Most of what chimpanzees and humans do today is not directly comparable

I thought the difference is that by dint of our language use and our ability to modify our environment, we have the potential reproduce all the different social behaviors that the various primate species have - as well as social behaviors from even non-primate species.

Sure, it's wrong to image one is entirely outside of a social species, that things like dominance and submission don't play any part. But it seems just as wrong to make a single analogy to a single species and be done. We can be like wolves (predictors), sheep (prey), chimps (violently competitive), Bonabos (nonviolently cooperative), and so-forth but it's the complex structures of human society that are going to determine which of these sorts of animal we wind-up with.

It's important not to let the shock of realization "wow, human are just animals" stand in the way of thinking, "but we can still collectively shape which animals we will resemble".

Humans are the only species to show pervasive, non-kin reciprocal altruism. Baboon troops are matrilineal and stable troops have a high-degree of kinship through the females. Males are more likely to move between groups but males will also kill newborns when taking over a troop.

In other words, Baboon society is still completely comprehensible by traditional genetic evolutionary theory. More importantly, Baboon society is quite clearly _circumscribed_ by well-understood genetic theory.

No species comes close to the degree of altruism humans exhibit. I can drop into the middle of nowhere and be greeted with warm relations, free food, and free shelter even when everybody knows I'll never return and thus would never be capable of reciprocating. There are anecdotes of this happening in other species, and even between species, but they're just that--anecdotes. Whenever it seems pervasive, upon investigation it quickly becomes apparent that it's mediated by an underlying intra-kin process.[1] There's a tremendous gulf between humans and every other species, including Baboons, in this regard.

So not only do Baboons fail to reflect human behavior in small groups, it's preposterous to equivocate their behavior with human political behavior at scale. From the vantage point of aliens looking down on earth, large groups of humans, sometimes numbering in the hundreds of millions, behave much like ants or bees. But ants, bees, and all similarly behaving species are siblings! The lone, fascinating exception is humans.

While there are genetic limitations to human altruism, somehow we managed to flip the equation. Individuals are generally altruistic by default unless and until that altruism begins to impose a non-trivial burden, and even then the drop-off is gradual and haphazard. Even the meanest among us exhibit and experience more altruism throughout the day than a Baboon. No existing evolutionary model has clearly shown how humans made this leap. Group selection has never been proven to exist, period. That a behavior improves the survival and reproductive success of a _group_ doesn't explain how it can arise and become prevalent genetically. Group selection, like similar theories, are post hoc rationalizations that fail to explain the full genetic evolutionary process. Likewise, theories about the benefits of tool making, intelligence, language, etc all fail to explain the genetic leap.

It's difficult to exaggerate how significant and profound this difference is. Theories and rationalizations that don't account for this difference are fundamentally crippled. Indeed, theories that fail to fill this gap in our understanding have limited usefulness in terms of either their explanatory or predictive power.

[1] Because animals cannot reliably or consistently know degree of kinship, all cooperative behaviors will naturally rely upon proxy indicators. Thus, if the strategy for cooperation is being nice to people in your troop because statistically you're strongly genetically related to others in your troop, then cooperating with a completely genetically unrelated troop member still conforms to the basic mechanics of selfish gene reproduction. You can see how extraordinary it is that humans regularly cooperate with, let lone behave altruistically toward, random humans. Again, we can rationalize how this behavior persists now that our species has found a new equilibrium, but nobody can explain the leap forward. And finding an answer will be difficult to understand because we're the only ones who have made it. The anthropic principle might partially explain this, but figuring out exactly how it happened would be profoundly useful in terms of understanding our own innate capacities and limitations, as well as in building complex systems.

My friend was in the jungles studying primates during his college years. One day we went to a restaurant/bar to eat. A girl was sitting on a bar stool and her boyfriend stood next to her and was rubbing her shoulders. My friend looked at them for a few moments and then said "He's grooming her".

But the title is arguably baity, so we replaced it with a representative sentence from the text.

It is critical to classify a creature as friend or foe based on what class it belongs to, rather than granting the instance benefit of doubt.

How previously observed members of a group have behaved in the past constitutes rational evidence for estimating the future behavior of a newly observed member of that group.

And you're missing the point that the stratification of phenomena into "higher reasoning" <-> "base instinct" is a false hierarchy. Even when you're working within ethics, you eventually have to ground yourself in moral intuitions, which is fundamentally irrational (the underlying mechanism of moral intuition can't be examined through reason).

I think maybe what the author is ultimately saying is that it's not wrong to think about these uniquely human qualities as being just as natural and basic as anything else.

>"Do we gain insight by comparing President Trump to a chimpanzee?"

If you look again at that sentence you quoted, it has a hyperlink to primatologist Jane Goodall comparing Trump to a chimpanzee.[1]

Because Goodall is somewhat of a celebrity on the subject of chimps, and Trump is...obviously Trump, a lot of various media outlets picked up on the combination. E.g. Guardian, FT, Huffington, Fox News, etc.[2]

So it seems like the author is basically responding to all of that.

[1] http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-aggressive-chimp-and-ma...

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=comparing+President+Trump+to...