I beleive that the paper was originally titled "Gorillas In Our Midst" which is a wonderful play on the title of the Dian Fossey book Gorillas in the Mist.
The title doesn't really do this article justice. The first paragraph does a better job explaining what it's about:
> For a graphic in the September 2014 issue of Scientific American, the editors challenged me to visually support the statement that we’re more like chimps and bonobos than gorillas, genomically speaking.
Possibly and thank you for using that metaphor properly. The article says "There’s another gorilla in the room:"
No!no!No!!!! The 500 lb gorilla sits anywhere it wants. The elephant in the room is what people don't want to talk about. Nowadays not only has the gorilla's weight increased to 800 lbs, he is now in the room. This article goes further, now we have multiple gorillas in the room? Flee that room.
I agree, but the problem I think others are having is your use of the word "human". You really mean a subset of humans: the issue isn't so much that the gorillas are exhibiting human-like behavior but that the article writer is ascribing non-universal motivations to their behavior.
Really interesting article, one thing I thought fascinating, was the idea: we and gorillas (and chimps) share a common ancestor that developed complex societies, but chimpanzees have lost a lot of this trait. It makes we wonder what was the stimulus that caused their genus to undergo a regression of social skills?
Also, the "Darwin" hoodie the Dr. Morrison is wearing at the bottom is awesome.
> living side by side with creatures that are only quite like us is an experience that has been lost in the collective human memory
I played with and interacted with chimpanzees quite a few times around Africa [1], and spent hundreds of hours watching them and just chilling while they ate, slept and played.
Sitting face to face with a large chimp on your lap is an incredible experience, and watching their facial expressions, emotions and reactions while checking out their fingerprints and having them groom your beard is a very powerful experience.
To my very core I had the feeling we are them and they are us.
Spending time with gorillas was cool too [2], but I didn't exactly play with them!
Ah, I wouldn't say I've lost complete confidence in my statement. Just wanted to add a disclaimer in case I didn't fully remember the details correctly (perhaps it isn't all gorillas, just certain species of gorillas. Perhaps the female gorillas aren't entirely infertile, just significantly less so. Etc), as I don't have the book handy to validate.
It sounds like the exact opposite of that story. They manually blacklisted gorillas from being identified because they kept conflating black people with gorillas.
The science isn't there for gorillas communicating like humans. No publications, no data and Robin Williams anecdotes instead. If there was something there one would think there would be more scientists doing research down that path.
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