NOT A CHIMP

NOT A CHIMP
Click on the cover to link to OUP's e-catalogue then turn to the biology section.

Interview Podcast with George Miller

Interview Podcast with George Miller
Click on the pic to link to the NOT A CHIMP podcast on Blackwell's Website

Preface to "Not A Chimp: The Hunt For The Genes That Make Us Human"

In many ways, this book is born out of frustration for a professional career in popular science television where ideas about comparative primate cognition, and the similarities and differences between us and our primate relatives, have continually circled me but constantly evaded my grasp in terms of the opportunity to transform them into science documentary. On the plus side, keeping a watching brief for over a quarter of a century on subjects like comparative animal cognition and evolution allows you to watch a great deal of water flow under the bridge. Fashions come and fashions go - specifically, perspectives on the similarity - or otherwise - of human and ape minds.

I remember the first Horizon science documentary about the chimpanzee Washoe, the great ape communicator, using American Sign Language to bridge the species barrier. And, later, Kanzi the bonobo jabbing his lexicon. These were the apes, as Sue Savage-Rumbaugh has put it, that were "on the brink of the human mind".

I remember when the pre-print of Machiavellian Intelligence, by Andrew Whiten and Dick Byrne, plopped onto the doormat of the BBC Antenna science series office in 1988. Suddenly primatology had become a great deal more exciting. Could primates, and especially higher primates like chimpanzees, really be as full of guile, as dastardly, as cunning, and as manipulative as the eponymous Florentine politician? Could they really reach deep into the minds of other individuals to see what they believed and what they wanted, and turn that information into deception?

I remember discussing primate cognition with a young Danny Povinelli, as we sat finger-feeding ourselves shrimp gumbo and new potatoes out of plastic Tupperware containers in a Lafayette restaurant surrounded by an alligator-infested moat, before returning to his kingdom - the New Iberia Research Centre - where the University of Louisiana had lured him back to his native deep South by turning a chimpanzee breeding centre for medical laboratory fodder into a primate cognition laboratory with one of the largest groups of captive chimpanzees in the country. He looked like a kid who had just been thrown the keys to the tuck shop.

In those days Povinelli shared the zeitgeist - spread by Whiten's and Byrne's work, and started by Nick Humphrey and Alison Jolly before them - that, since the most exacting and potentially treacherous environment faced by chimpanzees and other primates was not physical, but the social environment of their peers, they had evolved a form of social cognition very much like our own, in order to deal with it. This was further elaborated into a full-blown "social brain" hypothesis by Robin Dunbar, who related brain neocortex size to social group size throughout the primates and up to man. Povinelli's early work reflects this optimism for the mental life of apes, but both ape-language and ape-cognition research was subjected to a cold douche of searching criticism during the 1990s, and misgivings set in regarding the effectiveness of the experiments that had been constructed to guage ape cognition. Now the worm has turned again, with a number of research groups emerging with bolder and bolder claims for the Machiavellian machinations of primate minds, only to be powerfully countered by the curmudgeonly skepticism, chiefly by Povinelli, that these researchers are merely projecting their mental life onto that of their subjects; that, rather in the frustrating manner of Zeno's arrow that could never quite reach its target because it continually halved its distance to it, no experiment constructed thus far can actually get inside the mind of a chimp and show us exactly what it does and doesn't know, or how much, about the minds of others or the way the physical world works. One influential part of the world of comparative animal cognition talks of a continuum between ape and human minds and shrinks the cognitive distance between us and chimps to almost negligible proportions, while another returns us to the unfashionable idea that human cognition is unique, among the primates, after all.

When I began writing this book the working title was "The 1.6% that makes us human". My aim had always been to scrutinize the impression put about in the popular science media that humans and chimps differ by a mere 1.6% in our genetic code - or even less - and that it therefore makes complete sense that this minuscule genetic difference translates into equally small differences in cognition and behaviour between apes and man. However, contemporary genome science and technology, over the last few years, have dramatically advanced the power and resolution with which scientists can investigate genomes, eclipsing the earlier days of genomic investigation that gave rise to the "1.6% mantra".

As with comparative cognitive studies, conclusions on chimp-human similarity and difference in genome research depend crucially on perspective. To look at the complete set of human chromosomes, side by side with chimpanzee chromosomes, at the level of resolution of a powerful light microscope, for instance, is to be overwhelmed by the similarity between them. Overwhelmed with a sense of how close our kinship is with the other great apes. True, our chromosome 2 is a combination of two chimp chromosomes - giving humans a complement of 23 chromosome pairs to 24 in chimps, gorillas and orang-utans - but even here you can see exactly where the two chimp chromosomes have fused to produce one. The banding patterns you visualize by staining the chromosomes match up with astonishing similarity - and that banding similarity extends to many of the other chromosomes in the two genomes. However, look at a recent map of the chromosomes of chimps and humans, aligned side by side, produced by researchers who have mapped all inversions - end-on-end flips of large chunks of DNA - and the chromosomes are all but blotted out by a blizzard of red lines denoting inverted sequence. Now you become overwhelmed by how much structural change has occurred between the two genomes in just 6 million years. True, not all inversions result in changes in the working of genes - but many do - and inversions might even have been responsible for the initial divergence of chimp ancestor from human ancestor.

The extent to which you estimate the difference between chimp and human genomes depends entirely on where you look and how deeply. Modern genomics technology has led us deep into the mine that is the genome and has uncovered an extraordinary range of genetic mechanisms, many of which have one thing in common. They operate to promote variability - they amplify differences between individuals in one species. We now know, for instance, that each human is less genetically identical to anyone else than we thought only three years ago. When we compare human genomes to chimpanzee genomes these mechanisms magnify genetic distance still further. I have tried, in this book, to follow in the footsteps of these genome scientists as they dig deeper and deeper into the "Aladdin's Cave" of the genome. At times the going gets difficult. Scientists, like any explorers, are prone to taking wrong turnings, getting trapped in thickets, and covering hard ground, before breaking through into new insights. I hope that those of you who recoil from genetics with all the visceral horror with which many regard the sport of pot-holing will steel yourselves and follow me as far as I have dared to go into Aladdin's Cave. For only then will you see the riches within and begin to appreciate, as I have, just how limited popular accounts of human-chimpanzee genetic difference really are. Let me try and persuade you that this is a journey, if a little arduous at times, that is well worth taking.

There are a number of scientists around the world who have the breadth and the vision to have begun the task of rolling genetics, comparative animal cognition, and neuroscience into a comprehensive new approach to the study of human nature and this is part, at least, of their story. They strive to describe the nature of humans in terms of the extent to which we are genuinely different to chimpanzees and the other great apes. Somehow, over 6 million years, we humans evolved from something that probably resembled a chimpanzee (though we cannot yet be entirely sure) and the answer to our evolution has to lie in a growing number of structural changes in our genome, versus that of the chimpanzee, that have led to the evolution of a large number of genes that have, effectively, re-designed our brains and led to our advanced and peculiar human cognition.

If you don't believe me, hand this book to your nearest friendly chimpanzee and see what he makes of it!

Friday, 30 April 2010

Chimps Mourning - Don't Make Me Laugh!

The other day I posted one of the better stories concerning the "grief laden" chimps at a Scottish safari park, pointing out that, even if this WAS grief (which I seriously doubt) and not merely evidence of social attachment, such behaviour is not the sole province of our nearest primate relatives but is shown by a number of species, including elephants and dogs. Another commentator has added corvid birds to the list. As such it is wrong to use evidence of such behaviour to justify claims of near evolutionary relatedness when such inflated claims are questionable and the behaviour at issue more likely to be a product of the SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE of the species concerned, rather than their evolutionary proximity to humans.

I might have known that a suitably dismissive blast was forthcoming from a reliable source - Helene Guldberg, deputy editor of Spiked Online. Her book, soon to be published, JUST ANOTHER APE?, will join NOT A CHIMP to form a two-pronged attack on anthropomorphism in the science and journalism that deals with comparisons between humans and chimpanzees. Here are a couple of excerpts:

"....these two studies – describing the behaviour of a handful of chimps – have been widely reported as suggesting that apes are more like humans than we might previously have thought. James Anderson, who led the University of Stirling research team, said: ‘Several phenomena have at one time or another been considered as setting humans apart from other species: reasoning ability, language ability, tool use, cultural variation and self-awareness, for example. But science has provided strong evidence that the boundaries between us and other species are nowhere near to being as clearly defined as many people used to think.’

In my opinion, the opposite is in fact the case. As I argue in my forthcoming book Just Another Ape?, science has provided strong evidence that the boundaries between us and other species are in fact vast.

The problem is that not only journalism but increasingly science writing as well is littered with anthropomorphism – the attribution of human characteristics to animals. This can be very deceptive. Admittedly it is difficult for human beings not to ascribe human emotions and human motivations to animal behaviour, because it is the only way we make sense of the actions of our fellow humans. But it is precisely for this reason that we need to ensure that our presumptions are properly tested.

It is sloppy thinking simply to apply human characteristics and motives to animals. Take the question of grief and mourning. There is no evidence that chimpanzees have an understanding of death. They have no rituals surrounding death. The evidence of human burials not long after the birth of Homo sapiens around 100,000 years ago is the first indication of any species having an awareness of death."

Guldberg sums up her argument by quoting Derek Penn, a research colleague of arch-skeptic cognitive scientist Daniel Povinelli, thus:

"As Derek Penn and his colleagues at the Cognitive Evolution Group at the University of Louisiana and the UCLA Reasoning Lab argue: ‘Human animals – and no other – build fires and wheels, diagnose each other’s illnesses, communicate using symbols, navigate with maps, risk their lives for ideals, collaborate with each other, explain the world in terms of hypothetical causes, punish strangers for breaking rules, imagine impossible scenarios, and teach each other how to do all of the above.’

Unless we hold on to the belief in our exceptional abilities we will never be able to envision or build a better future – in which case, we might as well be monkeys."

Hear, hear!!
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Wednesday, 28 April 2010

Chimps Feel Death Like Humans

Here's one version of a story that has been out wide and far on the blogosphere over the last 48 hours (see also Ian Sample's account in the Guardian yesterday) about observations from the chimp colony at the Blair Drummond Safari Park in Stirlingshire, Scotland, where they appear to demonstrate collective interest/concern/grief over the approaching and eventual death of an elderly female.

The assumption is that the chimps share our faculty of awareness of the approach of death, and significant empathy for the dying.

Chimps are conspicuously social and intelligent animals and it is not surprising to find that they are capable of empathising with the terminal predicament of an important female member of the troupe. Are they, as the scientific authors of the paper on which these articles are based, state, therefore nearer to humans than many of us like to think? Possibly, but it is worth pointing out that displays such as this have been shown by elephants and even dogs. So this empathy may be more a product of sociality than genetic relatedness.
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