NOT A CHIMP

NOT A CHIMP
Click on the cover to link to OUP's e-catalogue then turn to the biology section.

Interview Podcast with George Miller

Interview Podcast with George Miller
Click on the pic to link to the NOT A CHIMP podcast on Blackwell's Website

Preface to "Not A Chimp: The Hunt For The Genes That Make Us Human"

In many ways, this book is born out of frustration for a professional career in popular science television where ideas about comparative primate cognition, and the similarities and differences between us and our primate relatives, have continually circled me but constantly evaded my grasp in terms of the opportunity to transform them into science documentary. On the plus side, keeping a watching brief for over a quarter of a century on subjects like comparative animal cognition and evolution allows you to watch a great deal of water flow under the bridge. Fashions come and fashions go - specifically, perspectives on the similarity - or otherwise - of human and ape minds.

I remember the first Horizon science documentary about the chimpanzee Washoe, the great ape communicator, using American Sign Language to bridge the species barrier. And, later, Kanzi the bonobo jabbing his lexicon. These were the apes, as Sue Savage-Rumbaugh has put it, that were "on the brink of the human mind".

I remember when the pre-print of Machiavellian Intelligence, by Andrew Whiten and Dick Byrne, plopped onto the doormat of the BBC Antenna science series office in 1988. Suddenly primatology had become a great deal more exciting. Could primates, and especially higher primates like chimpanzees, really be as full of guile, as dastardly, as cunning, and as manipulative as the eponymous Florentine politician? Could they really reach deep into the minds of other individuals to see what they believed and what they wanted, and turn that information into deception?

I remember discussing primate cognition with a young Danny Povinelli, as we sat finger-feeding ourselves shrimp gumbo and new potatoes out of plastic Tupperware containers in a Lafayette restaurant surrounded by an alligator-infested moat, before returning to his kingdom - the New Iberia Research Centre - where the University of Louisiana had lured him back to his native deep South by turning a chimpanzee breeding centre for medical laboratory fodder into a primate cognition laboratory with one of the largest groups of captive chimpanzees in the country. He looked like a kid who had just been thrown the keys to the tuck shop.

In those days Povinelli shared the zeitgeist - spread by Whiten's and Byrne's work, and started by Nick Humphrey and Alison Jolly before them - that, since the most exacting and potentially treacherous environment faced by chimpanzees and other primates was not physical, but the social environment of their peers, they had evolved a form of social cognition very much like our own, in order to deal with it. This was further elaborated into a full-blown "social brain" hypothesis by Robin Dunbar, who related brain neocortex size to social group size throughout the primates and up to man. Povinelli's early work reflects this optimism for the mental life of apes, but both ape-language and ape-cognition research was subjected to a cold douche of searching criticism during the 1990s, and misgivings set in regarding the effectiveness of the experiments that had been constructed to guage ape cognition. Now the worm has turned again, with a number of research groups emerging with bolder and bolder claims for the Machiavellian machinations of primate minds, only to be powerfully countered by the curmudgeonly skepticism, chiefly by Povinelli, that these researchers are merely projecting their mental life onto that of their subjects; that, rather in the frustrating manner of Zeno's arrow that could never quite reach its target because it continually halved its distance to it, no experiment constructed thus far can actually get inside the mind of a chimp and show us exactly what it does and doesn't know, or how much, about the minds of others or the way the physical world works. One influential part of the world of comparative animal cognition talks of a continuum between ape and human minds and shrinks the cognitive distance between us and chimps to almost negligible proportions, while another returns us to the unfashionable idea that human cognition is unique, among the primates, after all.

When I began writing this book the working title was "The 1.6% that makes us human". My aim had always been to scrutinize the impression put about in the popular science media that humans and chimps differ by a mere 1.6% in our genetic code - or even less - and that it therefore makes complete sense that this minuscule genetic difference translates into equally small differences in cognition and behaviour between apes and man. However, contemporary genome science and technology, over the last few years, have dramatically advanced the power and resolution with which scientists can investigate genomes, eclipsing the earlier days of genomic investigation that gave rise to the "1.6% mantra".

As with comparative cognitive studies, conclusions on chimp-human similarity and difference in genome research depend crucially on perspective. To look at the complete set of human chromosomes, side by side with chimpanzee chromosomes, at the level of resolution of a powerful light microscope, for instance, is to be overwhelmed by the similarity between them. Overwhelmed with a sense of how close our kinship is with the other great apes. True, our chromosome 2 is a combination of two chimp chromosomes - giving humans a complement of 23 chromosome pairs to 24 in chimps, gorillas and orang-utans - but even here you can see exactly where the two chimp chromosomes have fused to produce one. The banding patterns you visualize by staining the chromosomes match up with astonishing similarity - and that banding similarity extends to many of the other chromosomes in the two genomes. However, look at a recent map of the chromosomes of chimps and humans, aligned side by side, produced by researchers who have mapped all inversions - end-on-end flips of large chunks of DNA - and the chromosomes are all but blotted out by a blizzard of red lines denoting inverted sequence. Now you become overwhelmed by how much structural change has occurred between the two genomes in just 6 million years. True, not all inversions result in changes in the working of genes - but many do - and inversions might even have been responsible for the initial divergence of chimp ancestor from human ancestor.

The extent to which you estimate the difference between chimp and human genomes depends entirely on where you look and how deeply. Modern genomics technology has led us deep into the mine that is the genome and has uncovered an extraordinary range of genetic mechanisms, many of which have one thing in common. They operate to promote variability - they amplify differences between individuals in one species. We now know, for instance, that each human is less genetically identical to anyone else than we thought only three years ago. When we compare human genomes to chimpanzee genomes these mechanisms magnify genetic distance still further. I have tried, in this book, to follow in the footsteps of these genome scientists as they dig deeper and deeper into the "Aladdin's Cave" of the genome. At times the going gets difficult. Scientists, like any explorers, are prone to taking wrong turnings, getting trapped in thickets, and covering hard ground, before breaking through into new insights. I hope that those of you who recoil from genetics with all the visceral horror with which many regard the sport of pot-holing will steel yourselves and follow me as far as I have dared to go into Aladdin's Cave. For only then will you see the riches within and begin to appreciate, as I have, just how limited popular accounts of human-chimpanzee genetic difference really are. Let me try and persuade you that this is a journey, if a little arduous at times, that is well worth taking.

There are a number of scientists around the world who have the breadth and the vision to have begun the task of rolling genetics, comparative animal cognition, and neuroscience into a comprehensive new approach to the study of human nature and this is part, at least, of their story. They strive to describe the nature of humans in terms of the extent to which we are genuinely different to chimpanzees and the other great apes. Somehow, over 6 million years, we humans evolved from something that probably resembled a chimpanzee (though we cannot yet be entirely sure) and the answer to our evolution has to lie in a growing number of structural changes in our genome, versus that of the chimpanzee, that have led to the evolution of a large number of genes that have, effectively, re-designed our brains and led to our advanced and peculiar human cognition.

If you don't believe me, hand this book to your nearest friendly chimpanzee and see what he makes of it!

Friday 5 December 2014

Chimps not entitled to rights of people: NY court

http://phys.org/news/2014-12-chimps-entitled-rights-people-ny.html

Sanity prevails!!

Friday 3 October 2014

Unexpectedly speedy expansion of human, ape cerebellum

http://phys.org/news/2014-10-unexpectedly-speedy-expansion-human-ape.html

Two British researchers - Rob Barton and Chris Venditti have moved the spotlight, in the brain, from the neo-cortex to the cerebellum. They show how the cerebellum, in real terms, has expanded mightily in the apes, and on into humans. The neuronal density in the cerebellum is greater than that throughout the neo-cortex. "In humans, the cerebellum contains about 70 billion neurons—four times more than in the neocortex," Barton says. "Nobody really knows what all these neurons are for, but they must be doing something important."

As time goes by, the cerebellum has been found to have more sophisticated roles than previously thought. These include "the temporal organization of complex behavioral sequences, such as those involved in making and using tools, for instance. Interestingly, evidence is now emerging for a critical role of the cerebellum in language, too."


Wednesday 1 October 2014

Humanized Foxp2 accelerates learning by enhancing transitions from declarative to procedural performance

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/39/14253.abstract.html?etoc

Here's an interesting paper in PNAS which furthers our understanding of how the transcription factor FOXP2 underpins the human language faculty. All the main scientists cited in NOT A CHIMP are among the co-authors - Simon Fisher, Wolfie Enard and Svante Paabo, and their observations stem from transplanting human FOXP2 into mice.

Tuesday 16 September 2014

Neuroscientists identify key role of language gene

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-09-neuroscientists-key-role-language-gene.html

The FOXP2 story continues to run and run - and at the centre of developments are Svante Paabo and Wolfie Enard at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig. A new function for FOXP2 suggests it is important in transforming experience into new behaviours. Mice, into which the human form of FOXP2 had been engineered, learned T-mazes much more quickly. "The findings suggest that Foxp2 may help humans with a key component of learning language—transforming experiences, such as hearing the word "glass" when we are shown a glass of water, into a nearly automatic association of that word with objects that look and function like glasses..."

Friday 8 August 2014

Chimpanzee Jack to stand trial on human crimes at Edinburgh Fringe

http://www.thecourier.co.uk/news/local/fife/chimpanzee-jack-to-stand-trial-on-human-crimes-at-edinburgh-fringe-1.511295

In NOT A CHIMP I go into a great deal of detail about people who keep chimps as human surrogate pets and rights campaigners who argue that accrediting chimpanzees with "human" rights will better preserve them and serve their interests wherever they are threatened or abused. I argue strongly that it is wholly inappropriate to grant chimps human rights because they are palpably not humans and are not capable of the understanding of two-way moral obligations that rights suppose. Fascinating and hilarious, therefore, to see that Lewis Dean of the Scottish Primate Research Group has written an audience-interactive play (essentially the trial of a fictional chimpanzee criminal) to explore these issues for the Edinburgh Fringe.

Tuesday 5 August 2014

Flores bones show features of Down syndrome, not a new 'hobbit' human

http://phys.org/news/2014-08-flores-bones-features-syndrome-hobbit.html

Arguments over whether or not the skeletal remains found on the island of Flores - the so-called "hobbit" - represent a new species of human ancestor, or an abnormal Homo sapiens, have ricocheted too and fro over the last few years - demonstrating, if nothing else, the perils and pitfalls of archaeological interpretation. This fascinating report argues that the specimen is a human with Down syndrome! The brain size was over 400 cc, not less, as was originally calculated. No doubt this will not be the end of the affair. Look out for a riposte!

Tuesday 1 July 2014

Congo: A Group of Chimpanzees Seem to Have Mastered Fire

http://worldnewsdailyreport.com/congo-a-group-of-chimpanzees-seem-to-have-mastered-fire/

Fascinating report of a colony of bonobos in Salonga National Park in the Congo basin that have been watched for over 3 years and appear to have gradually evolved and somewhat refined a crude method of fire-making which they are reported to employ in brandishes against enemies - which villagers say have destroyed tracts of forestry - and in cooking squirrel monkeys. if this has been reported accurately - and I am looking for more learned reports here - it may represent evolution in action and a replay of early human evolution where the ability to cook food - at least according to Richard Wrangham - was a crucial factor in releasing high-octane calories vital for body and brain growth.

Friday 30 May 2014

Domestication of dogs may explain mammoth kill sites and success of early modern humans

http://phys.org/news/2014-05-domestication-dogs-mammoth-sites-success.html

An interesting piece relating to Pat Shipman's recent work investigating huge mammoth kill sites in eastern Europe. She contends that the steep increase in wholesale dispatch of mammoths coincides with evidence of wolf-like dogs and suggests this may be evidence of early domestication of dogs and that dogs might have been invaluable for hunting, surrounding and killing mammoths. If she is right this tilts the argument over the evolution of dogs back towards the direct domestication of wolves hypothesis.

Thursday 6 February 2014

Identification of gene that influences joint attention in chimpanzees provides insight into autism spectrum disorders

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-02-identification-gene-joint-attention-chimpanzees.html

Interesting news from Larry Young and Bill Hopkins from Yerkes Primate Centre. They have been looking at the heritability for joint attention - the essential foundation stone for theory of mind and social intelligence. it builds on work on variants of the vasopressin receptor gene, reported in NOT A CHIMP - transferring the work from prairies voles to chimps. They lack a key repetitive element in the receptor gene that humans have.

Friday 31 January 2014

Teaching young wolves new tricks

http://www.vetmeduni.ac.at/en/infoservice/presseinformation/press-releases-2014/press-release-01-30-2014-teaching-young-wolves-new-tricks/

Interesting piece from scientists in Vienna who show that wolves are better at opening food containers if they are able to watch con-specifics previously doing so successfully, than dogs. In other words, wolves are better at imitating other wolves than dogs are other dogs. The suggestion is that, under domestication, dogs have transferred their imitative focus to humans and away from their own species.

Thursday 30 January 2014

What makes us human? Unique brain area linked to higher cognitive powers

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-01-human-unique-brain-area-linked.html

One of several reports coming out of Professor Matthew Rushworth's lab at Oxford University's Department of Experimental Psychology. "The brain area pinpointed is known to be intimately involved in some of the most advanced planning and decision-making processes that we think of as being especially human." says the report from Medical Express.

"'We have established an area in human frontal cortex which does not seem to have an equivalent in the monkey at all,' says first author Franz-Xaver Neubert of Oxford University. 'This area has been identified with strategic planning and decision making as well as "multi-tasking"".