From Ben Mauk at LiveScience:
To say we are more “evolved” than our hairy cousins is just wrong. (See how long you last naked in the Congo Heartland, and then tell me who’s got the evolutionary upper hand.) More.
Ah, a question we can answer without a Google search! Free-living apes must survive naked in the Congo Heartland but few humans ever need to, or not for long. Which is why apes live in our conservation programs and we do not live in theirs.
So we have the upper hand, no contest.
Pop science is funny that way. People can make really inane statements and they pass for the best of science wisdom.
Actually, a different variety of pop science bumf holds that primates are in fact evolving into humans or something like that. Wasn’t 2015 the year that apes were entering the the Stone Age?
The apes seem to have gotten upstaged more recently by chickens, never mind ravens.
It probably makes more sense, from the pop science perspective, to just close one’s eyes and believe all this is happening than to try to figure out why it isn’t. That could be ideologically risky.
Anyway, there is always some casuistical experiment out there that can pretend that apes have (or need) a theory of mind. Ravens do too, by the way.
See also: Are apes entering the Stone Age?
Researchers say chickens are smarter than we think.
and
New Scientist: Why can’t monkeys talk? Hint: It wouldn’t make any difference if they did or not.
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