Not so simple

I was reading Nicholas Wade’s paean to E.O. Wilson (who deserves it, after all) in the NYT Science Section when this caught my eye:

When Human Rights Extend to Nonhumans
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

The environment committee of the Spanish Parliament voted last month to grant limited rights to our closest biological relatives, the great apes — chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans.

The committee would bind Spain to the principles of the Great Ape Project, which points to apes’ human qualities, including the ability to feel fear and happiness, create tools, use languages, remember the past and plan the future. The project’s directors, Peter Singer, the Princeton ethicist, and Paola Cavalieri, an Italian philosopher, regard apes as part of a “community of equals” with humans.

It’s worth reading the whole story at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/weekinreview/13mcneil.html?ref=science&pagewanted

A point common to both the Wilson story – which focused on his theories of “social evolution,” (which irks the evolutionists like Dawkins who believes that the gene is everything in evolution) and the one above is the tendency of human nature to select one fact above all others and say that’s the explanation for everything. Whether it’s evolution or animal rights – or darn near anything else from traffic to marriage – the real reasons for why things are the way they are usually are much more subtle and various than any theory can account for.

So whether we’re reading Wilson or Genesis, it’s probably a good idea to approach the text as a kind of libretto. You can understand the outlines of the story, but you won’t understand the opera until you hear the aria.