Chimps with smarts and culture

A lot of people over a lot of years have disliked Darwin’s contention that humans are just “big-brained apes.” They’ve fought to maintain a suitable distance between us and our closest primate cousins.

While the least sophisticated of these people are motivated by Bible literalism, and others by an often unrecognized or unadmitted need for human dignity, the most thoughtful objectors argue that we can’t rely on perceived similarities as real evidence that there is an uninterrupted continuum from the ai ai to the academic.