chimp inteligence & anthropocentrism

[video http://s9.video.blip.tv/1330001701037/Knews-YouVsTheChimp632.wmv]

Yet another proof for evolution – creationists want to believe humans are special, created unique, perfect, in the image of God, but looking at this it’s pretty obvious that we share common ancestors with chimps and other apes. (i mean, as if it wasn’t already proven by the fact they share something like 98% of our dna….). we evolved more complex linguistic capabilities and the ability to use more complicated tools, they got superior memory skills. we have more processor speed, they have a better hard drive…. it’s a basic evolutionary trade off. we adapted in one direction to be more effective as hunter-gatherers on the plains, using language and weapons to hunt larger more difficult prey. they adapted to be more effective as hunter-gatherers in the deep forest. and, of course, they continue to evolve just as we do. we are not “more evolved” then them, just different.

people who talk about some animals being more “highly” evolved then others are spouting nonsense, carrying over their basically Christian pre-conceptions about how nature works and projecting a hierarchy onto the natural world that does not actually exist. evolution dictates that species will adapt to fit their environments, period. if a species is already perfectly adapted for their niche then they don’t need to change. that doesn’t make them inferior, it makes them perfectly adapted to their place in the world.

So why should we care? well, to start with, we should care because abusing our relatives speaks very poorly of our character. Perhaps more importantly (to humans anyway) is the fact that as long as we accept the Abrahamic perception of the world as a hierarchy with humans at the top we will find it very difficult to level out the hierarchies within human society. So-called Social Darwinism – an ideology Darwin himself never condoned or endorsed – isn’t based on evolution at all. It’s based on a cultural understanding of our place in the world, rooted in the Abrahamic tradition, that asserts the superiority of humans over other animals. As long as Anthropocentrism remains an unquestioned part of our cultural outlook there will be people who take it a step further and assert that not only are humans superior to other animals but that their particular group is superior to other humans. You can’t have racism without anthropocentrism. Without the false perception of the natural world as hierarchal the justifications for all other human hierarchies crumble away.

And that’s what really kills me about this…. even though most scientists are athiests, they still unquestioningly carry around Abrahamic ideas about us being somehow superior to other animals and use that to justify conducting horrific experiments on them. It’s one thing to hunt and kill another animal for food, that’s a normal part of nature, but to methodically torture living things just to see how much they can take is just plain sick. And I’m not even going to get into factory farming. Taking evolution seriously – really internalizing it and understanding what it means for us and our place in the world – would mean understanding that we’re not superior, just different, and other creatures have a right to live too.

And THAT is why the Christians fear it so much.

so can we stop treating other animals as though they were inferior now? please? ya know, stop destroying their habitats, capturing and caging them, and mutilating them to test cosmetics and crap? i mean holy shit people… have a little humanity.

Posted: December 14th, 2007 under race & racism, science and history, video.
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