I’m always leery of claims that humans are uniquely exceptional, that we are better than nonhuman animals (animals) at dealing with the demands of our daily lives, that we are more highly evolved, above, and separate from other animals on different misleading scales of relative intelligence, and that our big brains enable us to better cope with all sorts of risks that come our way. For those and other reasons, I was pleased to learn of a new book by experimental economists Don Ross and Glenn Harrison titled The Gambling Animal: Humanity’s Evolutionary Winning Streak—and How We Risk It All.

In their fascinating and challenging work, in which they compare humans to elephants in terms of their abilities to handle risks and adapt to various scenarios, they offer a “profoundly unsettling account of human exceptionalism” and conclude that our special strategy for collectively dealing with risk is the source both of our ecological dominance and the probable collapse of our industrial civilization. Their book reminded me of an interview I did that focused on the question, “Is human intelligence a gift or a burden?” in which writer Justin Gregg concluded that human intelligence is an inferior evolutionary solution when compared to the kinds of intelligence we find in other species.1

Don Ross: We’re experimental economists who specialize in responses to risk. First, we wanted to show the explanatory power of our many years of studying the risk-response functions of over 40,000 people, plus our recent extension of this study to elephants.

Second, we wanted to set the current environmental and civilizational crisis in a deeper evolutionary context: We evolved expensive brains to cope with climate change. The basic strategy by which humans have........

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