“The disturbing question posed by IQ tests – are chimps cleverer than us?”
Apparently this reporter just caught wind of the animal rights and cognitive ethology revolution and is totally confused. What a stupid , speciesist conclusion, that we are superior to chimps and can experiment on them because we can build spaceships and they cannot; how utterly circular, question begging, and an irrelevant red herring point is this, as common a mentality it is. Difference is always turned into hierarchy and power, and never respected.
And why is the possibility chimps can be smarter than us in some ways, or even just intelligent, “disturbing”? Talk about Homo(sapiens)phobia, the fear there could be other forms of “intelligence” out there in the world. Maybe this guy is freaked because he saw the Return of the Planet of the Apes and is having anxiety over being an inferior primate and an evolutionary dead-end? Forget about the typical point chimps are smarter than a 4-5 year old child, I have studies showing chimps consistently outperform college students on analogy and spatial relations tests! Finally, after all this speciesist drivel, the reporter shifts ground, inconsistently but happily, to end on a positive final sentence.
Chimps are not smarter, sharks are. Chimps do not swim like sharks, humans even less, therefore sharks should be announced masterminds of swimming.
I didn’t know swimming was the key criterior of intelligence, a bit arbitrary, is this a shark writing me? On the same grounds cheetahs can run faster, so are smarter, bats have echolocation, so are even smarter, and so. No need to be arranges animals according to a hierarchy of intelligence, that was Aristotle’s fetish. Each species is remarkable and intelligence and adapted to its environment in its own each, each, that is, except perhaps the human species.
I dont know much about Aristotle sorry. I read only the poetics which is some horrible analysis of what theatre or art is and of course, like all academia it comes second to action, to analyse action, duh!!
Greeks were the first seriously TWISTED bipeds. They replaced religion and nature with aggressive theories towards nature (”philosophy”’) and the Romans then did good work to convince the entire globe that this is what we should be and what we to be, full stop.
Major harm done. Maybe the Persians should have gone over Athens and not stop there.
You said… ”animals adapted to its environments..except perhaps the human species”.
The human species, as you know very well, is an animal too that has the capacity to think logically and only this differentiates it from other animals.
But it is still an animal.
As I said above, horrible propaganda against the truth (that we are animals primarily than ”logical beings”) is so huge and comes so early (500 BCE) that we cannot surpass it even today.
We are still in a delusion thanks to 2-3 Greeks in Athens a long time ago…………….
Class-based -and to bring the issue to NOW’s circumstances-, this ideological delusion worked for elite classes (bureaucrats, academics and others ‘thinkers’) better than the ‘proletariat’.
This ideology produced ”great” poets, artists up to 18th century further propagating this horrible doctrine. They were ignorant elites.
They created ”public schools for free” and now the proletariat is ignorant, as well, but also ideologically minded (speciesist) too. Schooling in the west is seriously outdated or ”speciesist” or even flawed in terms of what it offers when humanities sections are concerned. They still more or less praise the…Greeks!!! Instead of getting over that fable of ‘superior civlization through logical thinking”, etc. etc.
I am not saying this was planned as in conspiracy theory, though, just how things evolved to be, very unfortunately for animals, but for some humans too who happen to be aware of all these twistes that are presented as high culture or civilization to the middle -upper classes.
Finally, only visual (mostly visual than literary) artists made it clear that ” western civilization” is a hoax (early 20th century even) and they were misunderstood and lost their voice but their fault was that they gave no alternative and that led to cynicism and “apathy” slowly into today (their influence towards nihilism among the elite classes is considerable impact). Well before that Malthus gave an excuse for exploitation but he is not far (in history) from these nihil artists and their no altervative blackboards that haunt the elites up to today.
(BREAK HERE, TAKE 10 MINUTES TO DRINK COFFE!)
What is happening now is that consumerism is an ideology in itself (egoism that is as man’s final frontier…) and that is essentially also nihil I suspect. It destroyed essential aspects of human joy like communities, family-stability etc. The society is disintegrating int he west, or the family, or am I overstating?
btw, Plato said that the family is the basis of the state’s stability and power. It proves correct now. See statistics from Norway, one of the wealthiest nationsi n the world, one parent families,despite being rich, their kids adapt to society with more difficulty than normal families.
(another break for an orange juice HERE).
Finally, something I wanted to say long time now, to you, after starting reading occasionally your blog: I may have said this in this blog again, don’t remember, sorry if I repeat now, but it is for me revealing for our problems now.There was a branch of philosophy that is pre-socratic and very early on was outruled by other schools because it was spiritual. There was this greek school of philosophy that resembled to Buddhism (combining spirituality with thinking) and it was expelled and regarded by other schools ,early on, as heretic and ‘non philosophy”. What if THEY became the rule instead of Plato’s school and even more INSTEAD OF ARISTOTLE’S ”analyses” that are so anti-activist and elitist…
ps: I am making clear in my comment now that the Greeks I mean the ELITES of them (a few ppl in athens that also had political powers) and not Greek pre-classical who were pretty ‘eastern’ in culture (spiritual) and Greek ancient ”proletariat” that believed in Gods and did not give a second thought for Plato or Aristotle.
Uff,, The End, took an hour! Greetings from Europe that is so near to …. becoming a desert in 80 years.
Winner of longest comment of the year award, but interesting, thanks. One quick point in reply: Pythagoras, one of the first Greek philosophers, was a vegan and what we would today call an animal rights activist. Hs influence was strong throughot antiquty, survived the medieval period, and surged again through the modern period. But Greek culture generallly was humanistic and its speciesist biases influence the Romans, Stoics, Christians, and moderns considerably.The clear turning point was with Aristotle, who arranged all things in a hierarchy of value according to degrees of rationality; so men had value over women because they were deemed more rational and humans over animals as the latter were sentient but not reasoning (science tells us quite differently today). This pernicious rationalist hierarchy persists to this day, it is utterly arbitrary and irrelevant to moral consideration of beings, and so I recommend resarching the constrasts between Pythogoras and Aristotle, and throughout western history this minoriy (Pythogorean) and majority (Aristotelian) tradition competed, and there was never one monolithic view toward animals, but the Aristotelian tradition, sadly, triumped and thrives today..Here is a good site to appreciate the diversity of views over mellenia of western history: http://www.animal-rights-library.com/
Thank you sir, very good site suggestion. I happen to like http://www.animalrightshistory.org also. Pythagoras was his name, right so. I wonder though why are you re-telling what I said:) Or it seems to me alone this way.
Not only ”aristotelian” culture is devouring us in media and state education but we are now told that we have ”selfish genes”. It never ends:/
But what about all the videos in youtube and personale xperiences of animals being tolerant and kind to their own pray (especially mammals).
Finally, you say homo rapies is falwed, I think all mammalians are flawed cause a dog can be taught to adore cats if intervened by education during early life, while in the opposite case, the same dog will just kill all cats in sight.
maybe we are not ‘rapiens’and flawed but wonderful and creative and ”in gods image” etc, who need more intervention during our early stages of life. But no politician nowdays is willing to give that.
I don’t recall repeating anything you said, I was drawing a contrast between two different lines of philosophy that came out of ancient Greece, As for human nature, all the hisotyr and anthrpology points to a nonstop slaughter and bloodbath of other animals and fellow humans; we are the most cruel and violent animal on the planet and there is little basic for hope for a rational, peaceful, and sustainable society of the future.
Dear Sir, I believe I have mentioned this division between logic and spiritual philosophy within Greek thought in my comment NO1 (“There was a branch of philosophy that is pre-socratic and very early on was outruled by other schools because it was spiritual. There was this greek school of philosophy that resembled to Buddhism (combining spirituality with thinking) and it was expelled and regarded by other schools ,early on, as heretic and ‘non philosophy”. What if THEY became the rule instead of Plato’s school and even more INSTEAD OF ARISTOTLE’S ”analyses” that are so anti-activist and elitist…”)
You seemed to elaborate this part of my comment, thank you, it was very informative.
There are documentaries that show cruelty is a necessity, part of the educaiton among mammals (lions teach their cubs how to kill by dragging half dead antilopes for distances or whales throw to each other live sealion babies for fun before eating them).
I don’t see how humans possess more blood thirsty instict than other mammals. If the dogs had our brains they would also torture us and create slaughterhouses and so on. All mammals share same brains except that ours has deeper grooves as biologists say, I love to hear from sage people that there is a limit to the knowledge we can attain with this brain we got. For example, physics, chemistry etc, have come to an ‘end’ sort off, there is not much more to be explored in these sciences.
Now that we know so much, why we act ignorant? The answer is politics and the loss of power of politicians to other centres of influence.
Thank you