Humans not just “big-brained apes,” researcher says
There is no way to spin it: if Darwinism is true, then human beings are little better than apes. It does not mean we directly came from them, but it does mean that we are on a par with them. If Darwinism is false, then there is a possibility that humanity is without comparison, being above all animal life. The popular subtheory in the current General Theory of Evolution is that humans and apes are very closely related, and some studies have tried to link the two species in intelligence and genetics. However, as reported by one psychologist, this subtheory may not be as accurate as Darwinism so requires. Below is an article on this development and after it is the citation and link to the source.
In discussions on animal intelligence, it’s fashionable to play up animals’ smarts and their similarities to humans. And many studies provide fodder for such thinking.
But a new study, reassessing much past research, offers a different perspective: it argues that key human-animal differences are often overlooked. Humans are more than just “big-brained apes,” as Charles Darwin called them in 1871, wrote the author, psychologist David Premack of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Penn.
In trying to change such conceptions, Premack is swimming against a tide of research that has found sometimes surprising cognitive abilities in animals, capacities once thought unique to humans.
A study published last July, for instance, found that even some rodents can remember the “what, where and when” of events in their lives, an ability sometimes cited as key to consciousness. And findings made public just this week suggested rhesus monkeys use “baby talk” with infants, though surprisingly, not their own.
Premack didn’t challenge the findings of past studies. But he argued that they often focus on animal-human similarities—striking us repeatedly with examples of how animals are “so like us”—while glossing over the vast realms of activity where they’re really quite unlike us. That leads to the false idea that animals have human-like abilities, he said.
Further confusion has arisen because human brains do have similarities in structure to other mammals’, added Premack, whose paper appeared in this week’s early online edition of the research journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For such reasons, most neuroscientists agreed with Darwin until recently.
Only since the late 1990s has research challenged that notion, by revealing microscopic features unique to human brains, Premack wrote. These studies have found “enhanced wiring, and forms of connectivity among nerve cells not found in any animal.”
One such finding, he added, involved a newfound type of neuron, or brain cell, that’s far more numerous and larger in humans than in any of their ape relatives. Called von Economo neurons, these cells are particularly prevalent in brain regions dealing with social emotions such as empathy, guilt and embarrassment, Premack wrote.
In a critical analysis of past literature, Premack examined claims of similarity between animals and humans in several different areas, including teaching, deception, memory, and language. In all cases, he argued, the similarities are small and the differences large.
A major difference is that animal behaviors appear to be mainly adaptations focused on a single goal such as food-seeking, he wrote, whereas human behaviors have an infinite number of goals. Such disparities are consistent with the observed differences in brain structure; the challenge is to understand the function of these cellular-level differences, he wrote
"Humans not just 'big-brained apes,' researcher says", World Science, August 22nd, AD 2007, http://www.world-science.net/othernews/070821_humans.htm, accessed 02/20/2008.
