The mother of all Dodos

Feb 8, 2008 Alun Politics, Science 1 Comment Evolution, Philosophy, Spencer Wells, Will Self

WS: I think one of the things that inspired me to write Great Apes was the immin­ent extinc­tion of the chim­pan­zee in the wild, which I think will be one of the most philo­soph­ic­ally queasy moments. But I don’t think people have reckoned on it at all.

SW: Any extinc­tion, but par­tic­u­larly chimpanzees.

WS: Par­tic­u­larly the chimp, surely.

SW: It’s the final­ity of it and the notion that, “These are our cous­ins, and we’re the ones who caused their demise.”

I think I should pay more atten­tion to the SEED salon. There’s a few con­ver­sa­tions in there I’ve missed, and from the high­lights, it looks like the full ver­sion of the Will Self / Spen­cer Wells con­ver­sa­tion could be fun if it’s put online. They were talk­ing about what it means to be human.

Will Self was being Will Self, which he does very well. He was talk­ing of the interest in see­ing a Chimpanzee-Human hybrid. Spen­cer Wells in con­trast would like to talk to a chim­pan­zee, but not cre­ate a hybrid. It’s inter­est­ing because Self sees human­ity as a con­struc­ted idea. It’s inter­est­ing, because it raises the ques­tion “Is what makes you human a hard­ware or soft­ware issue?” Self also raises the ques­tion of self-cloning. If he could, would it be accept­able to have a brain­less clone to act as a source of body parts. Is a brain­less clone human?

The extinc­tion of the chim­pan­zees is a prob­lem which isn’t in the high­lights video, but it’s a power­ful point. Humans have exterm­in­ated other human cul­tures. The people who built Easter Island are effect­ively extinct, killed by the effects of west­ern con­tact. Homo Sapiens have prob­ably killed their closest rel­at­ives Homo Neander­thalen­sis. Was that gen­o­cide or spe­cicide? We’re also close to push­ing the other great apes off the planet. Yet it may in the future be pos­sible to mate with Chim­pan­zees. Suc­cess would require genetic engin­eer­ing to cope with the dif­fer­ent num­ber of chro­mo­somes, and invent­ing a banana-shaped Valentine’s card, but it may be pos­sible. We’re so close that a few bio­lo­gists have sug­ges­ted we are a form of Chim­pan­zee ourselves.

When we elim­in­ate them will we dis­cover that we are still as thought­lessly human as we were at the end of the Middle Palaeo­lithic when the last Neander­thal died? And that’s where we came in.

There’s a con­ver­sa­tion tran­script and video high­lights.