Chump Chimp

Another in the gripping series of blog posts about Homogeneous Others. I was watching a special on primates the other day, something about how humans are different than chimps. They were showing that chimps do not have mirror cell abilities like we do, and that is why we rule and they drool. So, chimps do not learn from watching other chimps and mirroring their behavior, which the scientist claim gives us the advantage over chimps. It is what allowed us to build societies, etc. Obviously I am telling you about of this because I think they are sooo wrong (something I have touched on before, and will again).

During the course of the show they talked about a wonderful discovery - they found a chimp that could learn from watching. Various scientist studied this chimp, they talked about how this was impossible and never seen before. They claimed it was a trick, that the chimp had been trained to react in certain ways to make it look like it had learned something. Quite the controversy! A chimp with abilities beyond the keen of normal chimps... and it makes me wonder - are all scientists that stupid?

What is the average IQ for a human? 100. What does that mean? That 50% of the population is above that, and 50% below that. Assume that chimps have a similar distribution. Can we not say that all chimps are not equally endowed? Can we believe that there is a range of chimp abilities that matches our own? Can we not believe that most of the chimps we catch are not the bright ones? Sounds like we finally caught one of the smarter ones, or else just one that was willing to perform for us.

Until we can directly measure ability without resorting to a battery of tests, tests based on our own bias, I think we will discover more and more impossible abilities in chimps, and within ourselves. Looking at others as all being the same will lead us to constant surprises, in ways that we shouldn't be surprised in.

The Edward