Articles – Page 4 – Helene Guldberg

3 November 201014 March 2022

Animals are useless, unless humans make use of them

Should apes have rights? Absolutely not. Rights are a human concept, premised on the idea of autonomous individuals, who should be treated equally before the law.

Animals are not autonomous. They cannot take responsibility for their own actions, and they cannot – like us humans – subordinate their individual natural drives to the interest of society as a whole. In fact, they do not have society. It is therefore nonsensical to grant animals rights.

19 August 201014 March 2022

Orang-utans are not remotely like humans

Time and again, we are told that humans are not that special after all: abilities previously thought to be uniquely human are now purportedly evident amongst the great apes. The most recent claim, published in the current issue of the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, is that orang-utans use mime to make themselves understood.

8 July 201014 March 2022

Set children free by trusting adults

Oliver and Gillian Schonrock have inspired a heated debate this week about how much independence children should have. The couple from south London have been allowing their eight-year-old daughter and five-year-old son to cycle one mile unsupervised from their home to school.

29 April 201014 March 2022

Monkeys mourning? Don’t make me laugh

A handful of chimp mothers carrying around their dead babies is not evidence of ‘human-like’ qualities.

‘Chimps “feel death like humans”’, the BBC reported this week. And according to Scientific American: ‘Like tool use and self-awareness, distinct grief and mourning might be just one more thing we share with our closest living relatives.’

12 March 201014 March 2022

This isn’t racism – it’s just kids being kids

A new book explodes the myth of racist children and reveals how anti-racist initiatives in British schools have split pupils into ethnic camps.

15 October 200714 March 2022

Battle in Print: comments on Sue Palmer’s ‘Out to Play’

The modern world is damaging children. They are cooped up inside – impassive and apathetic, and unable to create their own fun and entertainment. Their imagination is dulled by too many hours watching the TV and playing on sedentary computer games. Their minds are corrupted by commerce and advertising. They are traumatised by testing.

So we are increasingly led to believe.

3 November 200414 March 2022

The determinist myth

The idea that the first three years of our lives make us who we are is scientifically unsound.

4 September 199914 March 2022

A right to play

A few years ago, in my home town of Trondheim, a five-year-old girl called Silje was beaten up by three boys of her own age, knocked unconscious and left to freeze to death in the snow. People were shocked. Teachers and childcare officers were not alone in wanting to know where the adults had been when this happened. The children, it transpired, had been playing outdoors unsupervised.