A ‘Bill of Rights’ for apes?
by Carl Wieland
The Great Ape Project is a series of essays put together by some of the
world’s leading evolutionist biologists and philosophers. It is being launched
in association with a Declaration on Great Apes. This is, in effect, a
‘citizen’s charter’ for chimps, gorillas and orangutans.1
The message is clear: because they are so close in evolutionary terms to humans,
great apes ‘deserve the same moral status’. Not only may they no longer
be kept in cages or used for medical research, but they must be regarded under law
as ‘persons’ rather than property, perhaps having guardians as do some
young or retarded people, if the eminent proponents of this ‘Magna Chimpa’
are to be heeded.
Their arguments draw heavily on the opinions of Jane Goodall (the well-known student
of wild Tanzanian chimpanzees) concerning the ‘rich and varied social and
emotional lives’ she believes these animals have. Ironically, evolutionist
Ronald Nadler of the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center, who has studied both
wild and caged specimens, thinks that Goodall has ‘exaggerated the intellectual
nature of the animal and also exaggerated the negative aspect of conditions in which
we keep them’.
Chimps are especially favoured by ‘animal-righters’ because of the many
DNA similarities they have with humans. The very influential Professor Jared Diamond
even insists that biologically, man should be classified as a third species of chimpanzee.
Oxford biology professor Richard Dawkins says ‘We admit that we are like apes,
but we seldom realise that we are apes’.2
Dawkins, a clever and persuasive promoter of evolution, asks us to imagine holding
hands in an unbroken chain with our ancestors. We hold our mother’s hand,
she holds her mother’s, and so forth.
After only 300 miles of such a ‘human chain’, says Dawkins, we would
have reached the ancestor we share with chimpanzees. In other words, if we had another
line stretching backwards from a present-day chimp, the two lines would converge
in that one individual.3
All the representatives of the more distant ‘intermediate types’ happen
to be dead, he says, which he regards as a regrettable chance occurrence, since
he would ‘love to meet them’. The implication is that if their kind
had survived, it would be obvious how absurd it was to treat apes and humans differently
in moral terms. And, although chimps and humans are not able to interbreed, each
member of such a chain would be able to interbreed with those fairly close to it.
So he speculates that if some of these intermediate species had survived to the
present, they could form a ‘hybridizing link’ to chimpanzees. In other
words, he claims, it would then be possible to breed with someone who could breed
with someone else who could breed with a chimpanzee! Dawkins says that the belief
in the absolute humanness of humans is the cause of ‘much evil’. Of
course, to a consistent evolutionist, there are no absolutes with which to define
good and evil. It might be ‘evil’ (to Dawkins and many others today)
to prevent someone aborting a child—he clearly sees it as ‘evil’
to keep chimps in labs for medical research to cure human diseases.
All of this is only one more logical step for a society which believes in evolution
and has largely rejected Genesis. If humans are only evolved animals, and are not
special creations in the image of God, what moral and ethical basis is there, indeed,
for treating them any differently? Do away with belief in the created uniqueness
of people with their immortal souls, and there are then no more black and white
distinctions between human beings and animals, just shades of grey.
If the Genesis origin of man is no longer regarded as the true and authoritative
basis of our law and ethics, then of course it’s OK to kill an unborn child.
Or an old person with advanced Alzheimer’s disease, for instance, if society
decides it is convenient. After all, neither of these two humans has a ‘rich
and varied social and emotional life’ compared to an adult chimp. How tragic
that there are many in the churches who are compromising with this deadly philosophy.
References and footnotes
- New Scientist, June 5, 1993, pp. 36–42.
- ibid.
- For a refutation of the whole notion of ‘human evolution’, see Marvin
L. Lubenow, Bones of Contention: A Creationist Assessment of the Human Fossils,
Baker Book House, Grand Rapids (Michigan), 1992.
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