New, they say, is long-forgotten old. In the past this old adage used not to apply to scientific discoveries, but times change.
Our time in particular is becoming exceedingly more politicised, and science isn’t off limits for this observation. This is especially true of any findings that bring into doubt the key assumptions of our soulless, materialistic modernity.
One assumption modernity can’t do without is that man originates from the ape. Never mind that Darwin’s slapdash theory, and certainly the part of it that deals with the descent of man, has been debunked by just about every modern science you care to mention.
No other theory, and not even its staunchest supporters claim Darwinism is anything more than that, would have survived beyond one generation, two at most. But since without the crutch of Darwinism modernity has no philosophical leg to stand on, dissenting scientific data are brushed aside towards oblivion.
This amnesia, either deliberate or enforced, explains the noise accompanying the recent ‘discovery’ that elephants boast an intelligence far superior to that of primates, such as chimpanzees.
Apparently, when a researcher points at one out of ten buckets, an elephant picks the right one 67.5 percent of the time, falling just short of year-old babies (72.7 percent) and putting primates to shame. This discovery is being hailed as just that, and the impression given is that we’ve learned something new.
We haven’t. The data pointing in the same direction have been in the public domain for decades. But they have been hushed up for obvious reasons: if man is the most intelligent mammal and the chimp is his immediate ancestor, the chimp has to be seen as the intellectual giant among animals.
Many experiments have been staged on the basis of the a priori knowledge that the chimp has to be clever, and that was all there was to it. Many a Darwinist has set out to prove the intelligence of apes, allegedly so much superior to other animals’, if ever so slightly inferior to man’s.
It’s only when primatologists untainted by evolutionary afflatus became involved that any such claims were disproved. A conclusion has been reached that primates don’t differ from other mammals as much as was believed in the past. In fact, many scientists place chimpanzees lower on the intelligence scale than some other animals such as dolphins – and elephants.
For example, elephants and wild dogs bury their dead, whereas apes don’t. In fact the primatologist Jane Goodall showed that chimpanzees have no concept of death. Female chimps carry their dead young with them, and other siblings in the same litter continue to play with the corpse when it’s already in the late stages of decomposition.
Also, unlike whales who look after their aged and sick, apes often attack their defenceless old, setting a useful example for our ‘socioeconomically disadvantaged’ underclasses to follow.
Much has been made of the fact that apes can use a few primitive tools. After all, Engels, another demiurge of modernity, more or less equated this ability with humanity.
“Man was created by labour,” he wrote. Labour was therefore used as the simulacrum of God, though a straight swap has never quite caught on. One doesn’t hear many people praying to Labour, our Lord. Nor do many people insist that there’s no God other than Labour, and Richard Dawkins is its messenger.
However, thanks be to Labour, apes aren’t the only nonhumans who can use tools. For example, the Galapagos woodpecker (Cactospiza pallida) grips a cactus thorn in its beak to pluck insects out of the tree bark.
Some birds of prey attack ostrich nests by dropping stones from a great height. Eagles drop turtles onto stones to break the shells and eat the contents. Actually, Aeschylus is said to have been killed when one such turtle-lover mistook his bald pate for a stone. And there are many other examples of some animals being equal, and often superior, to primates.
When yet another bit of news emerges that suggests that this is the case, such as today’s reports about the elephant’s superior intelligence, it’s dutifully published and quickly forgotten.
Even before this onset of amnesia, no one dares suggest that perhaps the new experiments cast doubt on Darwinism. This isn’t to say that such reports lie by distorting facts. They don’t. They merely deceive by omitting to mention some obvious inferences and conclusions.
Meanwhile, children, in as much as they’re taught anything, are being taught Darwinism as unchallenged fact. You can set up your own experiment to prove this.
If you have a child of school age, ask him who the most intelligent animal is. If he doesn’t say ‘the chimp’, I’d be very much surprised – and you’d be well-advised to disabuse the youngster of such notions.
Bucking modernity doesn’t get one far in our modern world. At some point, the skies will open and Labour will smite the precocious tot with its mighty hand.