Biography:

Dr. Martinez-Contreras has a PhD in Philosophy by the Sorbonne and has been a professor for 38 years in four Mexican Universities and four French and Spanish ones (sabbatical leaves). He has published more than twenty books as single author, co-author and/or editor, and more than one hundred papers, most of them as a single author. He has given more than two hundred conferences and communications in specialized meetings. He is a specialist in Evolutionism, especially in History and Philosophy of Primatology (the impact of the discovery of intelligent apes on Western Philosophy and on general social values, is the main subject of his research). He has been Director of Social Sciences Division and President of the UAM, Iztapalapa Campus. He has been president of important scientific societies, as the Mexican Philosophical Association and the Mexican Primatological Society: he is also a founder of the Bogot Group of Evolutionary Thought (a European and Latin-American group of scholars working on evolutionism). He has also conducted fieldwork in Central and South America, and also in Africa, in order to study primates conservation efforts in those continents. He is finishing a trilingual edition of Buffons Primates and a book on Darwin, and preparing the specialized symposium to be publishedLamarck-Darwin. Two hundred years of evolutionism. He is co-organizing the IPS World Congress on Primatology, 2012.

Abstract:

Darwin: apes and savages. Altruistic issues

Darwin is credited wrongly as having been the naturalist who established that anthropoids were more similar to Humans than to other monkeys (it was actually Tyson, in 1699). Nor is he the first in the Occidental Tradition to propose that animals are in general quite similar to Humans (the Stoics were). Before him, Buffon had done a Cartesian comparison between non Occidental Humans (Hottentots) and anthropoids (orangutans, actually chimpanzees). But Darwin was the first naturalist to compare, on equal grounds, savages which he had had an existential experience in Tierra del Fuego with apes of which he learned things by reading Brehms Thierleben and visiting zoos, specially concerning something that the Englishman valued the most: altruism. In the Beagles Diary he shows a sort of admiration concerning the adaptation of Fuegians to their milieu, but also a repulse, since he did not understand how a hunter-gatherer society must subsist. He got the impression Fuegians and non-civilized men in general were egoistic and lacked solidarity. On the other hand, reading Brehms account of how a male Hamadryas baboon risked his own life in order to rescue one of his troops infant from a pack of dogs, he mentioned in The Descent of Man that he preferred to descend from an altruistic ape that from an egoistic savage. We analyze what was known then concerning savages and apes in order to understand some of the evolving moral values Darwin wanted to study comparatively.