More on our ape bro.. cousins

Before i begin to report my first Leipzig zoo visit.
1) Apes are not monkeys; in short apes are our closest cousins. Apes, just like us, have no tail, apart from a vestigial one at the base of the spine (from a taxonomic viewpoint it can be argued that humans are also apes).
2) Apes are not our ancestors! Living apes and us are as remote in time from our common ancestors. And these common ancestors were not Chimps, not Gorillas, etc... they were just "another species". (Primatologists sometimes use apes as a window in the "pre-human" human past, but they do it with great caution because only the traits we have in common are likely to be also those of our common ancestors. More on that later..)

Anyway, I just paid my first visit to the Leipzig zoo (there will be many more). This was a private visit to a select group of 30 German retirees + me + occasional rain. Ha! So I saw:
- Gorillas: from too far, in the mist.. i'll see you guys later.
- Chimps, group A: the main group was indoors, pretty chill folks, lazy adults and jumpy clumsy infants. They seemed relaxed, like at a chimp version of the Club Med, aka Chimp Med.
- Orang-Utans ("Man of the forest" in Malay, nothing to do with the color "orange" although they coincidentally do have orange hair!): wow that dominant male is quite a riot! long hair like a cloak, impressive frame... unlike in nature (where male OU are solitary), he lives with the others but seems ok with it. It's an unconventional group anyway, since it includes one female Gibbon (too old to be mated with a male of her own kind--the only strictly monogamous ape species). She grooms and gets groomed, totally accepted by the colorful Orang folks! You can imagine what other question i asked about her, well, the answer is no.
- Bonobos: only 3 males, 2 females.. and one local newborn! We only saw the 3 males who came on call, un-shy about their gigantic testicles. Now, even though I had seen pictures, it was a shock how different they are from chimps, not so much physically but those guys feel so human it's eery. The way they look at you, the way they stroll around.. the way they seem so bored and lonely. They clearly miss company, well, at least that day I saw them. More on bonobos and their potential here.
- Chimps, group B: a few females related to the dominant males of group A, were kept separately to avoid inbreeding. This group also includes a male who almost got killed in a fight with males of the main group. Godly zookeepers saved him from a grim death. This group was not in Chimp Med, but in a (large) cage and definitely more interested by our visit.

I also discovered that Chimps, Orangs and the Gibbon chick regularly walk on the ropes. Right they don't just hang and swing around (masterfully) on branches and ropes. They sometimes actually walk on rope, and stand (not squat) on branches for a while. Long arms are a perfect for balancing there. I wonder if anyone has studied that, but it seems they walk more on branches & ropes than they do on the ground. All too logic considering the environment their species adapted to..

In the end, like any zoo it's a bit depressing, though these guys have it easier than other zoos i have seen. And they are stimulated by props and toys, including primate psychology experiments. I think for their well being and development, it's very important for apes to have social interactions,.. even if with human cousins by default. As exemplified by the Gibbonette among the Orangs, there may be more room for inter-ape-species friendship than we would think.

Of course the yahoo link of the previous post is now broken..
here is the story from a (hopefully) more permanent site:

http://forums.spacebattles.com/archive/index.php/t-117788.html

Scroll down to read many dumb or superficial comments but this here is a cool and deep one:
A. Bettik -- May 5th 2007, 8:42am

This actually is a difficult question: Some chimps have been shown to have the cognitive ability of a young child... some have even learned sign language. Why should they have fewer rights than children matter?
I'm not really sure at all. This could end up turning us into some race of hippy-indian-treehuggers who get annihilated by the first passing alien race, or it could be a step in the direction of the enlightened, superior Xel-Naga who soon rule the galaxy in benevolence. I'm not sure which.

what's new in the human species? might we include other animals in our own species?

Activists want chimp declared a 'person' - Yahoo! News
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/chimp_challenge (broken link, see new post above)

- what is a "person"? if we are talking in law terms, it's different in every country, and yeah maybe the law needs to be tweaked a bit now that we (re)discover that animals are damn smart and have emotions too. But really, how much rights can you have without having responsibilities? Chimps or any other animals cannot share the same responsibilities as human persons, therefore they cannot function as such in the society. How different are they from non-autonomous mentally-impaired humans? Well, even though I cringe writing this, I have to admit that some great apes do have higher emotional and cognitive abilities than some mentally-impaired humans. Having said that, does that mean they ought to have similar rights? No. Something just feels "wrong" about the idea, but what? Well, it's about the potential; we think that ANY human, even the deepest autistic or advanced alzheimer patient have the "potential" to be human. Same issue at stake when we debate on euthanasia. So the question becomes; does a chimp have the potential to be human like me?

- More practically; why don't they just put abandoned chimps in animal shelters? dogs and cats also have personalities but that doesn't make them "persons"! (btw, some cats paint and i have seen dogs eat pastry, hm.) Can't the activist just adopt Hiasl as a pet? Maybe the best would be a zoo, they know how to take care of chimps, and they may even have chimp friends for Hiasl and Rosi.

- aren't the activists contradicting themselves when they say they want Hiasl to have "basic legal rights" but no right to vote? They want to give him the "right to own property"; but is it moral to just give that to someone who doesn't understand what that means? If these are not plain contradictions they at least send a very confusing message.

- what is an "animal rights activist"? are these the same breed as the ones who said you gotta kill Knut the baby polar bear abandoned by its mother? at least one activist mentioned in the article disagrees with the present cause and rightly fears animal rights will loose credibility with such foolish claims (though it's not a foolish debate).

- apes such as chimps do have high cognitive abilities (and human-like physiques) that makes us think twice before treating them as.. "just animals". Another way to think about this is that we are animals ourselves, highly self-domesticated, and with a propensity to domesticate other species. There is no "Us v. The Animals", but "We The Animals". And "We Humans" have the most sophisticated societies and have the power to make all animals (including ourselves) either miserable or comfortable. And as far as we can tell, we are the only ones to strive towards morality. But morality itself is a relative concept under active scientific investigation because it really is not so straightforward; would we kill (and possibly induce suffering) in a few chimp to find a cure that will save millions of humans over time? how about killing a few gorillas? macaques? dogs? cats? rabb.. bunnies? mice? rats? roaches?.. What determines our double standards on which animal can get which treatment? Is that moral?

Those damn borders... the geographical ones and the ones in our tribal minds. Let's talk about the geographical ones for a moment; it's messy but it must be simpler than the human mind. In fact borders are probably in such chaos as a result of our damn restless minds.

The fact that they are constantly changing can be a good or a bad news. The bad news is that, with a few notable exceptions (German reunification or neighboring Czecho-Slovakian split) it usually goes with a war. The good news is that this war hopefully has something just to it and it will end in peace, in situation more stable than before (e.g. Yu-go-sla-via). Not quite sure anymore if there was a "just war" component in the current Iraq mess, but it may well be best ended with a country split. Of course many hate the idea, like Turkey or Iran who would have to finally accept the existence of a Kurdish culture. But even that can be a good news for them if they know how to go with the flow. One can always dream.. of a world where we would come back to such values as "La liberte des peuples a disposer d'eux memes". What happened to that? If people aren't asked the right questions in such critical moments as in Iraq right now there can only be violence. Don't ask them who to elect, there is barely a political class or any political debate, and people are still new to democracy. Ask them real questions about their future, such as which country do you want to live in? (Iraq, Kurdistan, Shiiteland, Sunniland, Iran, etc.. start a debate!) Which political system? Get an idea what people want; once this is known, every terrorist or foreign power looses all legitimacy if they go against the will of the people. Easier said, I know.. I know..

Will borders in the US disappear or appear. Will the red-state blue-state divide increase? Right now, no good reason to see it happen, everybody would loose, but wait until some real tough issue or crisis divides them. Or it could be just very slow. And if at some point some states accept gay marriage, or ban abortion altogether, and some clearly never will do either, people will move around accordingly... toward a peaceful national split?

I may add one thing to that last post. Another option is that instead of continuing to grow in numbers the human species shrinks. Then we may become more homogeneous. In fact that's probably what happened at least one time to our ancestors way back, and that may explain why we are one of the least genetically diverse species on earth, despite obvious regional physical differences.
So as a species we are faced with two main options (status quo is not an option): either we continue expanding, eventually overflowing out of this planet and ineluctably diverging genetically, OR shrinking in numbers, possibly becoming an endangered species, either by some large scale catastrophe, or very slowly, without even noticing it. Both preserving the earth, our nest, and swarming towards the stars are necessary elements of our survival as a species--and parent of species to be.

what is this?

I am a Homo sapiens, one of a growing mass of ~6 billion, a heterogeneous bunch, a big not-so-melted pot of spiced diversity.

This rich human genetic cuisine is displayed through people's physical appearance, which our tribal minds sorts out as kinds. Let's celebrate, rather than deny, this diversity resulting from the immemorial ebb and flow of human migrations. The complex interplay of population isolation and mixture went back and forth uninterrupted since our ancestors emerged from archaic forms of human over a hundred thousand years ago. Living in small tribes or bands until the intensification of horticulture into full scale agriculture and farming after the end of the last glacial age, there we are; a few of us still rooted in the ancestral lifestyle of hunting and gathering, and most of us post-industrial humans of planetary awareness.

The human species today shines as a fuzzy kaleidoskopic landscape of admixed populations and genetic isolates. Unlike a regular kaleidoscope, the borders are rarely sharp. Geographic and cultural patterns are discernible but the complexity is mind boggling. How melted is the genetic pot? Look at a metropolis like New York City or Sao Paulo; not so melted, he.. Will it ever be? Should it be? As much as some individuals tend to mix, most still stick to people who look alike. I have sometimes heard a question going like this; are we to become, in hundreds of years, a single homogeneous mass of people? Will everybody eventually merge to the same skin color and facial features? No way. Even with an increased number of admixed individuals, there will always be a gradation of admixture levels, whether subtle or sharp. There will always be geographic and cultural distances working as isolating mechanisms. And if after all these centuries we do finally migrate outside of our planet, then these isolating mechanisms will become even stronger. And natural selection pressures in different planets or orbital stations may even add some spice and modify our species to physical types never seen before, or new human species yet to evolve.