Just Another Ape?

Tim Black's review in spiked.com heralds the arrival of Helene Guldberg's much awaited (by me!!) book "Just Another Ape?" Guldberg's book is entirely comlementary to NOT A CHIMP because, while I dwell mainly in the world of human chimpanzee comparison at the level of genes, neurology and cognition, Guldberg spends most of her book looking at cognition and culture through the lens of infant and young primate development.

According to Black, Guldberg rails against philosophical voices like Richard Ryder and Peter SInger, who argue that seeing humans as a special case is arrogant species-ism. She believes current fashions for ape rights are part of a wide and growing disillusionment with humanity - a misanthropy. As Black says"

"While this mood of misanthropy is most definitely abroad, Guldberg is quick to point out that intuitively, experientially, most of us do value humans above animals. We may like pets, but we prefer people. For all the gee-whiz, aren’t animals amazing wildlife documentaries, we know that a cat’s ability to paw a door open, or even a chimpanzee’s dexterity with a stick when digging for termites, is far inferior to what humans have done with the microchip. We also tacitly accept that an animal’s life, in the interests of medical research for instance, is worth less than the human lives that the research might save. This ability to elevate our interests above animals does not make us sadists: it makes us human. However, as Guldberg points out, ‘the problem is that it is considered outrageously arrogant to assert this superiority’.

And that is why this sparkling, erudite polemic is so welcome. Just Another Ape? draws out, not our similarities with our closest animal relative, the ape, but our differences to it. It dwells not on the affinity between a vervet monkey’s set of alarm calls and human language, but on the near-fathomless chasm that divides them. It is what separates us from the animals that is important to Guldberg, not what binds us. Yes, we may share 98 per cent of DNA with chimpanzees, but we also share 70 per cent with yeast. Clearly biology does not exhaust our humanity. We are a bit more than our DNA. As Guldberg argues: ‘Our biology is the precondition for our humanity, but our instincts are transformed into something very different as a result of human consciousness and culture.’ Or as she puts it later in the book: ‘We need to look to cultural evolution, rather than genetic evolution, to explain the vast gulf that exists between the capabilities and achievements of humans and those of apes.’

The fact that Guldberg singles out Richard Ryder for treatment augurs well, because she and I will be debating the question "Should apes have rights?" with him at the Battle of Ideas" at the end of October at the RCA.