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If Apes Are Getting Smarter, What's In Store For US?

Humans test a lot of stuff on primates. One of the reasons we do it is to get a better idea of how we would react to often ludicrous experiments, like getting "launched into outer space":http://motherboard.tv/2010/7/29/monkey-nauts-five-great-space...

Humans test a lot of stuff on primates. One of the reasons we do it is to get a better idea of how we would react to often ludicrous experiments, like getting launched into outer space or being injected with infectious diseases. While both sound like a laugh and a half, If I was asked to weigh in on it, I’d probably tell you that you can only force a primate to do something for so long before it eats the last of your Xanax and rips off your friend’s face.

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At the end of the day, any example of messing with another species, be it for science or for fun, should be read as a cautionary tale, which is precisely the idea behind 20th Century Fox's upcoming $90 million, James Franco-starring summer blockbuster, The Rise of the Planet of the Apes. That's right. I'm not performing an experiment on you, you really read two "of the's." I had a chance to read those words again and again earlier this month, when I was invited to Los Angeles by Twentieth Century Fox to attend a “summit” for the movie, where I got a better understanding of animal experimentation of all kinds.

First thing’s first: This ain’t your grandma’s La Planète des singes. The Rise of the Planet of the Apes isn’t a remake. It’s not even really a prequel. It’s the beginning of a new series of films about apes and planets, which draws from the original series, where Charlton Heston is manlier than a bulldozer that runs on American chop suey.

In order to make a more “authentic” Apes, Fox enlisted director Rupert Wyatt and the Peter Jackson-owned company of visual magicians, WETA Digital, the geniuses who provided the eye-twisting special effects for Avatar and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, to create the most believable movie about primate revolution of all time.

If you want unbelievable to look believable, WETA Digital are the lunatics you turn to. But if you want unbelievable to be believed, you turn to YouTube—the great bastion of the hard to tell. It seems not a second goes by on our planet without someone questioning whether or not a video on YouTube is real (or uploading a video that certainly is not); what's more, many people assume something is real because it's on YouTube. That's like people thinking Orson Welles' adaptation of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds was real because it was on the radio. Which happened (just to clarify). I'd link to Wikipedia, but that feels wrong right now.

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At any rate, Fox is going for the real deal so they did “extensive research” to find “evidence” that apes are getting smarter and that there's real reason to believe that the fictional narrative of Rise of the Planet of the Apes could actually unfold in real life if we don't smarten up ourselves.

Said research includes some of the following videos. I'll admit they’re pretty interesting, but advise, knowing the fickleness of the Internet and the enthusiasm of executives for viral marketing, that they could turn out to be completely bogus, and I don't want to be responsible for that. I will say, as far as advertising goes, it's a pretty clever idea.

Nice job, apes.

Here’s a chimp scoring higher on an intelligence test than a human
Here’s a chimp walking like a human
Here’s a chimp playing a video game (this is the only thing I believe a chimp can do better than me)