They surely could given enough time and humanity’s extinction from their environment but that’s not the point I’m making.
We are so close to the other primates biologically that we can learn from their biology driven behavior.
Instead of projecting what humanity imagines to exist, we must look at what exists in the physical world and in absence of abstract conjectures based on our feeble social conventions.
We are the prime species because we can model the potential of the world around us but that aspect of our mind has blinded all of us to more simple truths that can be immediately observed in our lives.
We are letting ourselves be guided by values we have projected onto ourselves artificially and living within the understanding that what we have imagined to be true must be the total summation of how our mind works.
Physical changes in the brain produce profound differences in in our behavior and they drive our survival in a group of ways that people seldom understand.
I’m not saying lower primates are superior to humanity, I am saying they are probably the most useful key to understanding what the human species actually is without the pollution of our overactive imagination and emotional weaknesses.
We are the product of our parts. If we can understand how the minds work for our closest relative species work electrochemically, mechanically, architecturally, model their function (because we cannot do that with our own species out of concern for bioethics) then we will have an invaluable tool in understanding humanity.
Seeing and understanding those differences in lower primate biology becomes a massive boon for insuring a better outcome for our species in the long term whether or not you project some tree hugger bullshit onto my system of beliefs.
The natural world hates all things except the vacuum. We are a race of microscopic plankton clinging to a mudball hurtling through space at thousands of miles per hour. Eventually we’re going to do something that fucks this tiny little space up and then we’re all going to go extinct. I’d rather that happen because of the heat death of our solar system than becasue we were too busy autofellating on the strength of our delusions.
The next time a tiger eats a man in the wild, I’d like someone to get a picture of if it and we can decide if he thinks the person was the superior species. Hell no. That person was just lunch. To the vacuum of space we’re not anything at all.