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Big soup post. Zoologist, ethologist and surrealist painter Desmond Morris trained a chimp, Congo, in the 1950s in abstract expressionist painting. His (its?) paintings (one of which is pictured above) recently scored a record price for chimp-art at a london auction. Picasso reportedly owned and loved a Congo painting.
In the meanwhile reserchers are trying to put human genes everywhere, with particular regard to growing spare organs for quasi-xenotransplants. One branch of these hybridization attempts centers on implanting the FOX2P gene (one of the genes allegedly responsible of language, although this is a simplification) in a great ape genome. Shivers…
Human/animal crossbreeding is not the only way in which animals might be given the ability to talk. In 2002, researchers in Britain discovered that the FOXP2 gene in humans is required for articulate speech. While it is not the language gene, it is certainly one of the genes necessary for the ability to talk. The proteins produced by human FOXP2 gene differ by only two amino acids from the proteins produced by the FOXP2 gene in chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. Would research that creates a transgenic chimpanzee with human FOXP2 genes elicit moral concern? Since FOXP2 orchestrates the actions of a variety of genes early in the development of the brains of human fetuses, and might have similar effects in chimpanzee fetuses, there may be grounds for ethical worries about such an experiment. (Reason Magazine, Nov. 24, 2004)
Other, less invasive, attempts at human-great ape communication include Bonobos that communicate verbally between each other and then visually with humans, a sort of bonobo-wireless-telegraph
In one experiment she described to me, she placed Kanzi and Panbanisha, his sister, in separate rooms where they could hear but not see each other. Through lexigrams, Savage-Rumbaugh explained to Kanzi that he would be given yogurt. He was then asked to communicate this information to Panbanisha.”Kanzi vocalized, then Panbanisha vocalized in return and selected ‘yogurt’ on the keyboard in front of her,”Savage-Rumbaugh tells me. (Smithsonian magazine)
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