A boy is a rat is a dog...

Yahoo! News - Researchers to Study Apes, Forgiveness So let me get this straight. Scientists take it as an article faith that there is nothing particularly special about humans - since we are evolved beings and share common ancestry with apes, the ancestral roots of behavior we call "human" must be observable in non-humans. So researchers plan to spend $125,000 (fortunately not taxpayer's money) to observe captive apes and look for signs of behavior they can label as "forgiveness," thereby proving the point that non-humans exhibit "human" behavior. Seems just a tad bit ... circular. I wonder if anyone is interested in studying whether "non-humans" deprived of food and water by their care-givers exhibit forgiveness.