Humans are alike, but for those who create fear of others

 

I watched a fascinating nature documentary recently about a couple in Liberia who dedicated themselves to saving baby chimpanzees.

Chimpanzees share over 98% of our DNA. However, they don’t suffer the same fate of overpopulation. They’re an endangered species and there are fewer and fewer of them every day.

Many adult chimps are killed for food by the local population. Chimps have been on their menu forever; the same way cows have been on ours.

I won’t get into the thorny issue of how much of a mammal does a mammal have to be to not be considered as food. Dogs and cats seem controversial enough, and I’m just not evolved enough to bring apes into the debate.

What happens often is that adult chimps, especially mothers, are killed and their babies sold as pets. In one case, a chimp grew up with a chain around her neck that was so big and heavy it could have been used to tow a truck.

When the chimp was rescued, its human “mother” cried seeing her “baby” taken away. Obviously, there’s affection, and mothers, human or otherwise, feel sorrow in losing their babies.

Here’s the part I found interesting.

Being our closest cousins among the primates (the orangutans, in spite of their name, are slightly further away from us DNA-wise), chimpanzees share many similarities with humans.

Chimps with ICs?

They have fingerprints, just like us. Technically, they can be issued with an identity card and maybe even run for election, which would raise the quality of elections substantially.

Given that now millions, nay billions, of other primates (us!) are already having or doing this, we don’t need more. Though if they did enter politics, one may end up being elected PM – Primate Minister!

And said Primate Minister may ask his chimp ministers to turun padang, get down to the playing field, which in this case would be asking the chimps to balik kampung!

Anyway, I was amazed to learn that upon being born, and for a few years afterwards, baby chimps are totally dependent on their mothers for care and protection.

They need to be taught how to survive in the jungle. Most of the things chimps do don’t come naturally to them, including tree-climbing.

You’d think they’d take to climbing trees as easily as falling off a log. But chimps have to be taught how to climb! It’s funny to see them slowly learning how to do it. But given their body’s adaptation for climbing, they end up climbing more and falling less.

Nature has a strict certification test – if you’re up a tree and you fall down, you get eaten. Over time, the types that keep falling down the trees disappear and the types that can stay up flourish.

Adapt or perish

There’s no affirmative action in the jungles. The species not adapted enough to survive will perish, whilst those that adapt, survive. It’s what evolution by natural selection is all about.

But before you get all fluffed up about politics in Malaysia, remember that affirmative action among humans also means we don’t leave the disabled or elderly to perish so as to ensure the survival of the group.

To me, the most fascinating part though was watching the human surrogate mothers teach the baby chimps about the dangers of snakes.

They’d put rubber snakes in the bushes and initially the baby chimps woudly nonchalantly play around with these as if they’re toys.

In the real world they’d have been bitten, or eaten, or both.

Their human “mothers” then mimicked the behaviors of chimp mothers in the wild, clasping the babies close to them and going all-hell-breaks-loose to warn the kids and the rest of the troop about the snake danger.

After a few lessons, the babies got the message and they’d stay away from the rubber snakes, and certainly would avoid real snakes they’d see later when they are released in the wild.

Testing the air

Please don’t draw any conclusions here about snakes. They’re not evil, just as a stone or a tree is not evil, even if many had undeservedly branded them as such.

Snakes’ tongues come out to “smell” the air the way we use our nose. The forked tongue gives it the stereoscopic function to determine the direction the smell comes from, similar to why we have two eyes and ears.

The difference between snakes and primates begins from the moment the snakes hatch. They’re on their own. Their parents don’t hang around to sing nursery rhymes or warn them against humans offering apples.

Their survival techniques are hard-coded in their genes. For higher-order mammals, such as primates, so much has to be taught by their parents.

We literally are born as clean slates, and our parents, society and environment do much to point us to whichever destination we end up.

Small kids happily play with each other without regard to colour or any other human distinction. They’d happily continue that way until somebody decides to “educate” them with something to the contrary.

This “education” unfortunately is almost always negative, focusing and playing up differences rather than similarities.

That’s how, even though we basically share 100% of our DNA across the entire human race, we can still find reason to think of some of us as different, bad or inferior.

Conditioned to fear

By the time we become adults, we cease to question many of these forms of conditioning. We fall prey to confirmation bias, accepting any proof that reinforces our beliefs, and rejecting others that don’t.

It was much simpler to understand these dynamics in the olden days, when the only society most people knew was the one they were born into.

The rest of the world seemed full of monsters and dangers, including those other humans not of our tribe.

But in today’s world? Humans have been to space and seen that we all inhabit the same Earth. We have science to tell us we’re basically identical in our genes. We have religions and political systems that tell us we’re all created equal.

We really have no excuse for our fear of others, unless we’re taught that way.

Unfortunately, it continues to be taught, whether here or anywhere else on earth, because pointing out differences creates fear and being able to create fear confers power to the creator of the fear.

And even today, right here in Malaysia, that is still the basis for much of our politics. Shows that we haven’t evolved that much have we? - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.