I do not appreciate the author making light of the chimp who brutally attacked a woman. When he uses the word "tragedy," it is unclear if he means that the chimp had to be shot to death or that he mauled the woman. Also, using this incident as part of the chimps' "worst week ever" takes gravity away from the plight of a woman who is fighting for her life after being attacked.

The road to human behavior is through animals. As a teen with my own dog grooming busines. I figured out that I could tell a lot about the family I was servicing by their dog's behavior. Later, I dipped into animal behavior in vet school. Too bad these scientists lives were lived from grant to grant (financially difficult).

Anyway, the only thing separating up from all of them is Gandi--or something like that. Think about it the next time you desire to fuck someone over.

Uptight about killing and eating chickens or pigs? They have pecking order;or will eat you if you fall into the pen. Still, I like the Native American philosophy: "I eat you now, the worms eat me later".

Yeah, but "use of language"- in the fully developed linguistic sense- is HUGE.

It implies so many other abilities of recall, memory, categorical organization, and nuances of evaluation that it bespeaks a jump to a level of consciousness not approachable by the lower primates.

In and of itself, the subset of language known as "numeracy" is HUGE. I think there may be some apes who can count on their fingers, although I know of none who have could have come by the ability without substantial human coaching- much less the chimp having obtained the ability to transmit that knowledge to other apes, once learned. That's bound to impede the ability to perform solve for X or do partial differential equations, or all of the other procedures so important to encoding a technology.

Then there's the ability of humans to put an instinct in check, rather than simply being run by their pre-programmed drives. That's the reason a chimp can't be charged with a crime, for instance- not even murder.

The assumption in such cases is that they've been triggered by an instinct- and that it's a trait over which they don't even have sufficient detachment to be aware of as an instinct, much less possessing the ability to curtail the behavior prompted by it.

And I think that in the case of chimpanzees, that assumption is correct. As a legal defense for humans, my take on it is overwhelmingly less sympathetic.

I can rattle off a great many more behavioral proofs demonstrating that the differences between chimp conscious potentials and human conscious potentials, but I think the few I've mentioned should be sufficient that you get my drift.

that's us.

I remember getting really interested in chimps/apes for awhile during college, and I checked out all kindsa stuff.

I came to think (then, and still today) the only thing that really sets humans apart is use of language, and that is pretty well determined to be a human-only development.

What's "supposed to make you think that chimps are less rational than humans" is the demonstrated fact of their limited capacity to reverse the entropy in their environment, to a degree that, well, might as well make them another species entirely. One lacking anything like the reasoning potential of humans.

And, in fact, the other primates are lower orders of being, in terms of their consciousness.

I frankly wonder whether those who argue the contrary realize that they aren't so much exalting the consciousness potential of chimpanzees nearly so much as they are excusing the all-too-often activated potential for bad, foolish behaviors found in humans. As something, you know, "built into our DNA", and hence helpless to change.

you can do real well explaining human behavior in terms of primate sociology. toss in some thinking about the evolutionary utility of some of those traits.

anyway, like i said elsewhere, a chimp gets violent and, either deliberately or by mistake, injures a friend, and I'm supposed to think that makes chimps somehow less rational than humans? if anything, that behavior makes chimps seem even more similar to humans. show me an animal that doesn't have any random violent streak, and that's an animal i will say has very little resemblance to humans' mental processes.

(I've been keeping score; it's my third in this thread.)

the "Shapolsky" referred to above is actually Robert Sapolsky.

Not much use alluding to references or crediting researchers or authors, if the name is misspelled.

My turn to take your points, as you've expressed them so well in your last post.

I bet you like Shapolsky's work, too. And I'll bet you're getting a kick out of gestalt of the comments on this page, like myself ;')

My big bad BA is in cult ant, not the biological or primatological stuff. But I respect good research.

My problem is more what gets inferred out of all proportion or context from what's usually couched much more modestly and conditionally by the scientists doing the actual research, via popular vulgarizations that get taken by the naive or intellectually lazy as the currency of Scientific Truth [sic]. Often to suit other agendas- whether when appropriated by the robber baron wealthy and their right-wing apologists in the 19th Century as "Social Darwinism"- just another form of Satanism, as far as I'm concerned; or when taken in snippets put forth in the 21st century, as "conclusive proof" for the a belief in a material basis for all human behavior- just another form of Predestinarianism, as far as I'm concerned.

I'm a Christian with an anthropological bent, which I've gotten to understand is rather unusual. Weirder yet, I've gotten to think there's something like rabbinical Christianity, which is heretical on so many levels that I feel right at home with it.

Whatever...I've pondered the question sufficiently to have gotten to figure understand the idea of the "image of God" has zilch-o to do with the human visage, as physical anatomy. The "image of God" is the field of perception. Which is to say that I think Salty Pappy is wide of the mark when he makes a big deal about God sharing facial characteristics with humans, a notion which when taken seriously really does indicate the primate ego run amok, in my opinion.