International Campaign - Great Apes as Living World
Heritage
Many scientists now consider as nonhuman persons those beings who,
according to the concept of a person, surpass the definition accepted by many
philosophers. A few years ago, Joseph Fletcher (1905-1991), one of the
founders of modern bioethics, created a comprehensive and well-known
concept of 15 criteria for personhood: at least a minimal level of intelligence,
self-awareness, self-control, sense of time, sense of futurity, sense of the past,
capacity to relate to others, concern for others, communication, control of
existence, curiosity, change and changeability, balance of rationality and
feeling, idiosyncrasy and neo-cortical function. Today we know that all great
apes, not only humans, possess these 15 attributes, to varying degrees, but
also to a sufficient standard to meet the criterion for personhood.
Kofi Annan, former UN General Secretary, once affirmed. "The great apes are
our relatives. Like us, they transmit knowledge, have social life and
manufacture tools and medicines. They communicate with people and
recognize themselves in. However, we have not been treating them with the
respect they deserve."
Richard Leakey, well known worldwide anthropologist, said: "We should extend
to our brothers chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and bonobos basic rights to
close the gap that should never have existed."
Only 1% of genes separates us from chimpanzees and bonobos, and the
renowned geneticist Richard Goodman, a leading geneticist, affirmed, in 2003,
that these species of great apes should be framed within the genus Homo.
Jose Maria Bermudez de Castro, Prince of Asturias Prize and co-director of
Atapuerca, whose paleontological collections are among the world's largest and
declared a World Heritage Site and Place of Exceptional and Universal Value by
UNESCO, said: "The information the hominids, our closest living relatives in
phylogenetic terms, provide us is invaluable. They are a reference and
indispensable model for all studies conducted in humans. Only by this fact, we
must protect their natural habitat and respect their life. The genetic differences
that separate us from the current hominids are very small. We share with them
a common evolutionary history of millions of years. Why the few species of our
own evolutionary family should disappear without scruples? We must recognize
the great apes as members of our own genealogy."
It is for this reason that those who sign below strongly urge the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to declare the four
species of great apes a LIVING WORLD HERITAGE.
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