From G. A. BARBER
Richard Dawkins (‘Meet my cousin, the chimpanzee’, 5 June) surely
exaggerates when he claims that the discovery of a surviving intermediate
between mankind and the chimpanzees would cause our previous system of norms
and ethics to come crashing down.
The idea that we are close relatives to the apes has been around for some
time now. Dawkins is right to point out that we should be treating them with
a proper respect, but is he not guilty of speciesism by stopping his chain
of parent-child bonds at the man-chimp common ancestor? Why not go back all
the way to the first replicating organism or beyond and ‘meet my cousin, the
rock’?
Dawkins is famous for the strategy of ontological reductionism, that of
saying that we are ‘nothing-but’, which reduces man to just apes, apes to
just ‘selfish genes’, and genes to just molecules. But life has emerged from
inanimate matter, intelligence has emerged from living organisms and
conscious self-awareness, with norms and ethics, has emerged in Homo sapiens
from intelligent apes.
By failing to see the validity of these emergent properties, which have an
authentic existence of their own, he is blind to their nature and the rules
which they follow.
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G. A. Barber
Twickenham, Middlesex
