Kansas: Taking The Yellow Brick Road Back To Reality

The Kansas Board of education, after 7 years of creationist rule, has evolved its thinking (thanks to public outcries and an election) and has instituted real science back into its class rooms. - Reuters

But, when the next school year starts, what evolutionary story will the schools be telling?

The predominant evolutionary view has been that humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor, and that human physical develop, speech, language and brainpower have led people to believe ipso facto humans are more evolved than apes. However, recent scientific studies have seemed to suggest something slightly different.

A recent University of Michigan study, by looking at the recently-sequenced macaque monkey genome, was able to determine whether chimpanzees or humans had evolved more or less as compared to the macaque genome and found that "more genes have undergone positive selection in chimpanzee evolution than in human evolution." Meaning, on a genetic level, chimpanzees have evolved more than humans and may explain why certain kinds of primates, such as the rhesus monkey, are immune to simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), the primate equivalent of HIV.

Other research done by Cornell University has suggested that human evolution may have resulted in a huge genetic defect, cancer. Human sperm, while developing the ability to live longer, are the main contributor to our suseptability to cancer. The study also suggests that on a genetic level, human and chimpanzee brains are practically the same.

Does this mean that chimpanzees have the ability to think and reflect, or possibly have, as the philosopher John Kavanaugh put it, an awareness of their awareness?

Possibly. A study from Columbia's Primate Cognition Laboratory has demonstrated that monkeys can acquire "the ability to reflect about their thoughts and to assess their performance." The experiment

Was designed to show that a monkey could express its confidence in its answers to multiple-choice questions about its memory based on the amount of imaginary currency it was willing to wager. (The) experiment was derived from the observation that children often make pretend bets to assert that they know the answer to some question... (and) provided clear evidence of their ability to engage in meta-cognition, an ability that is all the more remarkable because monkeys lack language.

The researchers note that "the ability to reflect on one's knowledge has always been thought of as exclusively human." At one point we also thought that the Sun revolved around the Earth, and that the Earth was flat. Maybe it's time to reassess where we think we lie on the evolutionary totem pole?


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