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Mark Bisone's avatar

"This conclusion is highly illogical, though: faced with the information that we share 98% of our DNA with the chimps shouldn’t make us doubt obvious reality, that is, the vast gulf between us. The only logical take would be to say, well duh, seems that DNA isn’t as important as we thought! We are clearly missing something here!"

I'd take it even further than that. I think what it shows is that genetic similarity tells us next to nothing useful about the ocean of difference between what a human is and what other animals are. In fact, what we might be looking at when studying chimps in particular is a kind of anthropomorphizing paredolia, made even more enticing by their structural similarities (skeletal plan, binocular vision. etc).

I was watching a pair of crows the other day, and it put me in mind of how Eurasian magpies are one of a very small club of animals that can pass the MSR mirror test. That is, they show the ability to recognize themselves in mirrors. It's a strange little club, and one that includes chimpanzees and mountain gorillas (albeit with some age-and-sex-based caveats with the former, and a great deal of conditions and controversy with the latter). Bonobos and orangutans from Borneo also pass, yet all other primates flunk it, including ones we tend to think of as "intelligent."

Bottlenosed dolphins and killer whales pass it, despite their somewhat alien body plans and vast environmental differences. Some elephants pass. One fish, the bluestreak clear wrasse, supposedly did (though not without controversy). But I think the magpie interests me most. It's also the only other fully bipedal creature on the list aside from humans, but that's about where the similarities end. Is a magpie -- or are blackbirds in general -- closer to humans than a baboon or a lemur, despite their more distant genetic and morphologic proximity? Crows seem to remember and recognize individual human faces in the wild. Or are they doing something else, which we interpret as more humanlike the way we see shapes in clouds?

Something big is missing in the explanation, indeed. Unless I've been secretly typing these Substack missives to a bunch of magpies and bonobos all this time.

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John Carter's avatar

In university I took an introductory anthropology course, during which we were shown a documentary that contrasted the warlike, patriarchal chimpanzees with the peaceful, matriarchal bonobos. The political overtone was laid on thick, with the narrator concluding by noting that humans are, biologically, equally similar to both species, and can therefore choose which to emulate ... with the implication that we'd do better to model ourselves on the bonobos. It had rather the opposite impact on my teenage mind: if it was a choice between dying in war and being gay (the documentary made a specific note of the homoerotic methods of conflict resolution used by bonobos), then war it was.

But of course, humans are not chimps, but humans. Chimps can teach us nothing about what we *should* be, only about what our instinctual basis is. It's a matter of foundation and superstructure. To build, the foundation must be solid, meaning the biological and instinctive basis must be well developed and cared for. But on that foundation one may build whatever one wants, limited only by what the foundation can support. The foundation itself says almost nothing about the shape of the building.

It's quite common among leftists to proclaim for example that "we've evolved beyond" tribalism or what have you, which I've always thought is to completely misunderstand how evolution works. As though developing the capacity to think means we suddenly become beings of pure thought, or to use another metaphor, that evolving lungs means our metabolism no longer requires oxygen. Because humans are highly culturally flexible, they infer the tabula rasa ... a dangerous half truth. I guess what I'm saying is that chimpanzees can tell us a lot about the most fundamental constraints on human society, sort of like looking at the metrical structure of a poem, but they say nothing about the content of the poem itself. The left wishes to ignore the poem's structure, and therefore loses the poetry entirely, it just becomes a mess; conservatives focus too much on the structure, and therefore also lose the poetry.

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