Excellent Review In The Guardian

Excellent review for NOT A CHIMP in the Guardian Review section this morning, by Georgina Ferry, who is "impressed by an ascerbic look at primatology". As she says:"Egged on by a tendency to anthropomorphism, some primatologists have argued that the difference between chimpanzee and human cognition is simply a matter of degree. Taylor is having none of it. "To call the difference quantitative between alarm calls, food-specific grunts, whoops and Shakespeare; between night nests and twig-tools and the A380 passenger jet; and between retribution and food-sharing and Aristotle and Mill is, to my mind, stretching a point, and a bit of an insult to human ingenuity and culture".

"Taylor gives no more than a dismissive aside to chimpanzee language studies, most of which he describes as "ridden with wishful thinking, over-exaggeration, and even downright fantasy". Though this does not make for a scrupulously fair presentation of the evidence, his approach is enjoyably combative and certainly succeeds in mapping the biological, behavioural and social landscape that divides us from our next of kin."