A chimps intelligence is affected by Genes
A recent analysis discovered that the cognitive abilities of chimpanzees are determined by genetic factors playing a significant role. Researchers from Georgia State University combined cognitive performance tests with genetic analysis and figured out that there are some heritable cognitive traits in chimps. This study was reported in Current Biology. Parents pass on cognitive abilities to offspring just like in humans. Social and environmental aspects such as education and socioeconomic status, can impact an individual’s intelligence. Genetics concluding human intelligence was a debating topic for a while. It is also sufficiently clear that it can be passed from parent to child. It is harder for us to understand how genes vs environmental factors can mold cognition in non-human animals such as nonhuman primates. For several years people believed that cognitive traits were connected to the latter.
To explore this topic more, researchers studied and examined if cognitive behavior is heritable in chimps. 13 different tasks that were built to test many cognitive abilities in chimps. 99 Chimps from the ages 9-54 took part. The genetic analyses and the data from this experiment were combined to examine the degree of relatedness of the chimps during the task performance. Only some cognitive traits could be inherited in chimpanzees as result. This connects back to how it was thought that behavior is impacted by environmental factors. “In our case, at least, it suggests that purely environmental explanations don’t really seem to tell the whole story,” lead author William Hopkins claimed in a news-release. “Genes matter as well.”
It is implied that the intelligence of a chimpanzee is reflected to the the way the intelligence of humans as it was displayed during the the observation the chimps, Hopkins suggested. Though more studies on this topic need to be performed, it also benefits the topics of other studies and opens the doors for many new topics revolving around this idea. Researcher will progress in this work by examining bigger samples and discovering which genes are involved in concluding cognitive abilities in chimps.
