The ID Report

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Ever hear the term "cognitive dissonance"? This first year psychology concept refers to the ways we handle two different mental states that are in apparent conflict. For example, Joe likes to smoke but knows that smoking is bad for him. He could quit smoking. That's one way to handle it. Another way is to simply deny the evidence that smoking is bad for him and continue to smoke. A third way is to adopt the belief that smoking helps him control his weight. Or that his particular brand is less harmful than others. These strategies vary a great deal in the extent to which they agree with facts or common sense, but they all have one thing in common: They reduce the anxiety Joe feels around smoking.

A zoo story

Last summer, when urban zoos competed with the beach, the London Zoo staged a "daring" show. For four days, August 26 through 29, it put three male and five female humans on display in the wooded habitat on Bear Mountain as homo sapiens. Spokeswoman Polly Wills explained that the exhibit "teaches members of the public that the human is just another primate."

The exhibit actually demonstrated the opposite.

A label was coyly affixed to the display: "Warning: Humans in their Natural Environment."

Associated Press enthused, "At London Zoo, you can talk to the animals — and now some of them talk back."

Hmm. No surprise there. Conveniently for the humans, they were separated from our primate relatives by an electric fence. Why, I wonder?

BBC News explained that the sapiens chosen for the display had to apply and give a 50 word pitch. (A pitch? Fifty words? Such high standards for language! Highly trained chimps, after six months of indoctrination and a grove of bananas, can barely manage to string together two sequential words, if that.

Indeed, one patron professed disappointment that the humans turned out to be wearing swimsuits beneath the cut-out, pinned-on paper fig leaves. Swimsuits? Paper? Pins yet? And where did they get the idea for those fig leaves anyway? Such airs.

And needless to say, all the humans went "home" at night and all the apes stayed behind lock and key. You can also be pretty sure that "home" for the humans was not a pile of leaves somewhere either.

Now what happened here psychologically is that when naturalistic beliefs (humans are just like apes) conflicted with evidence (pins, swimsuits, flats in London), onlookers chose Joe's second option—they simply denied the evidence and continued to assert the belief.

This shows why powerful beliefs like materialism are difficult to challenge. As long as the believer thinks he is getting something out of the belief, he can simply deny the evidence.

Kong: Would she really marry that gorilla?

Of course, the new King Kong movie has focused attention once again on how like/unlike us primate apes are.

Gorillas are a lot like humans—if they are really Hollywood stars. Otherwise, not, it seems. Researchers who study them tend to focus on what they see as similarities or interesting activities, missing the big picture. That fits in well with cognitive dissonance.

So does the dream of producing a human-chimp hybrid. Richard Dawkins, for one, has argued that if we could find an intermediate between humans and chimps, we would be more inclined to care about chimps:

Our chain of African apes, doubling back on itself, is in miniature like the ring of gulls round the pole, except that the intermediates happen to be dead. The point I want to make is that, as far as morality is concerned, it should be incidental that the intermediates are dead. What if they were not? What if a clutch of intermediate types had survived, enough to link us to modern chimpanzees by a chain, not just of hand-holders, but of interbreeders? Remember the song, 'I've danced with a man, who's danced with a girl, who's danced with the Prince of Wales'? We can't (quite) interbreed with modern chimpanzees, but we'd need only a handful of intermediate types to be able to sing: 'I've bred with a man, who's bred with a girl, who's bred with a chimpanzee.'

It is sheer luck that this handful of intermediates no longer exists. ('Luck' from some points of view: for myself, I should love to meet them.) But for this chance, our laws and our morals would be very different. We need only discover a single survivor, say a relict Australopithecus in the Budongo Forest, and our precious system of norms and ethics would come crashing about our ears. The boundaries with which we segregate our world would be all shot to pieces. Racism would blur with speciesism in obdurate and vicious confusion.

Quite apart from the absence of intermediates, evidence suggests that Dawkins has got the situation precisely reversed. The London Zoo story clearly demonstrates that people find it far easier to assume that humans are like apes than that apes are like humans. The leveling tendency would, in reality, go only one way—downward.

As it happens, recently released declassified documents show that Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin did in fact try breeding humans and chimpanzees, according to a recent article in The Scotsman:

Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia's top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.
According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: "I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat."

In 1926 the Politburo in Moscow passed the request to the Academy of Science with the order to build a "living war machine".

Of course it didn't work. The fact that humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes and chimpanzees have 24 likely proved an inconveniences.

Humorist Andy Borowitz seems to have struck the right note

Hollywood, which has been buzzing with rumors of a torrid romance between the former "Friends" star and the giant ape, got the news today from an official spokesperson representing Tinseltown's latest power couple.

"Jennifer and King Kong will be married this June," said Sherrie Lasky, the couple's publicist. "We hope the press and the public will respect their privacy."

If we are going to have cognitive dissonance, it may as well be funny.

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Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O’Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She is also co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).