"Spiked" on the difference between chimps and humans


"Just another ape?" is the title of Helene Guldberg's book examining the difference between humans and chimpanzees. In the January 2011 Spiked review of of books, in the article "The chasm between great apes and people" she looks at Jon Cohen's "Searching for What Makes Us Human, in Rainforests, Labs, Sanctuaries, and Zoos" and Jeremy Taylor's "Not a Chimp". The subheading for her article is "For all the claims that apes and humans are genetically ‘98.5 per cent the same’, there is still an unfathomable gap between us."

Spiked is a generally left-wing publication which prides itself on being "freethinking" and liberal; there is certainly much with which any orthodox Catholic would disagree. However it has a refreshing ability to question commonly held secular opinion. Helene Guldberg's article is a good example of this.

I was personally struck by the article particularly because in many respects it takes much the same line as Fr Edward Holloway, founder of the Faith Movement, in his book Catholicism: a new synthesis (although, of course, she does not go beyond the observable phenomena to argue for the existence of the spiritual soul.)

If you are interested in apologetics in this field that do not commit you to the denial of the evolution of matter (or indeed the error of proposing that the soul evolves from matter) you might well enjoy What Makes Man Unique? in the Reasons for Believing series.

H/T SPUC news

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