The Animal Kingdom

I’m not so sure about Dr Douce’s little diatribe against science. There’s still an enormous place for progress and what on earth is this Centre here for but to develop mankind onto a higher level and escape his evolutionary heritage? Yet there is undoubtedly a point to be made here: even zoological taxonomy is not as stable as it used to be. Thanks to our understanding of DNA—the key to biological identity—we now know what behavioural science has been suggesting for decades—that we are extremely close to the other primates, and hence the labelling has to be changed. But this is not an arbitrary act; a paradigm shift has been effected through actual scientific progress.