As his title suggests, Jeremy Taylor is firmly in the second camp. A TV science producer, he was driven to distraction by a stream of documentaries showing cute chimps displaying apparently human traits such as empathy, tool-making and language. 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."
by
sennoma
2009-07-25 14:07
lostart
·
petpeeves
simpy
