| No, he doesn't have a point. You can't just splice some genes and add 'language' and 'intelligence' into an existing organism. (Assuming that you define them currently as un-intelligent and without language). It's not quite the same as changing some config bits. Though that doesn't rule out that one day we may be able to do so but for now this is simply (according to my knowledge of the state of the art of genetic engineering) an impossibility. Besides the ethical questions it would raise. Building the bomb, breaking enigma and landing on the moon (and ITER, for that matter) were 'mere matters of engineering' by comparison, at least there we had a good idea of what we needed to achieve and what possible paths there were to that solution. For the atomic bomb, for instance, the Uranium atom had already been split (in 1938), for the moon landings we already had the German V2 rocket and so on. The steps may seem huge but the theoretical underpinnings were firmly in place when the technology moved forward. Usually this alternates, one step is made by science to advance the theory which then can be put to the test and put into practice by engineering and experiment. This may lead to new insight and so on. It's very rare for someone to say 'oh, it would be nice if we could do 'x'' and then to turn up with a complete and solved problem on the next iteration. There's a reason the moonshot and the atomic bomb took several years and very large amounts of money to complete, and in neither case were we 100% sure that we'd achieve them. |
And you know this how? Because of the copious amounts of experiments that have been performed, attempting to do this? I think it's equally silly to declare this certainly out of reach as it is to declare it certainly within reach. We haven't even tried, so how do we know what's possible? Perhaps all it takes is splicing a couple of genes from the human genome into a chimp embryo and kabloom: you have an intelligent chimp who can be as miserable about his or her condition as the rest of us.
No one has sat there and run the years' worth of experiments required to prove whether this is achievable with today's technology. We obviously can't say it's easy but we can't say how hard it is either.
The more interesting rebuttal, imho, is that genetically engineering some intelligent apes that can speak will not advance the cause of non-intelligent apes who can't speak, it will just create a new species of apes with a catastrophic uphill civil rights struggle ahead of them (if you think there's racism in the world today, wait till the chimps start demanding the right to vote, work, etc).
Which probably helps explain why we have not pursued that avenue of science particularly much: why do such a thing? It'd be ethically unconscionable, to set out to create another intelligent species who will be condemned to decades, if not centuries, of abuse, for no other reason than because maybe we can? Only a monster would set out to do such a thing.