Chimpanzees

Chimpanzees are invoked in The Selfish Gene to expose the gap between biological relationship and moral status: although they can feel and think and may learn a form of human language, human beings accord them less protection than a human foetus. Elsewhere, the book’s discussion of kinship uses the care of an orphaned sibling to show how the evolutionary account of parental care extends to other close relatives. Together, these references place Chimpanzees within a broader argument about how human categories and animal behavior intersect with the gene-centered explanation of altruism.

Moral Status and Species Boundaries

The book contrasts the reverence and legal protection accorded a human foetus with the much lesser consideration given to an adult chimpanzee. The contrast turns on species membership rather than demonstrated capacities: the foetus is described as having no more human feeling than an amoeba, while the chimpanzee can feel and think and, according to experimental evidence cited in the book, may be capable of learning a form of human language. The example challenges the assumption that human moral priority follows from a simple ranking of sentience or intelligence.

This comparison appears in a critique of speciesism, the practice of assigning special moral standing to members of one’s own species. The author observes that people may shrink from the execution of human criminals while accepting the killing of animal pests, and may even treat the killing of other harmless species as recreation. Chimpanzees make the inconsistency especially plain: their capacities are acknowledged, yet their membership in another species leaves them with fewer protections. The book does not claim that evolutionary biology supplies a moral rule for correcting this hierarchy; instead, it argues that species-based privilege has no proper basis in evolutionary biology.

Language, Communication, and Deception

Chimpanzees also enter the discussion through Washoe, the chimpanzee who used American Sign Language. The author recalls attending a lecture by Beatrice and Allen Gardner about Washoe, whose achievement is presented as potentially important to students of language. During the discussion, some philosophers focused on whether Washoe could tell a lie. The author sets that question aside as less useful than the broader issue of how deception works in animal communication.

For this argument, deception does not require a conscious intention to mislead. It is enough that a signal has an effect functionally equivalent to deception: for example, a false alarm call that causes other birds to flee and leaves the caller access to food. The episode involving Washoe clarifies the book’s method. Terms such as lying and deceiving are used to describe consequences and evolutionary functions, not necessarily reflective intentions. The chimpanzee is therefore relevant both as an animal whose communication raises questions about language and as the occasion for distinguishing behavioral effect from conscious purpose.

Kinship, Care, and Evolutionary Explanation

The book’s treatment of kin altruism emphasizes that parental care is not genetically unique. An adult is related to its own child and to an orphaned younger sibling by the same degree, one half. In gene-selection terms, the author argues, a tendency to care for a younger sibling could spread as readily as a tendency to provide parental care, even though sibling care is much less common in nature. What matters to this explanation is the chance that the same gene is present in the recipient, not the social label attached to the relationship.

The discussion distinguishes genetic relatedness from the ways humans identify and organize kinship. Human beings learn who their relatives are through names, marriage customs, written records, and memory; family obligations and loyalties are also shaped by cultural ideas of descent and kinship. The book notes that kinship rituals, ancestor worship, blood-feuds, and inter-clan warfare can be interpreted in relation to genetic theories, while cautioning that incest taboos are presumably connected to the harmful effects of recessive genes in inbreeding rather than to altruism. The contrast matters for reading the chimpanzee examples: biological relatedness and socially recognized kinship are related questions, but they are not interchangeable.

Recognition, Adoption, and Misfiring Rules

Because animals cannot be assumed to calculate relatedness explicitly, the book asks what simple behavioral rules might produce kin-favoring outcomes. Physical resemblance is one proposed cue: an animal inclined to help individuals who look like itself might, on average, help relatives. Such a rule would not always identify kin correctly, and its reliability could change as a species’ living conditions changed. The argument treats apparent recognition as a statistical effect of a practical rule, not as evidence that an animal understands genetic relationships.

Adoption among monkeys illustrates the possible error. An orphan may be taken in by a female who has lost her own young; observers sometimes call the adopter an aunt, although, the author stresses, there is often no evidence that she is a relative. On a gene-centered account, care for an unrelated orphan may be a misfiring of a rule that ordinarily benefits kin, since the adopter spends time and energy that could have gone to her own relatives or future offspring. The book also notes that adoption does not always occur and that some orphans are left to die. These examples make the explanation conditional rather than sentimental: behavior that appears generous can benefit an animal’s genes when directed toward relatives, while similar behavior toward a nonrelative may not.