At the genetic level, we share most of our genes with all other mammals, many of them with insects and worms, almost all of them with close relatives such as chimpanzees. Biologically, we are no more different from other animals than they are different from each other. But at the level of behavior, the difference is enormous, not because humans make bows and plows and bombs and computers, not even because humans reason--pretty clearly animals do too--but because humans have language. Animals, of course, communicate as well, both among themselves and with humans. But the difference between a dog growling at a human, or even a bee dancing to tell other bees what direction and how far the source of nectar is, and humans talking, is a difference of degree large enough to seem a difference in kind.

What if animals too could talk—to us? It is an old dream, an occasional fiction. But it might be more.

Several decades ago, there were reports of serious scientific research suggesting that some non-human animals were capable of communicating at human or near human levels. The idea underlying the work was that the barrier to communication with our near relatives, such as chimpanzees and gorillas, was not intelligence but vocal speech. Humans have  organs adapted to produce human speech  and brains adapted to use and understand it; other primates have neither. Other primates do, however, have hands capable of producing the signs of a human sign language. So why not teach it to them?

One such project involved a gorilla named Koko. According to reports by the experimenters, she acquired a vocabulary of more than a thousand signs and the ability to understand about 2000 words of spoken English. They estimated her IQ at between 75 and 90--below the human norm but within the human range.

Critics argued that the results were largely bogus, the result of researchers seeing what they wanted to see. Thus it was claimed that Koko had created a new word, combining the signs for “water” and “bird” to label a duck. The alternative explanation was that, riding in a boat and seeing ducks, she had more or less randomly made a series of signs she had been taught, including both of those—and the researchers had filtered out all of the random and irrelevant combinations to report only on the one that seemed to demonstrate the ability to create language. So far as I can tell there has not been much happening along these lines in recent years, which suggests that the critics may have been right. But if they are wrong, not only are uplifted animals possible, at least one has already existed. 

Maybe, with a little more ingenuity and effort, one or more species of non-human  could learn to communicate with humans at a human level, using sign language or some other form of communication. Maybe, when they do, it will turn out that the other differences are smaller than we thought—that gorillas and chimpanzees are not really animals at all, as we understand animals, but humans who look funny, sufficiently intelligent to deal with other humans on a basis of at least near equality.

Evidence for that conjecture can be found in the book Chimpanzee Politics, which describes the result of careful observation of a chimp colony over a long period of time.  My favorite example was an experiment in which boxes of grapefruit were carried past their cages and buried out of their sight. The chimps were then released,  and spent some time in an apparently unsuccessful hunt for the goodies. Eventually nap time arrived. When all the other chimps were asleep, one low status male got up, went straight to where the fruit was buried, and started digging up grapefruits and and eating them.

Teaching animals to talk looks like the simplest path to uplifting them, to making them capable of interacting with humans on more or less human terms, but it is not the only one. Two others are suggested by previous chapters. One is genetic engineering. Once we have taken a careful look at the minor differences between the genes of humans and the genes of chimpanzees, perhaps we can work out which ones are responsible for some of the differences between the organisms those genes construct—including the differences that let humans, but not chimps, talk. Alternatively, if we make some progress in designing genes that make humans more intelligent, perhaps we can apply that knowledge to other species. As another possibility, if we can develop drugs that make humans smarter, they might  work on other species as well.

Suppose that some one of these approaches produces uplifted animals. That will raise some interesting issues for human societies and human laws.

One of the central principles--some would say myths--of modern legal and political systems is that all people are equal. It obviously is not true--some are smarter, more honest, taller, shorter, stronger, weaker, than others. But it is close enough to true to make possible legal rules that come close to treating everyone, with the obvious exceptions of children and lunatics,  as equal. One reason to have such rules is to prevent a running conflict over which of us count as fully human and entitled to a full set of rights and which as a little less fully human and entitled to a more restricted set.

That argument is harder to make, that principle harder to maintain, if some of us have bodies covered with fur, hands that lack opposable thumbs, and  different mental abilities than the rest. It gets harder still if those same people have patterns of behavior, burned into their brains by a million years of evolution, very different from the patterns burned into the brains of the rest of us. To put the point a little differently, how well will modern legal systems work, and how long will they last, in a world where the wildest imaginings of past believers in human racial differences are demonstrable fact for one or more species of (non-human) people?

Suppose we succeed in uplifting one or more species. Further suppose that we fit them into our institutions, proably as different sorts of people from us under somewhat different rules. How will we manage with different players, subject to different rules, sharing the same playing field?

Consider property. Some species are territorial, some are not, and the nature of territorial behavior varies across territorial species. In some  territory applies to only one gender, in others both. How do we deal with  people who really believe, deep in their hearts, that crossing the line marked by their urine is trespass that entitles them to attack the trespasser? How do we deal with people for whom the very idea of property, in land or anything else, simply makes no sense? Or consider other forms of behavior. The mating behavior of dogs looks a lot like rape. What if the same is true for one of the new kinds of people?

So far I have made, at least implicitly, the conservative assumption that uplift will be only for our close relatives. A number of experimenters have concluded that cetaceans, in particular dolphins, are among the most intelligent of animals; some have conjectured that the elaborate sounds they make are a language, perhaps a sophisticated one. More surprisingly still, there is some evidence that some species of birds are highly intelligent, despite their small brains. Consider the problems that will be raised when and if we uplift them.

This essay has two roles, as reading for the seminar and as a first draft of a new chapter for Future Imperfect. In the second role, it should keep going to discuss what problems such a legal system will face and how it might deal with them. In the first role, however, it must stop here.

Your turn.

For a fictional account of uplift, see the series of novels by David Brin that includes:

Sundiver

Startide Rising

Brightness Reef

The Uplift War

And a number of other books.