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.
Darwin said that the mental difference between apes and humans is a difference of degree, not of kind. You see, apes do build cathedrals, play chess, and compute quadratic residues — it’s just that they less of it than we do. Merely a difference of degree.
Anyway, here is Paul Erhlich on the reasoning power of chimps (Erhlich and Holm, The Process of Evolution)
Hi Vladimir,
Loved the humor in your post:
I was also greatly amused by the naivete of Paul Ehrlich’s claims about chimps. Doing a bit of digging, I discovered that the book he co-authored, The Process of Evolution, was written in 1963. Scientists now know a lot about chimps that they didn’t know back then. For instance, Ehrlich writes:
According to a Ph.D. dissertation written by Christopher Gibbons entitled The Referentiality of Chimpanzee Vocal Signaling: Behavioral and Acoustic Analysis of Food Barks (Ohio State University, 2007),
Gibbons’ thesis can be accessed here: http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/se.....1173219994
Let’s do the math. Three vocalizations would suffice to encode 25 x 25 x 25 = 15,625 distinct terms – quite enough for a language, if the chimpanzees had the linguistic wherewithal. But do they? Gibbons appears to think not, despite chimps’ documented capacity for functionally referential communication:
Ehrlich was wrong about tools, too. We now know that chimps are quite good at making and using simple tools; what they appear to lack is a proper causal understanding of how they work. According to an article by Jesse M. Bering and Daniel J. Povinelli, entitled “Comparing Cognitive Development” in Primate Psychology, (edited by Dario Maestripieri, Harvard University Press, 2003) (see http://books.google.com/books?.....38;f=false ):
Incidentally, Denyse is right: crows make better tools than chimps, as anyone who has followed the story of Betty the Crow will be aware. Readers who want more details on recent research can check out this link . Stay tuned!
Denyse,
You might be interested in reading an article by Wesley J. Smith in First Things, entitled “Human Exceptionalism Proved By the Human Mind” at http://www.firstthings.com/blo.....uman-mind/ . Here’s an extract, for curious readers:
Marc Hauser is a professor of psychology, human evolutionary biology, and organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard University. Obviously the man is no friend of ID. His evolutionary perspective is clear throughout his essay, right up to the final paragraph. Now, if a Harvard Professor of human evolutionary biology says that humans are unique in their cognitive abilities, then I have no choice but to take him seriously.
Hauser’s article is so good that I can’t resist including a few more choice quotes:
One wonders whether any apologies will be forthcoming from the gradualist camp. Somehow I doubt it.
No one doubts that sometimes people make very poor choices about which animals to keep as house pets or that sometimes they pay a terrible price for such an error. Adult chimpanzees are notorious for being temperamental, unpredictable and extremely dangerous as they are far stronger than adult human beings. In the case cited, both Travis and Charla Nash were victims of a serious misjudgement.
This has no bearing on how closely chimpanzees are related to human beings as a species.
No one is questioning the fact that human beings and chimpanzees are different. Neither is there much doubt that if each lineage were traced back through time they would converge on a common ancestral species.
What is at issue is the degree of difference and similarity and, as the papers quoted by vjtorley demonstrate, this is an ongoing investigation. Whether any of this research can be interpreted as bringing aid and comfort to the ID camp is questionable. Perhaps we should ask the authors.
As for gradualism, a noted researcher in the field wrote as follows:
VJtorley @ 3:
Very interesting posts, VJ. Just be clear about what you do and do not believe follows from these observations.
Specifically, IIRC, you have elsewhere stated unequivocally that common descent has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt, and that it is similarly beyond reasonable doubt that chimpanzees and human beings shared a common ancestor some six million years ago (or so).
It therefore follows from your own position that there is an unbroken chain of descent from an organism with cognitive characteristics very like that of chimpanzees to human beings and our astounding cognitive powers.
It seems clear that that gap was bridged in a punctuated manner. For example, Homo erectus, while representing marked steps in the direction of humanity in many respects (such as the evolution of pair bonding and high parental investment in offspring, as well as fire tending), displayed a remarkably monotonous lack of cultural and behavioral evolution during its 1.8 million year run. Change dramatically accelerated in the run up to Homo sapiens – which is exactly what one would expect upon the evolutionary innovation and rapid refinement of a powerful new cognitive adaptation, such as the origination of referential, grammatically flexible, and intentionally cooperative speech and communication, with the attendant innovations in theory of mind.
It is also worth pointing to the fact (pun intended…) that important current thinking is that the referential dimension of human speech had its origins not in the vocal behavior of our great ape ancestors, which, if it resembled that of other extant great apes, was likely indeed quite fixed and generally inflexible, but rather from gestural communication, which in extant great apes displays much greater flexibility and intentional content.
See, for example, Michael Tomasello’s 2008 book The Origins of Human Communication for a book length treatment of these ideas.
Hi Diffaxial.
You are correct in assuming that I accept the common descent of humans and chimps, about 6 million years ago, although recent research (see here and here ) has caused me to have some doubts as to whether undirected natural processes alone were responsible for the relatively sudden appearance of human accelerated regions (HARs) in the human genome. Personally, it doesn’t bother me in the least if a perfectly natural undirected mechanism is found.
While I accept common descent, I cannot accept a materialist account of human mental capacities. For a fairly comprehensive list (with links) to the best online philosophical and scientific arguments against materialism, please click here .
As someone who rejects materialism, I would expect that the four features of the human mind identified by Marc Hauser should have appeared literally overnight, and at the same time. That’s a very bold, singular and falsifiable prediction. Hauser’s four features, as you will recall, were:
(1) “Generative computation,” that allows us to “create a virtual limitless variety of words, concepts and things.”
(2) “Promiscuous combination of ideas,” meaning the ability to mingle “different domains of knowledge,” e.g., art, sex, causality, etc.
(3) “Mental symbols” allow us to enjoy a “rich and complex system of communication.”
(4) “Abstract thought,” which, “permits contemplation of things beyond what we can see, hear, touch, taste or smell.”
Inferences to the presence or absence of these abilities in prehistoric human beings based on the stone tools they made is highly problematic, as Professor Hauser (who unlike myself espouses a materialistic account) points out in his article. However, tools can tell us a lot, as this article shows. DNA analyses of Neanderthal man can also tell us whether this human being had HARs in its genome.
In short, we live in exciting times. I would hope that we can narrow down the date when distinctively human mental abilities emerged in our ancestors, to an accuracy of plus or minus a few thousand years, over the next two or three decades.
Vjtorely @ 6:
Do you mean literally “literally overnight” (within a literal 24 hour period) or figuratively “literally overnight?” (over a few thousand or tens of thousands of years). I assume you mean the latter. People often say “literally” for emphasis when they in fact mean figuratively.
If figuratively overnight, then how long is overnight? A thousand years? Ten thousand years? Thirty thousand years?
Also, help me sort out your position a bit. If you are comfortable with the notion that an entirely natural (unguided) mechanism may have resulted in this acceleration, yet are also committed to a “nonmaterialist” account of contemporary human mental capacities, do you also allow that an entirely natural mechanism may have resulted in the rapid acquisition or emergence of nonmaterial mental capacities? How might that work?
Similarly, did Homo erectus display nonmaterial mental capacities, but less of them than human beings? Australopithicines still less? Or did one or both display entirely “material” minds (whatever that means), or no “minds” at all, with an entirely unique nonmaterial mentality appearing later to become the basis for human exceptionalism.
Your prediction is bold, but not as powerful as you would like, particularly if you mean “figuratively overnight,” as you appear to allow that the rapid amping-up of human cognition may have occurred by natural (unguided) mechanisms, even if the result was a nonmaterial mind. Because you seem to allow that “natural mechanisms” (versus “designed,” I would assume) and “nonmaterial mind” are orthogonal hypotheses, it is not clear to me how the appearance of these abilities figuratively overnight has dispositive bearing upon the mode of causation. Further, the hypothesis is not really testable until you commit to a definition of “overnight.”
Vis that definition, you’ll be interested in Steven Mithin’s 1999 book The Prehistory of the Mind, in which he posits that what occurred “overnight” was not the appearance of important new domains of cognition (he identifies “natural history intelligence,” “social intelligence,” and “technical intelligence” and an emerging capacity for language, which emerged more slowly and independently), but rather the acquisition of sufficient “cognitive fluidity” to combine and recombine these domains of intelligence.
(Page 152).
Nothing punches it home like video:
Amazing puzzle solving crows #1 (with an endnote about identical primate studies)
Amazing puzzle solving crows #2 (NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC)
Lest we think these birds picked these tricks up as a modern urban adaptation, a fable (yes, a fable) hints that this behavior may have been observed millenia ago.
Obviously we may infer from these data that we share a common ancestor with crows that is more recent than our common ancestor with the Quadrumana.
Diffaxial
When I say “literally overnight” I mean literally overnight. I have no doubt that improvements in brain architecture occurred over a period of millions of years, but I would contend that at a critical point in evolutionary history, when the brains of our forebears became complex enough to be able to integrate information in the way that people need to in their everyday lives, our ancestors acquired an immaterial capacity to form abstract concepts – and in so doing, became true human beings. Thus my account of how human cognition arose is quite literally a Deus ex machina one. It unapologetically invokes what Dawkins and Dennett refer to as a “skyhook” explanation. Sometimes a skyhook is the only thing that will do the job. Nature can’t accomplish everything.
Professor Alfred Freddoso mounts a vigorous defence of the notion that God creates each individual human soul in his article, Good News, Your Soul Hasn’t Quite Died Yet . Before you reject the notion out of hand, ask yourself this: if you had to choose between (a) accepting a naturalistic account of human origins, but at the cost of denying that human beings have free will; and (b) accepting a supernaturalistic account of the human soul, and in so doing, preserving your freedom, which would you choose?
By the way, my Deus ex machina account makes one more testable prediction: no supermen will ever emerge at a future date in human history. The human brain is optimal, in the sense that one aspect of its functioning can be improved only at the expense of another. Although the first human being capable of forming abstract concepts may have had a brain that was in certain respects different from our own, it would not have been inferior to our own (e.g. it may have been somewhat slower at solving logic problems but better at conscious recall of information learned previously).
In small populations, cultural innovation often tends to be slow. Thus it may take a while to figure out exactly when the capacity for abstract concepts emerged in our ancestors, as they may have sat on their potential for a while, until they multiplied in sufficient numbers for their amazing abilities to take off. (This may explain why the sudden burst of technological innovation in the late Paleolithic, about 50,000 years ago, came long after the emergence of Homo sapiens.) For the moment, the two dates I’m willing to entertain are 600,000 years ago (the date when Homo heidelbergensis emerged – a species believed to have been ancestral to both Neanderthal man and modern human beings) and 200,000 years ago (the date when modern Homo sapiens emerged, if the Neanderthals turn out to have lacked the capacity to form abstract concepts). Currently, I think the former date is more likely.
angryoldfatman
Crows are pretty clever, and I for one am very impressed by them. I don’t think they belong in our league, though. You might like to have a look at these articles:
Crows use multitools, but do they plan ahead by Ewen Callaway in New Scientist, 5 August 2009.
“Cognitive Processes Associated with Sequential Tool Use in New Caledonian Crows” by Joanna H. Wimpenny, Alex A. S. Weir, Lisa Clayton, Christian Rutz, Alex Kacelnik in PLoS One, 4(8): e6471. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0006471 (August 2009) at http://www.plosone.org/article.....ne.0006471 . An excerpt: