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Chimps as Incipient Humans? Darwinists Debate

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There is a whole school of research aimed at showing we are not so separate from chimps, and even that they are already on the way up. In a recent BBC article by Colin Barras the focus was on the use of stone tools, and the bold claim that chimps and some monkeys are already in the Stone Age because of their use of rocks as tools.

Some of the reports of stone use appear valid. Capuchins and chimpanzees are all known to use stones to crack open food, and the technique appears to go back thousands of years. But then, no one is disputing that some animals use simple tools. Even otters use stones to break open clam shells.

Then there is the social side. Another BBC article, this one by Melissa Hogenboom, describes ways that chimps show empathy and social awareness, the ability to read facial expressions, to hide things from others, and to share. But then those things are not unique — anyone who has lived with dogs knows how acutely sensitive to social cues and facial expressions they are, and how they seem to show guilt over bad behavior. They can even share — or be greedy, depending on the dog’s temperament.

And of course, she describes how chimps have the capacity for language. Translation: chimps that have lived and trained with humans can have a vocabulary of five hundred words, and can understand thousands more.

But is this a sign that they are on the road to becoming like us?

In a further BBC article, Hogenboom lays out the argument against the idea that there is little difference between us and chimps. She quotes Ian Tatersall, a paleoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York: “Obviously we have similarities. We have similarities with everything else in nature; it would be astonishing if we didn’t. But we’ve got to look at the differences.”

Hogenboom writes:

When you pull together our unparalleled language skills, our ability to infer others’ mental states and our instinct for cooperation, you have something unprecedented. Us.

‘Just look around you,’ Tomasello [of the Max Planck institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany,] says, ‘we’re chatting and doing an interview, they (chimps) are not.’

We have our advanced language skills to thank for that. We may see evidence of basic linguistic abilities in chimpanzees, but we are the only ones writing things down.

We tell stories, we dream, we imagine things about ourselves and others and we spend a great deal of time thinking about the future and analyzing the past.

Not to mention the Brandenburg Concertos. Calculus. Hamlet. The Pythagorean theorem. The discovery of the periodic table. Einstein’s theory of relativity. All works of genius.

In her first article I think Hogenboom overplays the similarities between chimps and humans, just as Barras exaggerates their tool-making ability. Both authors accept the standard Darwinian view, however. Perhaps that accounts for their need to have a story of underlying similarity.

Ms. Hogenboom in her second article attributes all this to our big brains. She does admit that nobody knows how our brains came to be big. Neither does anyone have any solid explanation for how the anatomical, developmental, and physiological differences between us and chimps came to be.

At least Ms. Hogenboom acknowledges there might be a difficulty in explaining things.

Image by Thomas Lersch (Own work) [GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC BY 2.5], via Wikimedia Commons.

Ann Gauger

Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture
Dr. Ann Gauger is Director of Science Communication and a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture, and Senior Research Scientist at the Biologic Institute in Seattle, Washington. She received her Bachelor's degree from MIT and her Ph.D. from the University of Washington Department of Zoology. She held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, where her work was on the molecular motor kinesin.

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