Humans are unique - get used to it, or get therapy. Do NOT get a chimpanzee

In "Restating the case for human uniqueness," in Spiked* (Issue 25, June 2009), managing editor Helene Guldberg reviews Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find the Genes That Make Us Human by Jeremy Taylor (Oxford University Press 2009):

She notes that

Taylor sets out to argue that it is ‘as wrong as it is misguided’ to ‘exaggerate the narrowness of the gap between chimpanzees and ourselves’: ‘It plays into the hands of our natural propensity to anthropomorphise our pets and other animals, and even our inanimate possessions, and it has allowed us to distort what the science is trying to tell us.’ His aim is ‘to set the record straight and restore chimpanzees to arm’s length’.

Good idea that. Remember the horrific case of Travis the chimp? Travis would have been a fine chimp, left to himself in a natural environment. But he went on a rampage and horribly maimed and mutilated the employee of the owner of a towing company, who was keeping him. Her family are now suing for $50 million.

This is the tragedy of anthropomorphizing animals. They neither become people nor fit in with other animals of their kind. Travis was shot by a police officer. But had he lived, one may wonder whether he could even adapt to life in a troupe of chimpanzees, after a career in show business and later as a pet whose mistress thought he was like a son.

In the chapter titled ‘Povinelli’s Gauntlet’, Taylor outlines the fascinating work of the comparative cognitive psychologist Daniel Povinelli, who runs the Cognitive Evolution Group at the University of Louisiana. Povinelli is unequivocal in arguing that no test to date has reliably demonstrated that chimpanzees – or any other primate for that matter – have an understanding of the mental life of others or an understanding of causation in the physical world.

To investigate chimps’ so-called understanding of ‘folk psychology’, Povinelli tested whether chimps understood that their begging gestures will only be effective if the person they are begging from can see them. When one of two experimenters either wore a blindfold, held their hands over their eyes or wore a bucket over their head, the chimps showed no preference for whom they made their begging gestures to.

No surprise there. Chimpanzees do not usually perform as well as dogs in reading human gestures.

Even more interesting:

In order to demonstrate that far too much has been made of the tool-using abilities of chimpanzees in the wild, Taylor outlines recent discoveries showing that the tool-making of some birds equals, or in many cases betters, anything observed in chimpanzees. ‘In two species that parted company 280million years ago, performance is either very similar, or corvids might even have an edge. Bird brains, in specific contexts, are a match for chimp brains’, he writes. What this shows is that chimpanzees may not tell us that much more than corvids about the evolution of our unique genetic make-up, he argues.

Now that is a story that should be investigated more openly than it is. Why are some birds so smart, yet they have key brain differences from the animals that are supposed to be smart - mammals? Clearly, intelligence is not what we have assumed.

I will spoil no more for you; go here for more.

See also:

Dogs more like humans than chimpanzees are?

"Loving" chimpanzee eats its victims alive, new research shows

New assessment of ape language skills is dramatically scaled back

A defense of Apes r us - and insider look at the pygmy chimpanzee enthusiasts

Apes R Not Us, and we have to get used to it

*spiked is an independent online phenomenon dedicated to raising the horizons of humanity by waging a culture war of words against misanthropy, priggishness, prejudice, luddism, illiberalism and irrationalism in all their ancient and modern forms. spiked is endorsed by free-thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, and hated by the narrow-minded such as Torquemada and Stalin. Or it would be, if they were lucky enough to be around to read it.

Dogs more like humans than chimpanzees are?

Dogs, not chimps can help us understand human behaviour?

Well, this moved recently at msnbc.com:

Dogs (not chimps) most like humans

Man's best friend serves as model for understanding human social behavior

By Jennifer Viegas

Discovery Channel
updated 11:58 a.m. ET, Thurs., March. 26, 2009

Chimpanzees share many of our genes, but dogs have lived with us for so long and undergone so much domestication that they are now serving as a model for understanding human social behavior, according to a new paper.

Cooperation, attachment to people, understanding human verbal and non-verbal communications, and the ability to imitate are just a handful of the social behaviors we share with dogs. They might even think like us at times too, according to the paper, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Advances in the Study of Behavior.

While there is no evidence to support that dogs and humans co-evolved their laundry list of shared behaviors over the past 10,000 to 20,000 years, the researchers believe adapting to the same living conditions during this period may have resulted in the similarities.

Well, I am glad someone noticed that dogs are way better at understanding and living with humans than chimpanzees are. It sure beats this (horrific chimp rampage).

Yes, yes, some dogs go bad, but almost always that can be traced to improper breeding (churning out puppies for profit without a thorough investigation of the sire's and dam's personalities) and bad handling (if a dog pup is raised like a young wolf, he may end up acting like one).

Dogs and wolves are very close genetically and can interbreed (as both dogs and wolves can with coyotes). However, the genetic and environment history that enables your dog to lie quietly on the mat while you read your mail - and not run out to chew the leg off the letter carrier - is a human intervention that must be carefully preserved in each generation.

Chimps, however, rampage when they feel like it, and should not be living with humans, except under highly controlled conditions - which obviously wasn't happening here.

Topal, who is based at the Institute for Psychology at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, is one of the world's leading canine researchers. He and his team argue that dogs should serve as the "new chimpanzees" in comparative studies designed to shed light on human uniqueness.

Yes, exactly. It is time to give up the "third chimpanzee" myth.

Genetic similarity is not evidence of behavioural similarity. As I have pointed out before, in that case we should expect a rattlesnake and a ribbon snake to be roughly equally harmless ... It is a silly ideal fronted by materialists, and it can do a lot of harm if taken seriously.

Much more can be learned about human behaviour from studying the normal relationship between humans and dogs than from tracking troupes of chimpanzees, eating other troupes' babies (or human babies) - and inventing explanations for human behaviour based on activities few humans would relate to.

(Note: I don't believe the explanation here that chimpanzees eating human babies is a "recent development." There is no good reason to doubt that it has always been a normal behaviour pattern for that species.)

See also:

"Loving" chimpanzee eats its victims alive, research shows (Talk about a really fresh food source ... )

Chimpanzees more "rational" than humans? (Depends on what you mean by rational).

Art produced by animals: Is it art?

Neuroscience: Language feature unique to human brain?

New assessment of ape language skills is dramatically scaled back

Monkids? What? There aren't real kids out there?

Chimpanzees more rational than humans?

In news that shouldn’t surprise anyone, German researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology found that chimpanzees choose more "rationally" than humans - if by "rationally" you mean that, in a reward game,

Humans typically make offers close to 50 percent of the reward. They also reject as unfair offers of significantly less than half of the reward, even though this choice means they get nothing.

The study, however, showed chimpanzees reliably made offers of substantially less than 50 percent, and accepted offers of any size, no matter how small.

The researchers concluded both that chimpanzees do not show a willingness to make fair offers and reject unfair ones. In this way, they protect their self interest and are unwilling to pay a cost to punish someone they perceive as unfair.

The study (published in Science, October 5, 2007) continues in the well-worn path of trying to derive human behavior from primate ape behavior, and when that doesn’t work, the outcome is supposed to be something of a surprise.

Why? Humans often assign values other than the expected ones, have specific ideas about what's fair, and prefer emotional satisfactions to other types. Don't believe me, believe Woody Allen.