Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [71]
And it is happening everywhere. On the frontiers of zoology, for instance, humans are being stripped of their status as ‘special’ animals. It is almost a given of most world religions that humans stand above the rest of nature; in the Bible’s Book of Genesis, God gives Man ‘dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth’. However, geneticists have shown that the differences between us and other animals are only slight. So far we have identified only three genes that are unique to humans: the rest we share with our compatriots in the animal kingdom. When the catalogue of human genes is complete, the likelihood is that fewer than twenty of our 20,000 or so genes are unique to humans. We have also discovered that other primates have brain cells exactly like those inside our own oversized skulls. It’s no surprise, then, that our seemingly unique mental capacities are nothing more than sophisticated versions of tricks that other animals can pull off. In a world where killer whales and dolphins show distinct cultural groups, crows use tools, chimpanzees display morality, elephants show empathy, and even salamanders and spiders show a range of personalities, it is hard to argue that there is anything biologically special about humans. It is true that nothing in the animal kingdom is using what we call language, but gestures used by bonobos and orangutans come close.
Science is closing the gap between humans and other animals so fast, in fact, that some scientists are starting to think that human rights should also apply to other primates. In 1993, a team of eminent scientists published a collection of essays aimed at persuading the United Nations to grant chimps and other higher primates the privileges we know as ‘human rights’. The Great Ape Project demanded that ‘non-human hominids’ – chimpanzees, gorillas, orang-utans and bonobos – should enjoy the right to life, freedom and protection from torture. The book included contributions from primatologist Peter Singer and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who writes in typically witty and provocative style:
Remember the song, ‘I’ve danced with a man who’s danced with a girl, who danced with the Prince of Wales?’ We can’t quite interbreed with modern chimpanzees, but we’d need only a handful of intermediate types to be able to sing: ‘I’ve bred with a man, who’s bred with a girl, who’s bred with a chimpanzee.’
Humans, Dawkins says, are not far enough removed from chimpanzees for there to be distinctions between their rights and ours. Stumble across one of those missing intermediates in the wild, he says,
and our precious systems of norms and ethics would come crashing about our ears. The boundaries with which we segregate our world would be all shot to pieces. Racism would blur with speciesism in obdurate and vicious confusion. Apartheid, for those that believe in it, would assume a new and perhaps a more urgent import.
Predictably, reactions have varied from disbelief to scathing contempt for the idea. The Catholic Church condemned the Project for eroding the Biblical hierarchy that gives humans dominion over the Earth. Fernando Sebastián, the archbishop of Pamplona and Tudela, called the idea ridiculous. ‘We don’t give rights to some people – unborn children, human embryos, and we are going to give them to apes,’ he complained to BBC News when Spain said it would consider giving primates equal status to humans.
If the issues seem radical, then it is because biology has only quite recently started to challenge our taboos and move us out of our comfort zones. Physics, though, has been a thorn in humanity’s side for hundreds of years.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Earth sat at the centre of the universe, and according to received wisdom everything in the