Planet Erland

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Are Chimps People?

I was watching a documentary on Koko the Gorilla, and then some documentary about how smart chimps are.

Now in private, I talk to myself a lot, and it’s embarrassing when someone catches me doing it. So I was talking to myself about the chimps, and when talking about them, I said, “these people have a simplicity and clarity of thought that may allow them to come to sounder conclusions on some subjects, like children they’re not filtering things through a bunch of preconceptions”.

And after I said that, it dawned on me that I just called chimps people. A freudian slip if there ever was one.

Chimps are human, gene study implies:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3744

- Now wouldn’t that be something if geneticists started classifying chimps as humans. Ivanov’s attempts to breed chimpanzees with humans have failed, so that criteria is evidence in favor of them being a separate species. But perhaps Ivanov’s methods were inappropriate, and being able to breed with other members is not the sole criteria for determining species.

I think this debate will go on for a little bit longer, and I think that, like with race, there is going to be some ideological opposition to a certain categorization. In this case the mob ideology will be against lumping humans and chimps together, whereas with race it’s against splitting the races apart.

You can make the same argument, that by not being recognized as humans, this justifies real oppression of chimps. I’d have to think more about it, but I think that just about every argument about racial oppression can be applied to chimps, except that the case is much more plausible. I know some of you are laughing. I’m not.

Great apes are categorically not human, though they certainly share more in common with humans than, say, birds or bacteria do.

Here is a good article giving an overview on the exaggerated and anthropomorphizing claims regarding great apes vs. humans.

(via whakatikatika)