Skip to main content

Not a Chimp – Jeremy Taylor ****

Jeremy Taylor’s aim in this book is to show how a fashionable idea among scientists and science communicators – that the gap between human and chimpanzee cognition and behaviour is almost negligible – is in fact hugely mistaken.
The belief that there is little difference between humans and chimpanzees in terms of cognition and behaviour is significantly based on genetic studies of recent years which have appeared to show that the human and chimpanzee genomes are roughly 98.4% identical. But as Taylor points out in the earlier sections of the book, genetic similarities don’t necessarily entail cognitive and behavioural similarities, especially when only a small handful of genes can have the ability to make one species dramatically different from another. In any case, these earlier sections explain, there is good reason to believe that the 98.4% figure is misleading: when we study more closely the two species’ genomes, we notice, for example, that many of the genes we share with chimpanzees are active in chimps but are no longer active in humans; that identical genes are expressed differently in humans and chimps; and that some of the genes we share with chimps have been duplicated in human beings, increasing the effects of these genes in humans.
Added to this, we find out later in the book that there is no clear evidence that chimps possess a theory of mind like the human capability. This enables us to appreciate the hidden intentions, beliefs and desires of somebody else by merely observing their actions. We find, indeed, that crows are in many respects more cognitively advanced than chimps. All of these fascinating insights go to show how far we are set apart from chimps, and they mean that it is not difficult for us to account for unique traits in humans like artistic creativity and the ability to develop complex languages.
Throughout the book, Taylor presents the material in a way that is accessible to the general reader, and the amount of research he describes and brings together makes his arguments, by and large, very convincing, and means the book is likely to be appealing even to experienced primatologists.
There is one respect in which the book could have been a little stronger, and this is where the focus moves away from the science and on to the question of whether we should extend certain human rights to chimpanzees – the right to life and to protection from torture, for example – as some, like the philosopher Peter Singer, have suggested. Taylor criticises this view given the differences between the species mentioned above but, at times, gives the impression that people like Singer want us simply to view chimpanzees as fully human, which no one is suggesting. Ultimately, here, there is a slight tendency here not to appreciate the arguments and positions of the other side and to oversimplify the issues.
Only a small portion of the book is dedicated to that discussion, however, and Taylor’s clear and comprehensive coverage of the science more than makes up for any shortcomings elsewhere. There is much in the book we need to bear in mind when thinking about our relationship with chimpanzees and the rest of the animal kingdom, and I would recommend it.

Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Matt Chorley
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

God: the Science, the Evidence - Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies ***

This is, to say the least, an oddity, but a fascinating one. A translation of a French bestseller, it aims to put forward an examination of the scientific evidence for the existence of a deity… and various other things, as this is a very oddly structured book (more on that in a moment). In The God Delusion , Richard Dawkins suggested that we should treat the existence of God as a scientific claim, which is exactly what the authors do reasonably well in the main part of the book. They argue that three pieces of scientific evidence in particular are supportive of the existence of a (generic) creator of the universe. These are that the universe had a beginning, the fine tuning of natural constants and the unlikeliness of life.  To support their evidence, Bolloré and Bonnassies give a reasonable introduction to thermodynamics and cosmology. They suggest that the expected heat death of the universe implies a beginning (for good thermodynamic reasons), and rightly give the impression tha...
Post a Comment
Read more