It´s interesting, if one gets a score of over 90 percent or even, let´s just say, hm 98,8 percent, the person would say that this is close to absoluteIt´s interesting, if one gets a score of over 90 percent or even, let´s just say, hm 98,8 percent, the person would say that this is close to absolute. No matter if it is a test, a comparison or whatever. But as soon as it goes like "You know, those missing 1,2 percent are the difference between you and a sh$§trhowing chimpanzee, the person goes like WTF and so on. So, as I always say, we are naked apes and each emotional and brain reaction that is explored in monkeys gives deep insights into our collective and individual nature. The knowledge could lead to a better social design from international organizations to small villages with just a hand full of houses.
Checklists are great, so let´s put monkeys vs humans on a kind of partner finding match list with the same interest. Violent without reason against the own people which harms the whole society? Check. Manipulate and lie around anything that comes just a mile close so some sexy time? Done. The tendency to despotism, genocide and determination wars? Getting closer to a full match. Same emotional reactions concerning love, fear, hate, etc? Got it, monkey owned. Excuse me, but could someone please explain the difference to me again? I mean, even the throwing sh$3 thing seems to be matching, be it verbally or in some rare cases, ahem.
Both the neurological and social development are so closely related that the functioning systems kept growing inside our heads and got probably a little bit modified regarding impulse control, subtleness and intelligence, but nature didn´t change much in this running system. Take away food, shelter and punishment and we are again where we were millions of years ago, extremely dangerous group raiders with an integrated attitude to madness. This is especially funny, because there are no lesser intelligent animals, especially biological very similar mammals, that have the same rate of lunatics that naturally occur because something like a human brain can´t be constructed or civilized without some damage. When there are millions of rabbits, deer, mice or cows, their behavioral anomalies are so few compared to when one puts a few million people together in one place.
One implication is, that like bonobos and chimpanzees, human society has different attitudes depending on the social structure. And as both humans and monkeys keep evolving, many new variants may grow out of the few concepts with the main difference that humans could form an environment for many experiments and plentiful family and social structures instead of the few monocultures we see today. With each acceptable ideology, that doesn´t include harming, discriminating or erasing other groups, many experiments would be possible with volunteer groups of environmentalists, futurists, etc. that want to try out something new. How to prevent them from going the way of sects and extremists might be a tricky topic, but at least the indoctrinated way of how to live would fall apart.
A huge misuse of anthropomorphism has been the tendency to think that we great humans should project our superior properties onto other, "lower" animals instead of considering that it might be that many animals are much smarter, complex and emotional than we thought or wanted to think. Just because human communication got overcomplicated with language, mimics and stuff that doesn´t mean that communications that are based on smell, varying sounds or just hormones aren´t as good, effective and a sign of higher intelligence instead of just instincts, as thought for a long time. With the help of neuroscience and biological markers, the truth can be shown. Tragically, the bad and wrong science of the past was used to discriminate animals and other humans that were both deemed inferior.
The work is primarily focused on apes, but let´s think about other animals, for instance, pigs, cows and chicken or, if they are on the dinner table and the imagination is too irritating, dolphins, octopi, crows, well, anything that has the intelligence and/ or social life to feel. And here comes the cornucopia of ethical, philosophical and sociological questions regarding both our connection to and behavior regarding many animals. Let´s say a scientist would find out or has already found out a long time ago that especially the tortured animals in the meat factories have not just more complex feelings and higher intelligence than supposed but understand the whole context of their situation at each moment.
The work of this outstanding author should be read and spread by everybody, because it opens new, interdisciplinary fields of both natural sciences and humanities and leads to a better understanding of both real and human nature and could help to stop repeating the construction errors and behaving like aggressive alpha males after a few million years of a wild, human adolescence and become adult and wise instead.
Finally, let´s try a self-test that is prooving all theories right. Look, I made this funny, for the sake of your mental sanity censored, list of emotions that would completely control me with full intensity if I wouldn´t be such a highly developed, smart super-duper alpha predator (meditation and mindfulness really help a tiny little bit): bored, stressed, happy, hungry, evil, scared, tired, excited, hungry again, dishonest, sensitive,...
A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real-life outside books:
Mario the lone bookwolf
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Books:
de-waal-frans
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