It trains the immune system to create antibodies that recognise Ebola, without risking an actual infection. They used one that doesn’t contain any live viruses instead, it comprises a piece of the virus’s coat. In 2011, his team, led by Kelly Warfield, finally tested an Ebola vaccine on three chimps. Walsh thinks there’s now more appetite for vaccinating wild animals. “It’s very difficult to get anybody to agree to do vaccinations.” But this attitude is waning, as the threat of diseases is becoming clearer. “There was a backlash against her,” says Walsh. In 1966, Jane Goodall stopped a polio epidemic among Tanzanian chimps by hiding an oral polio vaccine in bananas. Historically, conservationists have been happy to protect a species’ habitat or to fight poaching, but they’ve railed against interfering with the animals directly. These orphaned medicines could be used to save wild animals. They’re still years away from passing human trials, and since Ebola is a rare disease that mostly affects poor people in the tropics, a human vaccine may never become a commercial reality. He certainly has plenty to choose from: scientists have developed several potential Ebola vaccines that have protected mice and monkeys against the virus. In 2006, Walsh’s team estimated that recent Ebola outbreaks have killed around a third of the world’s gorilla population-some 5,000 animals in the Republic of the Congo-and a slightly smaller proportion of the world’s wild chimps.įor years, Walsh has argued that we should protect the survivors with vaccines. In the body of a human or ape, it causes severe and fast-burning disease. Under a microscope, the Ebola virus looks like a malevolent knot. Our ape relatives are vulnerable to infections like anthrax, malaria, and respiratory viruses that spill over from human tourists and researchers. The twin threats of poaching and habitat loss are driving the African apes-chimps, bonobos, and gorillas-towards extinction. These scientists were working with chimps to help chimps. At first glance, the study looked like a lot of other medical research, in which drugs that are meant for humans are first tested on other animals. But given all that we've learned about chimpanzees over the last 50 years - and how they keep surprising us - why should we assume that they don't also have transcendent experiences? That would seem to be a tantalizing possibility that's worth considering."Ĭan chimpanzee spirituality be productively explored outside the realm of science? As I told Paulson on the air, an insistence on delving into chimpanzees and the sacred, in my view, says a lot more about us than it does about chimpanzees.In February 2011, a team of scientists led by Peter Walsh at the University of Cambridge injected six captive chimpanzees with an experimental vaccine against the deadly Ebola virus. None of proves that chimpanzees have spiritual experiences or a sense of the sacred. So if spiritual experience among humans is largely beyond the capacity of science to explain, why do we assume that chimpanzee spirituality is strictly a science question? Consciousness remains a huge mystery, and spiritual experience is part of that mystery. "While science can tell us a great deal about the evolutionary benefits of religion - and even certain brain functions that happen during spiritual experiences - it has little to tell us about the nature of the experience itself. Kehoe reached out to me by email to express her regret about how her views on stone-throwing have been presented in the media, including in Paulson's interview, which, she felt, focused disproportionately on the spirituality angle at the expense of other possible explanations that she offered. We each suggested simpler explanations like apes wishing to impress an audience of other apes, or pure pleasure in aimed throwing at trees.īut then an interesting thing happened. In the same segment, Paulson also interviewed me and primatologist Frans de Waal. "I do think that it's a possibility - some things can seem unlikely until they are discovered." Could this be a ritual with a spiritual dimension? Could the trees be shrines? "Plausibility shouldn't be mistaken for proof," Kehoe replied to Paulson. to 9 kg.) stones at selected trees repeatedly, and sometimes place the stones in a tree cavity instead of hurling them. Kehoe described the basics for Paulson's audience: how chimpanzees in Guinea, often but not exclusively adult males, throw large (8 kg. My response to this passage was skepticism, both at The Atlantic and here at 13.7, because the leap from "potential chimpanzee stone-throwing ritual" to "sacred trees" is just too great for me.įast forward to last month, when Wisconsin Public Radio's Steve Paulson aired an i nterview with Kehoe at To the Best of Our Knowledge.
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