What I see in different shades of gray, from behind my reading glasses
Five judges in a New York court rule chimpanzees don’t fit definition of a “legal person” http://t.co/lfYsJjWBw5 pic.twitter.com/9Sk7a8Di34
— Guardian Australia (@GuardianAus) December 5, 2014
The events occurring (as they have been since whenever) across the supposed “developed” or “first world” countries give sufficient cause to think that the judges are mistaken.
After all, chimpanzees do kill their own species. Not very different in that sense, are we?
Frans de Waal and Jennifer Pokorny were awarded the 2012 Ig Nobel Prize for their discovery that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends. (If you’re interested in their research paper, click here for a pdf document). A recent essay by de Waal in the WSJ, called the “Brains of the Animal Kingdom” begins thus:
Who is smarter: a person or an ape? Well, it depends on the task. Consider Ayumu, a young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University who, in a 2007 study, put human memory to shame. Trained on a touch screen, Ayumu could recall a random series of nine numbers, from 1 to 9, and tap them in the right order, even though the numbers had been displayed for just a fraction of a second and then replaced with white squares
I tried the task myself and could not keep track of more than five numbers—and I was given much more time than the brainy ape. In the study, Ayumu outperformed a group of university students by a wide margin. The next year, he took on the British memory champion Ben Pridmore and emerged the “chimpion.
How do you give a chimp—or an elephant or an octopus or a horse—an IQ test? It may sound like the setup to a joke, but it is actually one of the thorniest questions facing science today. Over the past decade, researchers on animal cognition have come up with some ingenious solutions to the testing problem. Their findings have started to upend a view of humankind’s unique place in the universe that dates back at least to ancient Greece….
If nothing, watch the video of Ayumu for a demonstration of his photographic memory!