3:41pm June 9, 2012

I’ve been thinking about monkeys.

I watched a bunch of monkey videos recently. And I was struck by how very like us they are. I’m puzzled at how anyone could deny the resemblance. And I’m talking monkeys, not apes.

But then I don’t see what other people see. I saw their movement patterns, which are our own, just adapted to their body shape. There is no difference other than that. Their emotions were the same.

What I’m saying is an approximation though. I don’t know the words for the depth I saw. I saw who they were on a deep level. And it was nearly identical to who we are. Just a few tiny surface differences.

Those surface differences are mostly a little more of certain cognitive abilities and things like that. And compared to what we have in common (which is huge and deep), any cognitive and social differences look very small indeed.

They may make a huge difference in our lifestyles, but that’s a huge result, not a huge difference to begin with. Most people confuse those things. It’s like someone with a lever will appear far stronger than someone without. The actual difference in strength may be small, but the result will be big.

Plus, their actual kind of cognition is so very much like us. It reminds me both of humans and of parrots. There’s something about it that strongly resembles what our bodies do – grab and manipulate stuff. Apes and monkeys do it with our hands. Parrots do it with their beaks and feet. And it shows up in how we think. I see the same exact movements going on in our patterns of thought. And there’s a ridiculous amount of overlap among all these species in terms of what we are able to do with those thoughts, even if some of us are usually better at certain things than others.

It still amazes me how different most people’s sense of proportion is. They cannot see that with the thousands of ways nondisabled people get support from their societies, disabled people’s few dozen extra ways are barely any different in the scheme of things. (And that’s not getting into the ways we need less support than most people.) And they can’t see that with the depth of similarities between us and monkeys, the differences are minimal, and the difference between us and bonobos or chimps is barely there at all.

The differences may be interesting to study in a level of detail where you get immersed in it and see it as huge because it’s right in front of you and you’ve got it under a microscope. But the differences. The actual innate differences. Those are smaller than you think. And the similarities are wide and deep.

8 notes