You. We pass each other on back porches and riverbanks and comment threads and think we’re strangers. Of course we aren’t. We’ve been copying off each other since salt learned how to be blood.

We called the world alien, ordered a thousand 23-and-Me tests to prove twins surrounding us share DNA instead of humming the chorus we walked into mid-song, until we learn the words: everything we love about ourselves—tenderness, cunning, thrift, play—has been practicing without applause for a very long time.

So I set the mirror down. Not because it lies, but because it tells too small a truth. I watch the turtle surface, take air, and descend, and feel that old recognition rise like a tide I didn’t schedule.

All this time we worried about projection, about making them too human. But we're a copy of them - just one more variation on ancient themes.

Of course, I think, tapping the glass with one knuckle I inherited from a million hands. Of course.