Everyone knows that elephants are intelligent, but no one has really tested them the way we test primates and so at the moment Josh Plotnik, who is a collaborator of mine in Thailand, he is testing elephants on all sorts of things that we test the primates on.
R.K.: Now, you have said that humanity never runs out of claims of what sets it apart, but it's a rare uniqueness claim that holds up for over a decade. It sounds like what your work is about is proving that there are very few areas of uniqueness.
F.W.: Yeah. I'm very interested in the continuity, of course. I'm a biologist by training and even though I teach in the psychology department, and psychologists like many social scientists, or many philosophers also, they think that there is a big dividing line between humans and other animals.
That doesn't make any sense to me, but it's a very popular position which ultimately of course is a religious position and the rest, but it doesn't make any sense because if you look at the brain of a chimpanzee, at the brain of a human, there's really nothing in the brain of a human that is new. There is no part that are not present in a chimpanzee brain, there are no transmitters, no neuro-connections that are not present in a chimpanzee brain.
So the human brain is bigger, it is about three times bigger than a chimpanzee brain, and so it is a more powerful computer, so to speak, but it doesn't do anything substantially different. If humans were so absolutely unique as people think they are, you would hope to find a part in the human brain that is found nowhere else, but we haven't found that yet. So for the biologist, it's logical that genetically we're very close to the chimpanzee and our brains are very similar and our bodies are very similar so it doesn't make any sense to postulate a huge difference between the two.
R.K.: Now, you just said that it is elitist thinking that humans are so special and unique and different than the other animals. Not too long ago I interviewed Daniel Quinn who wrote the book, Ishmael. Are you familiar with that?
F.W.: I have heard of that book, I don't think I've read it, no,
R.K.: I think you would love it. I strongly recommend it and he basically introduces us to the idea of how animals think and how they treat each other. How would you describe ways that you ... that primates could teach us some things about how we could be better people?
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