I hate chimpanzees

touched for the very first time, originally uploaded by Tino's dad.

I've never understood why people are charmed by chimpanzees. I find them repulsive--it seems like they've got all the bad characteristics of humans and none of the good ones.

Like obnoxious people, they've got rights. I'm all for leaving them alone in their natural habitat and protecting them from the even more rapacious obnoxious humans who would do them harm. But I really don't understand what makes them suitable subjects for heartwarming family movies.

I mean chimps even hunt bush babies with spears, according to the the New Scientist.

Comments

[Saheli]

Is this picture meant to be your counter-candidate for primate adoration?

[Saheli]

Oh, I see, that's what the chimps eat. Yeah, that's pretty unloveable of the chimps. Let's adore the bushbabies instead, despite their unfortunate name.

[Rob Helpy-Chalk]

All the cool kids are still into bonobos.

[Lawrence Krubner]

"ve never understood why people are charmed by chimpanzees."

I imagine many of us have a hunger to understand other species intelligence because it throws some light onto our own intelligence. We can tell ourselves that our intelligence is not unlimited but was instead structured by history and evolution, but no matter how often we tell ourselves that, it is difficult to understand until we compare ourselves to other species, especially other intelligent species.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

I find chimpanzees fascinating, I just don't find them charming. Yes, I make aesthetic judgments about species!

[John Lucid]

Are you telling us that you DON'T find it adorable when chimps hurl feces or publicly masturbate? What a dour person you are.

[DJA]

Chris, by "mean" I can only assume you mean "awesomely clever."

The article also notes that the spear-hunting was developed by females and juvenile males as a way of getting around the adult male hegemony on larger prey like green monkeys -- the bushbabies are a little snack on the side that they don't have to share with the alpha males. For this, they invented their own hunting technology. That's incredibly cool.

[DJA]

(Hmm. My comment is in reply to Chris's, but it seems TypePad is putting the comments out of order again.)

[Chris]

What's upsetting about the story is not so much that chimps eat lesser bushbabies; we knew that already. Instead, it's that they hunt them with spears! They fashion sticks, sometimes sharpening the ends, and then when they find a bushbaby in a hollow or hole, they thrust the sharp end of the stick into it several times, hard enough to injure the poor little bug-eyed things. In one instance, a female skewered one, and pulled it out on the stick. That's just a mean thing to do to such a cute little animal.

[Jay]

I didn't know there were any boyhood pictures of Yoda.

[deadantstomp]

isn't that a tarsier, not a bushbaby?

[Robster]

Yeah, Bonobos, though further away genetically to us than chimps, are so much more humanlike. It's something that I wrote some time ago (and don't like my writing style in it all that much), but there are some good links in it, so I offer it to you in return for your bushbaby.

[Chris]

DJA, dang, you're psychic! You anticipated the exact wording of my comment.

Anyway, you're right, it is incredibly clever. Especially since creating the spears generally involved several steps (at least 4 in most cases, and as many as 5).

Now, the "getting around adult male hegemony on larger prey" interpretation may be a bit of a stretch. Most of the tool use by chimps occurs in females and their young. Males tend to stop using tools of any kind when they reach adulthood. I'm not sure anyone knows quite why that is. It could be because the smaller females and their young have to find more innovative ways of getting food, but there are many other possible reasons as well.

[Lawrence Krubner]

"Yeah, Bonobos, though further away genetically to us than chimps, are so much more humanlike."

Frans de Waal, in his book on bonobos, points out that such statements are non-nonsensical. Humans, bonobos and chimps share the same most recent common ancestor, therefore it is impossible to say that bonobos, or chimps, are closer to humans. According to the book, we all descend from a common ancestor species called "Pan". Unless you could prove that bonobos are closer to Pan than chimps are, you can not say that bonobos are closer to humans than chimps are. Or vice versa.

[Robster]

Lawrence, I'll have to take a look at de Waal's research, but my understanding is that chimps are just a bit more similar to humans in their DNA than bonobos. That could be wrong, so I'll have to do a bit more research on it.

Keep well,

[Pete]

Robster, Lawrence is right about bonobos. Bonobos and chimps are closer to each other than either is to humans. Read this accessible paper for a nice summary.

How about the troglodytic spelling of the New Scientist author? "It appears that the chimps have learnt a grizzly method of slowing them down." ??! Or is that a pun I'm not getting..

[Lawrence Krubner]

"I'll have to take a look at de Waal's research, but my understanding is that chimps are just a bit more similar to humans in their DNA than bonobos."

Robster, I could be wrong, but I think when comparing three or more species, their last common ancestor has to be the reference point from which genetic change is measured. Thus, since we don't have a genetic sample from the species Pan, we can't meaningfully make statements such as "Chimps are more like humans than bonobos."

You could (I'm here setting up a strawman argument just to knock it down) argue that if we had a full map of the full genome of all three species, then there would be a methodology that would allow direct comparisons, but how would you weight variances that are unique to one species? What if one species shares 99% of our genes while the other species shares only 98% percent of our genes, but the first species, in that 1% of its genes that are different from our own, has some really wild mutations?

[Matt McIrvin]

It's a more or less arbitrary set of fictional cultural stereotypes. You can train baby chimps to act to some degree, so they show up in TV and movies. Since they're typically baby ones, not adults, they're relatively small and cute, and chimps end up getting typecast as benign, silly creatures.

As opposed to gorillas, which are really big and kind of scary-looking and generally get characterized as monsters, even though in real life gorillas are, I think, considerably less violent than chimps.

[Left_Wing_Fox]

Lindsay, are you familiar with the concept of the Uncanny Valley?

I'd run into the concept a few times in the past when discussing art and animation (especially attempts at replicating real people using computer animation), as well as a discussion about why people tend to find lemurs more appealing than chimps.

[Dunc]

I find them repulsive--it seems like they've got all the bad characteristics of humans and none of the good ones.

That's only because some people focus on certain aspects of chimp behaviour which reflect their pre-concpetions of human nature. Chimps, like all animals, are neither good nor bad, they just are. They're just doing their thing.

[QRED]

Hurls dung, heartlessly kills helpless creatures cowering in holes for no real reason, obnoxious, aggressive and obsessed with displays of power and dominance in inverse proportion to individual cleverness...

Why can't we just have one conversation without everyone ganging up on George W. Bush?

[cfrost]

That’s a tarsier alright. Just as cool as a bushbaby though.

“…since we don't have a genetic sample from the species Pan…”

(Pan is a genus. Has someone given the name “pan” to the pre- Pan/Homo split ancestor?) I’m not familiar with the literature, but the genomes of the three extant species of Pan and Homo should be sufficiently well characterized that a molecular phylogeny can be reconstructed. Just looking at the three animals, one would guess that chimps and bonobos shared a more recent common ancestor than either with humans. As yet bonobos and chimps are still in one genus and we are in another. In any case, it’s phenotype that matters in the real world.

Bonobos are behaviorally “nicer” animals than chimpanzees from an anthropocentric perspective, but why should bonobos or chimps care what we think. They just are what they are; in that sense they’re beyond the purview of human ethics or judgment.

All but one members of the genus Homo are now extinct. Direct evidence does not exist, but I can’t help but think that H. sapiens had a hand in our nearest cousins’ disappearance. Not necessarily directly, by thrusting spears into the last remaining Australopithecus or Homo neanderthalensis, but just by our presence, with the disproportionate ecological footprint we invariably leave. The Pleistocene/Holocene megafaunal extinctions argue that humans have probably always had something to do with the mysterious disappearances of the neighbors when we move in. Now two more of our nearest relatives are being pushed towards oblivion. This time we know for sure we’re the guilty parties. Even if the bushmeat trade did not exist, these animals are still probably toast: we’re leveling the forests without which apes cannot exist. Given the human demographic explosion that shows no signs of retreat for at least the next century or two, the prospects for survival of any of the great apes is marginal at best.

Apes are now known to be close enough to humans that ethical considerations of captivity, medical experimentation, entertainment use, etc. cannot be considered equivalent to other animals. We’re long past the point when we have the right to consider apes endearing or not, amusing or not, frightening or not. These animals are our family, to let them slip away, which is exactly what we are doing, is a crime. The line between human and animal blurs in the great apes, especially so in chimps and bonobos, To kill an ape would not exactly be homicide, but when we’re discussing the rights of human embryos what then is it? To push one species of ape over the precipice would be the grossest kind of negligence. To consign them all to extinction, which is where we’re headed, amounts to something approaching genocide.

[Dunc]

Oh, and I remember reading something, somewhere (great cite, huh?) that the chimp groups which exhibited the most aggressive behaviour had, in fact, had their behaviour modified by exposure to humans... Other, more isolated groups of chimps are far more peaceful.

I seem to recall that one of the key issues was the use of feeding stations by researchers as a means to observe the chimps. This created fierce competition for a new, high-quality, low-effort food resource, which led to the increased dominance of the most aggressive males in the most aggressive groups. Essentially, the observational techniques used were selectively rewarding aggressive behaviours.

[Mark]

I never understood why people drink beer. I find it repulsive.

There may be parts of the animal kingdom that we find charming, or endearing, or even just entertaining. But we have to remember that we're not at the center of anybody's universe but our own, and those things exist for reasons other than our amusement.

[Robert O'Brien]

Unless they come from the Planet of the Apes, I do not care for chimpanzees either.