How is “chimpanzee ethnomedicine” possible? Could it be based on some kind of hereditary information: You feel sick and suddenly you have a craving for a leaf whose shape or aroma is implanted in your brain from the beginning—like the goslings who are said to be born with a hereditary fear of the silhouette of a hawk? Or, more probably, is this cultural information passed on—by emulation or instruction—from generation to generation, and subject to rapid change if the available medicinal plants change, or if new diseases arise, or if new ethnomedical discoveries are made? Except that there are apparently no professional herbalists or medical specialists among the apes, chimpanzee folk medicine does not seem so different from human folk medicine. There’s a common complaint for which everyone knows what medicine to take. It’s something you learn as you grow up. Why the medicine works is a mystery to them—as it still is, in many cases, to us.
Some scholars have imagined that sexual repression was the first and inaugurating facet of human culture.41 Unrestrained expression of sexual desire—especially among young men and women—will destroy the framework of society, it is suggested, so early human cultures must have placed severe restraints on sexual activity, and encouraged guilt, modesty, hard work, cold showers, and clothing. However, there are many human cultures, often in the tropics, with frameworks apparently uncompromised by the fact that adults go around unselfconsciously stark naked—or perhaps with a thin vine or cotton belt that conceals no sexual parts. In South America, Yanomamo women are wholly unclothed, except for such a belt; the men tie their foreskins to their belts (although they are embarrassed should the penis slip free).42 In New Guinea and elsewhere, men cover up by wearing gourd sheaths that immodestly exaggerate their proportions. Before the Europeans arrived, the aboriginal peoples of Australia, even those in chilly climates, wore no clothes at all. In ancient Greece, Egypt, and Crete, adult nakedness was common, at least for slaves and athletes (although women spectators were excluded from the Olympic games on the grounds that it would be immodest for them to watch male athletes competing in the nude). Nudist camps seem to be models of decorum. Restraints on the permissible can be much less severe than the more repressive cultures ever imagine—as Captain James Cook’s crews discovered in Tahiti.
Victorian sexual attitudes are clearly not characteristic of our species. Moreover, sexual jealousy is a common cause of domestic violence among monkeys and apes; despite their more relaxed sexual standards, they have inhibitions in place. All primate societies, humans and everyone else, set limits on acceptable practice. Sexual repression and associated feelings of shame cannot be the hallmark of our species.
Another aspect of cultural life sometimes thought to be uniquely human is art, dance, and music. But given pencils or paints, chimps with considerable drive and deliberation make art that, though exclusively nonrepresentational as far as we can see, is thought presentable in some circles.43 Male bower birds decorate their nests guided by an aesthetic that resonates with ours; they regularly replace picked flowers, feathers, and fruit that are no longer fresh; their art evolves through the summer. Gibbons fling themselves balletically through the high forests, and chimps can be counted on to rock and roll at waterfalls and in rainstorms. Chimps delight in resonant drumming, and gibbons in song. Although we like to think it has reached its greatest elaboration in us, culture is not restricted to humans, or even44 to the primate order.
Here is a 1932 joint assessment of primate and human culture by Solly Zuckerman:At the one extreme there is the monkey or ape with its harem, frugivorous [fruit-eating], without any vestige of cultural processes. At the other extreme is man, usually monogamous, omnivorous, whose every activity is culturally conditioned. Socially there are no obvious comparisons between man and ape.45
Put aside the facts that chimps eat meat, that most monkeys and apes have no harems, and—a fact known even in 1932—that in many cultures humans are not “usually” monogamous; and compare Zuckerman’s assessment with Toshisada Nishida’s, in a much later overview of twenty-five years of research on chimpanzees in the Mahale mountains:[T]he following social behavioral patterns are known to be present in both the chimpanzee and our own species: strong tendency to avoid incest, long-lasting mother-offspring relationship, male philopatry [males remaining in the group they are born into], strong antagonism among groups, cooperation among males, development of reciprocal altruism, triadic awareness [for example, sexual triangles], alliance fickleness strategy, revenge system, sex difference in political behavior …46
Much of this may be genetically, as well as culturally, determined, but “socially” there do seem to be some “obvious comparisons” between man and ape.
——
Consciousness and self-awareness are, in the West, widely esteemed as the essence of being human (although the absence of self-awareness is considered a state of grace and perfection in the East); the origin of consciousness is imagined to be an unfathomable mystery, or—not so different—the consequence of the insertion of an immaterial soul into each human being, but into no other animal, at the moment of conception. Consciousness may not be so mysterious a trait, though, that supernatural intervention is needed to explain it. If its essence is a lucid awareness of the distinction between the inside of the organism and the outside, between you and everyone else, then, as we’ve argued, most microorganisms are to this degree conscious and aware; and then the origin of consciousness on our planet dates back more than 3 billion years. There were vast numbers of microscopic creatures then, buffeted by sea swells and ocean currents, reveling in the sunlight, each with a rudimentary consciousness—perhaps only a microconsciousness, or even a nano- or picoconsciousness.47
Every cell in a healthy body can make the distinction between itself and others, and those that cannot, that suffer from auto-immune diseases, quickly kill themselves or fall prey to disease microorganisms. But maybe you’re thinking that a cell distinguishing itself from another cell (in your body or in the primeval sea) is not what is generally meant by consciousness or self-awareness, that even for exceptionally unreflective humans there’s more to it than that. Yes. As we’ve said, only the most rudimentary kind of consciousness can be imagined in the early history of life on Earth. Of course, there’s been substantial evolution since then. Do we know—it might be a very hard thing to know—whether any other animals have our kind of self-awareness?
This is often thought to be a key facet of our humanity, especially because of what else it makes possible:The attribute of self-awareness, which involves man’s capacity to discriminate himself as an object in a world of objects other than himself, is … central to our understanding of the prerequisites of man’s social and cultural mode of adjustment … A human social order implies a mode of existence that has meaning for the individual at the level of self-awareness. A human social order, for example, is always a moral order … It is man’s capacity for and development of self-awareness that makes such unconscious psychological mechanisms as repression, rationalization and so on of adaptive importance for the individual.48
A fish, a cat, a dog, or a bird catching sight of itself in the mirror apparently understands the image only as another member of the same species. If unhabituated to mirror images, male animals may attempt to intimidate the reflection; it must be sensed as a rival male. The image intimidates back and the animal may flee. Eventually, it accommodates to the silent, odorless, and harmless image and learns to ignore it. By mirror reflection criteria, these animals don’t seem very smart. It is said that human children must usually be about two years old before they grasp that their mirror image is not some other child with a talent for imitation. In recognizing what a reflection is, monkeys also are like fish, cats, dogs, birds, and human infants. They don’t get it. But some apes are like us.
In 1977 the psychologist Gordon Gallup published an article entitled “Self-Recognition in Primates.”49 When chimpanzees born in the wild were confronted with a full-length mirror, at first—like other animals—they thought the reflection was someone else. But within a few days they had it figured out. Then, they’d use the mirror to preen, and to examine inaccessible parts of themselves, looking over their shoulders to view their backs, for example. Gallup then anesthetized the chimps and painted them red—in places that they could see only in the mirror. Upon regaining consciousness and resuming the pleasures of self-examination in the mirrors, they quickly discovered the red marks. Did they reach out to the ape in the glass? Instead, they groped their own bodies, touched the painted areas repeatedly, and then smelled their fingers. They trebled the time they spent each day examining their mirror images.*
Among the other great apes, Gallup found mirror self-awareness in orangs, but not in gorillas. Later, he may have found it in dolphins. We are conscious, he proposes, when we know that we exist, and have a mind when we monitor our own mental states. By these criteria, Gallup concludes, chimps and orangs, at least, are conscious and have minds.50
“As to what concerns fidelity, there is no animal in the world so treacherous as man,” said Montaigne.51 But male fireflies skillfully interpose their own blinks so as to make the courting message of their rivals disagreeable to the females. Some chimp females vampirishly stalk young mothers of their group, waiting for the chance to steal and eat their newborns. Many primates seek surreptitious matings when the alpha’s attention is elsewhere. Few of the male alliances rippling through the dominance hierarchy persist beyond their utility. Deception in the social relations of animals, and even self-deception in animals, is an emerging and productive topic in biology; whole books are written about it.52
Chimps sometimes lie. They also sometimes try to outwit others who are lying. This fact surely affords us a glimpse inside their minds:An especially telling example is the duplicity displayed by chimpanzees trying to keep the locality of cached food to themselves, and the cunning of others at beating the bluff … You cannot—logically cannot—tell lies unintentionally; even the idea of self-deception involves the intentional model, one part of the self trying to put it over on the rest. The dissembling chimpanzee appears to be acting on the understanding of what the signs he gives will mean to others, and hence intentionally.53
And yet it is not so long ago that a modern philosopher, among many others, was saying,It would be senseless to attribute to an animal a memory that distinguished the order of events in the past, and it would be senseless to attribute to it an expectation of an order of events in the future. It does not have the concepts of order, or any concepts at all.54
How could he know that?
The chimpanzee’s interior monologue is doubtless not up to the standard of the average philosopher’s, but that they have some notion of themselves, what they look like, what their needs are, their past experiences, future expectations, and how they relate to others—enough for the purposes of a “social order”—seems beyond doubt.
——
“Language is our Rubicon,” declaimed the famous nineteenth-century linguist Max Müller, “and no brute will dare to cross it.” Language permits widely dispersed humans to communicate with one another. It allows us to sample the wisdom of the past and time-binds the generations. It is an essential tool in helping us to sharpen our mental acuity, to think more clearly. It is an unsurpassed aid to memory. With good reason we prize it. Long before the invention of writing, language played a major role in human success. This is the main reason that Huxley could reassuringly conclude, “Our reverence for the nobility of manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge that Man is, in substance and structure, one with the brutes.”55 But does this mean that other animals must lack language, even simple language, even the capability for language? We are struck by Müller’s military, defensive metaphor, and the possibility he seems to raise that language is within the grasp of “brutes” and that only timidity restrains them.
A long tradition of similar confident assertions denying language to the beasts dates from the start of the European Enlightenment, perhaps beginning with a 1649 letter by René Descartes:The principal argument, to my mind, which may convince us that the brutes are devoid of reason, is that … it has never yet been observed that any animal has arrived at such a degree of perfection as to make use of a true language; that is to say, as to be able to indicate to us by the voice, or by other signs, anything which could be referred to thought alone, rather than to a movement of mere nature; for the word is the sole sign and the only certain mark of the presence of thought hidden and wrapped up in the body; now all men, the most stupid and the most foolish, those even who are deprived of the organs of speech, make use of signs, whereas the brutes never do anything of the kind; which may be taken for the true distinction between man and brute.56
That chimps and bonobos can engage in a rich flow of gestural and lexigraphic signs is beyond doubt. We have glimpsed the vigorous scientific debate about their ability to use language. The nervousness of some scientists about claims of chimp language is evident in many ways—including repeatedly changing the rules after the game has begun. For instance, some scientists denied that Ameslan-signing chimps have language because of an apparent absence of negations or interrogatives. As soon as the chimps began objecting and asking questions, the critics discovered some other aspect of language that the chimps presumably did not have while humans did, and that now became the sine qua non of language. To a surprising extent, scientists and philosophers have merely asserted, sometimes with extraordinary vehemence, that apes cannot use language, and then dismissed evidence to the contrary because it contradicted their assumption.58 Darwin’s view, in contrast, was that some animals have the power of language, “at least in a rude and incipient degree,” and that if “certain powers, such as self-consciousness, abstraction, etc., are peculiar to man,” they are “mainly the result of the continued use of a highly developed language.”
There is controversy over how many meaningful and non-redundant words chimps can routinely put into a sentence. But there is no dispute that chimps (and bonobos) can manipulate hundreds of signs or ideograms taught to them by humans; and that they use these words to communicate their wishes. As we’ve discussed, the words can stand for objects, actions, people, other animals, or the chimp itself. There are common and proper nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs. Chimps and bonobos can request, and therefore are clearly thinking about, things or actions not now present—food, for example, or grooming. There is evidence that—like the Ameslan-literate Lucy and the lexigram-literate Kanzi—they can put words together in new combinations to make a novel kind of sense. Some of them invent and tend to abide by at least a few simple grammatical rules. They can label and categorize inanimate objects, animals, and people using not just the things themselves, but arbitrary words representing the things. They are capable of abstraction. They seem sometimes to use language and gesture to lie and deceive, and to reflect an elementary understanding of cause and effect. They can be self-reflexive, not just in action, as with their mirror images, but also in language, as when a chimp named Elizabeth was cutting an artificial apple with a knife and signed, in a special token language in which she was fluent, “Elizabeth apple cut.”
They know at best only about 10% the number of words in “basic English” or other minimal vocabularies adequate for everyday human life. This difference has been exaggerated—as by one distinguished linguist who argues that a finite number of human words can be combined to generate an “infinite” number of sentences, and an “infinite” number of communicable subjects, while chimps are stuck in their finitude.59 In fact, of course, the entire range of human words and ideas is, as for apes, resolutely finite. The laboratory linguistic accomplishments of chimps and bonobos are in addition to their own repertoire of signals—in gesture, sound, and smell—of which we understand, probably, very little. “The word,” the “use of signs” which Descartes denied to “brutes,” is plainly present in chimps and bonobos.
No ape has ever shown linguistic abilities approaching those of a normal child entering kindergarten. Nevertheless they seem to have a clear-cut, although elementary, ability to use language. Many of us would grant that a child of two or three who has a vocabulary and verbal dexterity comparable to that of the most accomplished chimps or bonobos—no matter how glaring their deficits in grammar and syntax—has language.60 It has been conventional wisdom in the social sciences that culture presupposes language and language presupposes a sense of self. Whether this is true or not, chimps and bonobos evidently have, at least in a rudimentary form, all three: consciousness, language, and culture. They may be much less repressed than we are and not as bright, but they, also, can think.
Most of us have a memory like this: You’re lying in your crib, having awakened from your nap. You cry for your mother, at first tentatively, but when no one comes, more emphatically. Panic mounts. Where is she? Why doesn’t she come? you think, or something along those lines—although not in words, because your verbal consciousness is still almost wholly undeveloped. She enters the room smiling, she reaches in and picks you up, you hear her musical voice, you smell her perfume—and how your heart soars! These powerful emotions are preverbal—as are much of our adult anticipations, passions, forebodings, and fears. Our feelings are present before they can be parsed into neat grammatical packages, to be dealt with and subdued. In those dimly remembered feelings and associations, we may glimpse something of the consciousness and emotional lives of chimps, bonobos and our immediate prehuman ancestors.
* Many of them would not have included the word “other,” and even today there are those who bristle at being called—even by scientists speaking generically and without affect—“animals.”* On July 14, 1858, Friedrich Engels wrote in a letter to Karl Marx: “Nothing discredits modern bourgeois development so much as the fact that it has not yet succeeded in getting beyond economic forms of the animal world.”* For example, water buffalo in Southeast Asia, which are routinely castrated by crushing their testicles between two rocks.32* Watching themselves in the mirror wearing hats is also a wildly popular and apparently gripping experience.
Chapter 20
THE ANIMAL WITHIN
[T]he human brain is an imperfect instrument
built up through long geological periods. Some
of its levels of operation are more primitive and
archaic than others. Our heads, modern man has
learned, may contain weird and irrational
shadows out of the subhuman past—shadows
that under stress can sometimes elongate
and fall darkly across the threshold of our
rational lives. Man has lost the faith of the
eighteenth century in the enlightening power of
pure reason, for he has come to know that he is
not a consistently reasoning animal. We have
frightened ourselves with our own black nature
and instead of thinking “We are men now, not
beasts, and must live like men,” we have eyed
each other with wary suspicion and whispered
in our hearts, “We will trust no one. Man is
evil. Man is an animal. He has come from the
dark wood and the caves.”
LOREN EISELEY
Darwin’s Century1
We have now brought our story—our fragmentary effort to reconstruct some of the entries in the orphan’s file, to cast a little light into the shadows—to the threshold of the appearance of humans on Earth. It is time to take stock.
Many of the protective ditches, moats, and minefields painstakingly dug to separate us from the other animals have now been bridged or flanked. Those driven to preserve for us some unique, unambiguous, defining characteristic are tempted to shift the definitions once again and erect a final line of defense around our thoughts. If chimpanzee and bonobo language is limited, we cannot tell much about what they think or feel, what meaning, if any, they give to their lives. They have authored, at least so far, no autobiographies, reflective essays, confessions, self-analyses, or philosophical memoirs. If we can choose particular ideas and feelings to define ourselves, no chimp can contradict us. For example, we might point to our knowledge that all of us will someday die, or that sex is the cause of babies—matters widely understood among humans, although sometimes denied. Perhaps no ape has ever glimpsed these important truths. Perhaps some have. We do not know.2 But standing alone on such homiletic pinnacles is a hollow victory for the human species. These occasional insights are minor matters compared to the vaunted distinctions of humanity that have crumbled into dust as we have learned more about the other animals. At so fine a level of detail, the motives of those who would define us by this or that idea seem suspect, the human chauvinism manifest.
To compare humans with other animals in regard to behavior amenable to observation is just; but unfavorable comparisons on the basis of first-person accounts emanating from within the animals themselves, their reports of their thoughts and insights, are unfair if no channel of communication into their internal lives has yet been opened. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Were we better able to enter into the mind of the ape, might we not find much more there than we guess?—a point made almost three centuries ago by Henry St. John, the first Viscount Bolingbroke:Man is connected by his nature … with the whole tribe of animals, and so closely with some of them, that the distance between his intellectual faculties and their … appears, in many instances, small, and would probably appear still less, if we had the means of knowing their motives, as we have of observing their actions.3
An oft-cited difference purported to exist between human beings and other animals is religion. Only humans, it is said, have religion, and that settles the matter. But what is religion? How could we know whether animals have it? In The Descent of Man, Darwin cites the comment, “a dog looks on his master as a god.” Ambrose Bierce4 defined reverence as “the spiritual attitude of a man to a god and a dog to a man.” The omega looks on the alpha as something like a god, and the depths of his submission and self-abasement are reached in few extant religions. It is hard to know how profoundly dogs or apes feel reverence, how tinged with awe their attitudes are toward a stern “master” or a well-established alpha, whether they have a sense of the sacred, pray for forgiveness, and otherwise seek to placate and influence forces more powerful than they. Animals raised, educated, and disciplined by much stronger and wiser parents, animals spring-loaded to fit into a dominance hierarchy, animals moreover faced with the daunting presence of human beings armed with life-and-death powers and meting out rewards and punishment—such animals may well have feelings akin to what we call religious. Many mammals and all primates satisfy these conditions.
Over the course of human history, some religions, it is true, have become much more than this—at their best transcending intimidation, hierarchy, and bureaucracy, while providing comfort for the powerless. A few, rare, religious teachers have acted as a conscience for our species, have inspired millions by the example of their lives, have helped us to break out of baboonish lockstep. But none of this contradicts the thesis that a generalized religious predisposition, ready to be put to use by the local social structure, may be a commonplace in the kingdom of the animals.
Perhaps, if we were able to peer into the mind of the ape in a state of nature, we would find—among a flurry of other feelings—a sense of satisfaction about its apeness rivaling ours about our humanity. Every species may feel something similar. It would be far more adaptive than its opposite. If anything like this is true, then we would be denied even our self-congratulatory distinction of being the only animal that makes self-congratulatory distinctions.
If we have not much peered into the hearts and minds of other species and have not even studied them carefully, we may impute to them virtues and strengths as well as vices and deficiencies that in fact they lack. Consider this bit of verse by the poet Walt Whitman:I think I could turn and live with animals, they’re so placid and self-contain’d,I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth
On the basis of the evidence presented in this book, we doubt if any of Whitman’s six purported differences between other animals and humans is true—at least given a little poetic license; that is, in the spirit if not the letter of the poem. Montaigne thought6 that when we conclude that other animals have “ambition, jealousy, envy, revenge, superstition, and despair,” we are simply projecting our own “sickly qualities” onto the beasts; but this goes too far, as the lives of the chimps make clear. While many commentators have exaggerated the differences between humans and “animals” and warned of anthropomorphizing, others, like Whitman and Montaigne, have romanticized and sentimentalized the animals. Both excesses serve to deny our kinship.
——
The proximate cause of human success must have something to do with the conjoining of our intelligence and our talent for making and using tools. Surely, our globe-girdling civilization arises chiefly from these two abilities. Without them, we would be nearly defenseless. But “a little dose … of judgment or reason often comes into play, even in animals very low in the scale of nature,” Darwin wrote in The Origin. Late in life, he made extensive studies of what you might think is an unpromising subject, the intelligence of earthworms. He gave them intelligence tests involving the manipulation of real and artificial leaves. They did very well. Flatworms can work their way through a simple maze to get a reward; even worms have a degree of intelligence. Galapagos woodpecker finches, studied by Darwin on the voyage of the Beagle, use twigs to worry wood-dwelling larvae out of branches; even birds have a rudimentary technology.
Certainly we could not have invented civilization without intelligence and technology. But it would be unfair to describe civilization as the determining characteristic of our species, or as establishing the level of intelligence and manual dexterity required for our definition, especially because the first 99 percent of the tenure of humans on Earth was spent in an uncivilized state. We were humans then, as now, but we hadn’t dreamed up civilization. Yet the fossil remains of the earliest known humans and hominids—dating back not just hundreds of thousands but millions of years—are often accompanied by stone tools. We had the talents, at least in partial measure. We just hadn’t gotten around to civilization yet.
The contrast between the proclivity for tools in humans and the absence of tool use in so many other animals has made it tempting to define ourselves as the tool-using or the tool-making animal—as seems to have first been suggested by one of the members of Josiah Wedgwood’s and Erasmus Darwin’s Lunar Society, Benjamin Franklin. On April 7, 1778, James Boswell confesses to admiring Franklin’s definition. The ever-grumpy and sometimes over-literal Samuel Johnson objects: “But many a man never made a tool; and suppose a man without arms, he could not make a tool.” Again, if we are to define a human being, should we use traits that, without exception, every human being possesses, or traits that may be present only potentially? And if the latter, who knows what traits lie smoldering in other animals, not yet fully elicited by circumstance or necessity?
——
Blasé, matter-of-fact, encumbered by the infant (who, face to her chest, clutches her fur), she carefully positions the hard-shelled fruit on the log and smashes it open—using a stone tool procured for the purpose. Hammer and anvil. No light bulb goes off above her head. There’s no chin to fist, no hint of insight struggling to emerge, no moment of revelation, no strains from Also Sprach Zarathustra. It’s just another routine, humdrum thing that chimps do. Only humans, who know where tools can lead, find it remarkable.
Although many chimps literally do not know enough to come in out of the rain, they’re able to use tools. Not only that: they’re able to premeditate the use of tools—to acquire a tool now for some action they intend to perform later. They go large distances to find the right kind of stone or stick, and then lug it home. They seem to have had its ultimate use in mind all the while.
“It has often been said,” wrote Darwin in The Descent of Man, “that no animal uses any tool; but the chimpanzee in a state of nature cracks a native fruit, somewhat like a walnut, with a stone.” His source was that acute but easily offended Victorian observer of chimps, Thomas Savage, M.D. Chimpanzees regularly crack open hard-shell seeds and nuts with a stone hammer against a stone or wooden anvil; and they’ll carry the appropriate rocks over a good fraction of a kilometer for the purpose. At other times, wooden clubs may be used as nutcrackers. In the Tai Forest in the Ivory Coast, chimps select an appropriate club, climb a cola tree, pick the choice cola nuts, and crack them open using the branch as the anvil and the club as the hammer.7 Female chimps are more likely to employ hammer-and-anvil technology than males, and they’re better at it.*
A chimp breaks off a long grass stalk or a reed so she may use it later, hundreds of meters away, more than an hour in the future, to lure delectable termites out of a log or termite mound. She must remove superfluous leaves and twigs, shape it, shorten it, insert it into the termite tunnel with a deft twisting motion to follow the interior contours, shake it seductively to attract termites onto it, and then with great care remove it without scraping off too many. Chimps take years to perfect their technique and routinely teach it to their young, who are avid pupils. This exactly satisfies one confident definition of “the uniqueness of man’s toolmaking”—namely, “the fashioning, out of natural materials, of an implement designed to be used at a distant time and on objects not now perceptually present.”10
How difficult is chimpanzee termite fishing? What depth of intellect and manual dexterity are required? Suppose you are dropped naked into the Gombe Preserve in Tanzania and, like it or not, discover that termites are your principal hedge against malnutrition or starvation. You know they’re an excellent source of protein; you know that self-respecting humans in many parts of the world regularly eat them. You manage to put aside whatever compunctions you may feel. But catching them one at a time is not going to be worth the effort. Unless you’re lucky enough to encounter them when they’re swarming, you’re going to have to make a tool, repeatedly insert it into their meter-high mound, introduce the tool into your mouth, and strip off the clinging termites with your teeth and lips as you withdraw the tool from your mouth. Could you do as well as a chimp?
The anthropologist Geza Teleki tried to find out. He spent months in Gombe under the tutelage of a chimp named Leakey, who was adept at the technique. Teleki wrote about his findings in a famous scientific paper called “Chimpanzee Subsistence Technology.”11 The Gombe termites mainly come out at night; before dawn they expertly wall up all the entrances to their mounds. Chimps routinely begin their termite foraging by scraping away these entrance barriers. Teleki’s inquiry started there:Having repeatedly observed [chimpanzee] individuals approach a mound, make a rapid visual scan of the surface while standing on or beside it, and reach decisively out—with a high degree of predictive accuracy—to uncover a tunnel, I was soon impressed by the apparent ease with which tunnels could be located. In attempting to learn the technique, I applied several experimental procedures: examining in minute detail all crack patterns, protuberances, depressions and other “topographic” features in the clay. But, after weeks of futile searching for the essential clue, I had to resort to scraping mound surfaces with a jackknife until a tunnel was inadvertently exposed. My inability to find any physical features which could serve as visual clues eventually led me to realize that chimpanzees may possess knowledge far beyond my expectations.. . The only hypothesis which, at this point, seems to reasonably account for the observed facts is that an adult chimpanzee may know (memorize?) the precise location of 100 or more tunnels in the most familiar mounds. Moreover, since intensive probing is restricted to a short annual season, the possibility that chimpanzees retain a mental map of core mound features during the intervening 10 months must also be considered. That chimpanzees require a prolonged learning period (i.e. 4–5 years) to gain proficiency in this technique …, and that some individuals are known to have the capability to retain specific information for many years, provides circumstantial support for this hypothesis.
Next, Teleki looked into a selection of raw materials for the manufacture of the termite probe:When performed by experienced chimpanzees, the selection procedure seems deceptively simple. After a brief visual scan of the nearby vegetation, a chimpanzee will usually extend a hand and deftly tear off a twig, vine or grass stalk. Sometimes the individual must move a few paces away from the mound and fetch a suitable probe, and in some cases 2–3 objects are initially selected. These may be rapidly examined and discarded until some specification is met in one, or several may be carried to the mound for subsequent selection. Whenever it occurs, the selection is made in a swift, almost casual manner, and modification is begun if necessary. Without being aware of the nuances involved, it is easy to undervalue the proficiency needed to perform these maneuvers.Chimpanzees presumably have the experience whereby the properties of an object can be evaluated before it is applied to the task of probing, for the rate of error in selecting probes is not high … When probing for termites, the specifications are in fact surprisingly stringent: if the vine or grass selected is too pliant, it will buckle and collapse (accordion-like) when inserted into a twisting tunnel; if, on the other hand, the object is too stiff or brittle, it will catch on the tunnel walls and either break or resist entry to the necessary depth …Despite months of observing and aping adult chimpanzees as they selected probes with enviable ease, speed and accuracy, I was unable to achieve their level of competence. Similar ineptness can only be observed in chimpanzees below the age of about 4–5 years.
Finally, putting aside the difficulties in finding the tunnel entrances and manufacturing the tools, Teleki set himself to learning how to use a competently produced tool:I spent many hours inserting probes, pausing for the designated interval, and pulling them out again—without getting any termites. Only after some weeks of nearly total failure … did I finally begin to grasp the problems involved …In order to collect these subterranean termites, the probing object must first be carefully and dextrously inserted to a depth of about 8–16 cm [centimeters], with appropriate turns of the wrist so that the object navigates the twisting channel. The probe must then be gently vibrated with the fingers during the prescribed pause, for without this movement the termites may not be stimulated into biting firmly onto the probe. However, if the vibration is performed too lengthily or roughly, there is an excellent chance that the probe will be cut through by the [termites’] mandibles while still in the tunnel. When these preliminary actions have been correctly performed, the probe, presumably with dozens of termites now attached, must be extracted from the tunnel. Once again there are nuances to be observed. If the object is too rapidly or clumsily pulled out, the insects are likely to be scraped off along the sides of the tunnel, which then yields nothing but a shredded probe. The hand motions must be reasonably but not overly swift and, once started, uniformly fluid and graceful. If the tunnel is particularly tortuous (a feature which can be determined during insertion of the probe), the success of the catch can be ensured by a slow twisting of the wrist while the probe is pulled out.
It is a little daunting to discover—on the very technological grounds on which human superiority is often claimed—that after months of apprenticeship, human scientists cannot do as well as preadolescent chimps. Teleki remained generous and good-natured about his failure. In the acknowledgments at the end of the paper, among thanks to various organizations for financial and logistical support, there appears this sentence: “I am, in addition, more than grateful to the patient and tolerant Leakey, whose termite-collecting skills so outstripped mine.”
The chimp style of teaching nut cracking and termite fishing to the young is relaxed—by example and not by rote. The student fiddles with the tools and tries out various approaches, rather than slavishly copying every hand movement of the instructor. Gradually the technique improves. Chimps have for this reason been criticized12 as not really having culture. (Ironically, one group of scientists denies chimps language because—as we described earlier—they are said to be too imitative, while another group of scientists denies chimps culture because they are said to be not imitative enough.)
The learning style of the great physicist Enrico Fermi was to ask colleagues to state the problems they had recently solved, but to withhold their answers: He could understand the problem only by working it through himself. Learning by doing is—in science and technology, as in many other human activities—much more effective than learning by rote. Knowing, as the chimps do, that a problem exists and can be solved with the tools at hand is most of the battle.
Baboons in Gombe eat termites, but almost entirely during the two- or three-week period in which the insects migrate. Then the baboons can be seen gathering and slurping the insects, and leaping into the air to catch them on the wing. In less bountiful times, baboons will be shooed away from a termite mound by an arriving group of chimpanzees. Sometimes the displaced baboons sit a little distance away, morosely observing the chimps working away with their tools on the mound. When the chimps are done, they leave their modified stalks and reeds at the base of the mound. But no baboon has ever been observed trying to use an abandoned tool—even though it could extend their termite season from weeks to months. Apparently the baboons just don’t have it in them. They’re not smart enough. Probably their brains are too small.
As chimps are much better than baboons at collecting termites, so some preindustrial humans who routinely eat termites are much better than chimps. They dig open the termite mounds, or fumigate them, or flood them with water. One of the more elegant practices is—with the tongue on the palate, or two pieces of wood gently touched to the mound’s surface—to imitate the sound of raindrops, which entices the termites out of their nest.13 Chimps have never been observed to use these techniques.* Probably they’re not smart enough. Probably their brains are too small.
What we find most interesting is the overlap. Some chimps lack even probe technology, and are no better at catching termites than baboons are. Other chimps are armed with a well-developed if rudimentary technology, many steps having to be done correctly and in the right sequence for the method to work—as good as many human cultures, although nowhere near as good as some. There are human cultures barely up to the highest chimpanzee standards of termite catching, and others only on a par with the baboons.15 No sharp boundaries are apparent here separating baboons from chimps, or chimps from humans.
Chimps also drop branches on intruders and sop up drinking water with leaves. While they cannot be described as fastidious or obsessively hygienic, chimps are known to use leaves as toilet paper and handkerchiefs, and twigs as toothbrushes. They employ sticks for digging up roots, for investigating animals in burrows and knotholes, and—like a croupier at a gaming table—for raking in otherwise inaccessible fruit. If they were able to manufacture more complex tools, they certainly would have the intelligence and dexterity to use them: In zoos, chimps try to steal the keys from the keeper’s pocket. When successful, they often manage to open the lock. Like us, they can sometimes use their intelligence to escape from bondage.
Male chimps like to throw missiles—whatever is handy, generally sticks and stones. (Like the inmates of college fraternity houses, they also occasionally throw food.) Females are much less interested in missiles. Chimps would throw stones at the visitors who gawk at them in the traditional kind of zoo—if they had stones. As it is, all they have is feces. When wild chimps are presented with a fairly realistic mechanical leopard, after a reassurance frenzy of screams, hugs, and mutual mountings, they find appropriate clubs and beat the effigy to death—or at least until they knock the stuffing out. Or they’ll pelt it with stones. (In the same circumstance, baboons will furiously attack the leopard, but without a thought of using clubs. Baboons just don’t know about tools.)
Chimps have stunned or killed by throwing stones. The directionality of their throwing is good. Where they’re deficient is in range: In tense confrontations with prey or hostile peers, thrown rocks hit their targets only a few percent of the time. Adolescent boys don’t do much better under comparable conditions. But even when inaccurate, a hail of stones can be off-putting.
A distinction needs to be made between tool using and tool making. Many scientists have conceded tool use to other animals, and, following Benjamin Franklin, defined humans as the sole tool-making animal; where tools are manufactured, it is suggested, language cannot be far behind.16 But the chimpanzee termite fishery industry makes it clear that chimps, with considerable forethought, both make and use tools. Chimps also have a rudimentary stone technology, although, as far as we know, they don’t manufacture stone tools in the wild. In captivity, though, Kanzi—the linguistically talented bonobo—has, imitating human models, hit stones together to produce sharp flakes, which he then uses to cut a string so he can open a box which is filled with food. (This is a causality sequence at least five steps long.) As long as it’s sharp enough to cut the string, Kanzi will generally settle for the first crude stone knife he flakes off. But the thicker the rope he must cut, the larger and sharper the knife he makes.17
Evidence of chimpanzee talent to combine objects purposefully to make tools has actually been with us for decades:Between 1913 and 1917, Wolfgang Kohler conducted observations and experiments on the intelligence of chimpanzees at a field station in North Africa. In one study a male chimpanzee, Sultan, was led into a room where a banana had been tied to a string and suspended from the ceiling in a corner. A large wooden box had also been placed in the center of the room, open side up. Sultan first tried to reach the fruit by jumping, but this quickly proved futile. He then “paced restlessly up and down, suddenly stood still in front of the box, seized it, tipped it … straight towards the objective … began to climb up it … and springing upwards with all his force, tore down the banana.” A few days later Sultan was taken into a room with a much higher ceiling, where again there was a suspended banana, as well as a wooden box and a stick. After failing to get the banana with the stick alone, Sultan sat down “with an air of fatigue … gazed about him, and scratched his head.” He then stared at the boxes, suddenly leaped up, seized a box and a stick, pushed the box underneath the banana, reached up with the stick and knocked the fruit down. Kohler was struck with the apparently thoughtful period that preceded Sultan’s solution, as well as with his sudden and directed performance. Such “insightful” behavior apparently contrasted with other forms of learning, which develop gradually and depend on reinforcement. 18
It’s not hard to imagine an especially insightful chimp or bonobo wondering if there weren’t some way to make a stone flake cut better or a projectile go farther.
Since the progress of human technology is a continuum, to pick a particular milestone—the domestication of fire, say, or the invention of the bow and arrow, agriculture, canals, metallurgy, cities, books, steam, electricity, nuclear weapons, or spaceflight—as the criterion of our humanity would be not just arbitrary, but would exclude from humanity every one of our ancestors who lived before the selected invention or discovery was made. There is no particular technology that makes us human; at best it could only be technology in general, or a propensity for technology. But that we share with others.
Like us, nonhuman primates are not all the same. They vary in focus from individual to individual and group to group. Some, like Imo, are technological geniuses. Others, like the hierarchy-besotted macaque males, are hopelessly old-fashioned and stuck in their ways. One chimp population pounds nuts, another does not. Some probe for termites, others only for ants. Some use grass stalks and vines to coax the insects out, others sticks and twigs. Females preferentially use hammers and anvils, males preferentially throw stones. None of them, so far as we know, has ever used a stick to dig out a nutritious root or tuber, although it ought to be possible and adaptive. Some individuals find technology uncongenial or intellectually too taxing and never use it, despite the obvious advantages accruing to other members of their group who are comfortable with technology. Some large groups have no technology at all. “I’m embarrassed to say,” says an observer of a community of Ugandan chimps, “that the Kibale chimpanzees appear as the country bumpkins of the chimp world.” He goes on to speculate that life is too easy and food too plentiful at Kibale for the challenge of deprivation to elicit the response of technology.19
Chimps are smart. They carry accurate mental maps of their territory in their heads. They seem to know the seasonal availability of plant foods and will congregate in some peripheral province of their territory to harvest a small stand of ripening fruits or vegetables. They have rudimentary culture, medicine, and technology. They have a startling capacity for simple language. They can plan for the future. Think again of the sensory and cognitive skills necessary to succeed in chimpanzee social life. You must recognize dozens of faces and their expressions. You must remember what each of these individuals has done to you or for you in the past. You must understand the foibles, weaknesses, ambitions of potential allies and rivals. You must be quick on your feet. You must be very flexible. But if you have all this, there’s probably a great deal else about the world that, sooner or later, you can figure out and change.
——
How thoroughly the chimps and bonobos have erased the list of purported human distinctions!—self-awareness, language, ideas and their association, reason, trade, play, choice, courage, love and altruism, laughter, concealed ovulation, kissing, face-to-face sex, female orgasm, division of labor, cannibalism, art, music, politics, and featherless bipedalism, besides tool using, tool making, and much else. Philosophers and scientists confidently offer up traits said to be uniquely human, and the apes casually knock them down—toppling the pretension that humans constitute some sort of biological aristocracy among the beings of Earth. Instead, we are more like the nouveau riche, incompletely accommodated to our recent exalted state, insecure about who we are, and trying to put as much distance as possible between us and our humble origins. It’s as if our nearest relatives, by their very existence, refute all our explanations and justifications. So as counterweights to human arrogance and pride, it is good for us that there are still apes on Earth.
Much of this chimp and bonobo behavior was discovered only recently. Doubtless they have other talents that have so far eluded us. We humans are biased observers, with a vested interest in the answer. The cure for this disease is more data. But the study of primate behavior, both in the laboratory and in the wild, is by and large poorly and grudgingly funded.
If we insist on absolute rather than relative differences, we do not, so far at least, discover any distinguishing characteristic of our species. Shouldn’t we expect, especially with our close relatives, that the differences will be of degree and not of kind? Isn’t this the lesson of evolution? If we require that we uniquely possess tools, culture, language, trade, art, dance, music, religion, or conceptual intelligence, we will not understand who we are. If, on the other hand, we are willing to admit that what distinguishes us from the other animals is more of one propensity and less of another, then we may make some progress. Then, if we wish, we can take pride in the fuller flowering of primate aptitudes that has taken place in our species.
The more an animal weighs, the more of it there is that its brain must control, and so—within certain limits—the bigger its brain needs to be. This is true between species, although not between individual members of a given species. A species with a much bigger brain for its body weight—especially in its higher brain centers—has a good chance of being, on some level, smarter. Indeed, for comparable body weights, humans tend to have bigger brains than other primates; primates than other mammals; mammals than birds; birds than fish; and fish than reptiles.20 There is some scatter in the data, but the correlation is clear. It corresponds pretty well to the commonly accepted (by humans, of course) rank order of animal intelligence. The earliest mammals had significantly larger brains than their reptilian contemporaries of comparable body weight; and the earliest primates were similiarly well-endowed compared to other mammals. We come from big-brained stock.
Adult humans, who weigh only a little more than adult chimps, nevertheless have brains three to four times more massive. A human infant a few months old already has a larger brain than a grown-up chimpanzee.21 It seems very likely that we’re significantly smarter than the chimps because we have a significantly larger brain—despite the comparable body weights. For a factor of three to four increase in brain weight, the brain size (its circumference, say) must increase by about 50%. But the human brain isn’t entirely a proportional scaling up of a chimp brain. Despite what Huxley found, there is a little bit of brain architecture—not much, but some—that humans have and the other primates at least mainly don’t. Significantly, some of it seems to be related to speech.
Some parts of the brain are proportionally much larger in humans than in other primates: The cerebral cortex in general, responsible for thinking, is proportionally much larger in humans than in chimps (or in our non-human primate ancestors); so is the cerebellum, in charge of keeping us steady on our (two) feet.22 The frontal lobes are far more prominent in humans than in chimps; they’re thought to play an important role in foreseeing the future consequences of present action, in planning ahead.*
Still, purported distinctions in brain anatomy must be treated with caution: There are many primates not yet studied with sufficient care, and there have been so many erroneous claims. For example, in humans different information is stored in, and different abilities controlled by, the two hemispheres of the cerebral cortex—a surprising finding that emerges from patients whose bundle of neural fibers connecting the two brain hemispheres has been cut.23 This asymmetry, called “lateralization,” is connected with language, and, arguably, with tool use.24 So, of course, the conceit arose that only the brains of humans are lateralized.25 Then songbirds were found to have their songs stored almost exclusively in only one hemisphere of their brains,26 and lateralization was discovered in chimps that had learned language.27 In any case, the qualitative differences between chimp and human brains, if any, are few and subtle.
So is that all there is to it? Give the chimps a bigger brain and the power of articulate speech, maybe take away some testosterone, cancel the ads for ovulation, burden them with some more inhibitions, give them a shave and a haircut, stand them up on their hind legs, and get them out of the trees at night? Would they then be indistinguishable from the earliest humans?
The possibility that we might be “no more than” deluxe model apes, that the differences between them and us might be almost wholly differences of degree and not of kind, and that the differences of kind, if they exist, might be elusive—all this was a source of profound discomfort from the earliest days in which human evolution was seriously considered. Just a few years after The Origin of Species was published, Huxley wrote:[D]esiring, as I do, to reach the wider circle of the intelligent public, it would be unworthy cowardice were I to ignore the repugnance with which the majority of my readers are likely to meet the conclusions to which the most careful and conscientious study I have been able to give to this matter, has led me.On all sides I shall hear the cry—“We are men and women, not a mere better sort of apes, a little longer in the leg, more compact in the foot, and bigger in brain than your brutal Chimpanzees and Gorillas. The power of knowledge—the conscience of good and evil—the pitiful tenderness of human affections, raise us out of all real fellowship with the brutes, however closely they may seem to approximate us.”To this I can only reply that the exclamation would be most just and would have my own entire sympathy, if it were only relevant. But, it is not I who seek to base Man’s dignity upon his great toe, or insinuate that we are lost if an Ape has a hippocampus minor [in its brain]. On the contrary, I have done my best to sweep away this vanity …We are indeed told by those who assume authority in these matters … that the belief in the unity of origin of man and brutes involves the brutalization and degradation of the former. But is this really so? Could not a sensible child confute, by obvious arguments, the shallow rhetoricians who would force this conclusion upon us? Is it, indeed, true, that the Poet, or the Philosopher, or the Artist whose genius is the glory of his age, is degraded from his high estate by the undoubted historical probability, not to say certainty, that he is the direct descendant of some naked and bestial savage, whose intelligence was just sufficient to make him a little more cunning than the Fox, and by so much more dangerous than the Tiger?28
Suppose you own a personal computer. It’s roughly the size of a typewriter, sits on your desk, and outcomputes any hundred mathematicians. There was nothing remotely like it on Earth only a few decades ago. Building on the strengths of this model, the manufacturer now introduces a relatively minor variant with a faster and more powerful microprocessor and a few new peripherals. Surely this is not as remarkable an accomplishment as the invention of the personal computer in the first place. But the new computer, you find, can perform a range of functions the old one couldn’t. It can figure certain problems out in a reasonable span of time that previously would have taken—for all intents and purposes—forever. There are whole categories of problems you can now solve that you couldn’t come within hailing distance of before. But if solving these problems were somehow important for the survival of the personal computer, pretty soon there would be a large number of personal computers with the added capabilities. Perhaps our uniqueness is no more than, or only a little more than, this: an enhancement of well-established pre-existing talents for invention, forethought, language, and general intelligence, enough to cross a threshold in our capacity to understand and change the world.
Still, depending on what else they are allied with, greater reasoning skills need not—necessarily and in all circumstances—be adaptive and improve survival. “Reason more than anything else is man,”29 said Aristotle. Mark Twain countered:I think it is open to dispute … [The] strongest count against [man’s] intelligence is the fact that with that [historical] record back of him he blandly sets himself up as the head animal.30
If we imagine that we are purely, or even mainly, rational beings, we will never know ourselves.
We are too weak to destroy or seriously damage the planet, or to extinguish all life on Earth. That is far beyond our powers. But what we can do is to destroy our global civilization and, just possibly, sufficiently alter the environment as to render our own species, along with vast numbers of others, extinct.31 Even at levels far short of those that can cause our extinction, our technology has given us awesome powers—our ancestors would have thought them god-like. This is merely a statement of fact. It is not a remonstrance and is not intended to define us. But it leads us back again to the question of whether we have any choice in the matter, or whether there is some deeply buried part of our nature that, despite the comparative intelligence and promise of our species, will sooner or later arrange matters for the worst.
“We are conscious of an animal in us,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, “which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers.”32 The idea is, in a way, obvious; it emerges from even shallow introspection. It goes back at least to Plato,33 who described how in dreams, “when the gentler part of the soul slumbers and the control of Reason is withdrawn … the Wild Beast in us … becomes rampant.” That Wild Beast, Plato goes on, “will cast off all shame and prudence at such moments and stop at nothing”—including incest, murder, and “forbidden food.” The idea of the beast within is also familiar to us from Sigmund Freud, who called it the “id,” Latin for “it,” and from neurophysiology, starting with the work of J. Hughlings Jackson.34 A more recent incarnation can be found in the perspective of the neurophysiologist Paul MacLean,35 who identifies many of the control centers for sex, aggression, dominance, and territoriality in a deep-lying, ancient part of the brain called the R-complex—“R” for reptile, because we share it with the reptiles, who lack much of a cerebral cortex, the seat of consciousness.
We go to great lengths to deny our animal heritage, and not just in scientific and philosophical discourse. You can glimpse the denial in the shaving of men’s faces; in clothing and other adornments; in the great lengths gone to in the preparation of meat to disguise the fact that an animal is being killed, flayed, and eaten. The common primate practice of pseudosexual mounting of males by males to express dominance is not widespread in humans, and some have taken comfort from this fact. But the most potent form of verbal abuse in English and many other languages is “Fuck you,” with the pronoun “I” implicit at the beginning. The speaker is vividly asserting his claim to higher status, and his contempt for those he considers subordinate. Characteristically, humans have converted a postural image into a linguistic one with barely a change in nuance. The phrase is uttered millions of times each day, all over the planet, with hardly anyone stopping to think what it means. Often, it escapes our lips unbidden. It is satisfying to say. It serves its purpose. It is a badge of the primate order, revealing something of our nature despite all our denials and pretensions.
The danger seems so obvious. Surely there is something in us deeply seated, self-propelled, and on occasion able to evade our conscious control—something that can do harm despite what we understand to be our best intentions: “The good that I would I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do.”36
Sometimes, we use our “higher nature,” our Reason, to awaken the Wild Beast. It’s that stirring animal that terrifies us. If we acknowledge its presence, some fear, we will be sliding toward a perilous fatalism: “That’s what I’m like,” the criminal might plead. “I’ve tried to behave myself, abide by the law, be a good citizen, but there’s only so much you can ask of me. I’ve got an animal inside. It’s human nature, after all. I’m not responsible for my actions. Testosterone made me do it.”37 Such views, if widely held, could unravel the social fabric, it is feared; therefore, it is better to suppress knowledge of our “animal” natures and pretend that those who perceive and discuss such natures are undermining human self-confidence and playing with fire.
Maybe what we’re afraid we’ll find if we look too closely is some resolute malevolence lurking in the heart of man, some unquenchable selfishness and blood lust; that down deep we’re all mindless crocodilian killing machines. It’s an uncomplimentary self-image and of course, if widely held, it would work to undermine human self-confidence. In an age when the global environment is within our power to ruin, the notion is not cheering for our future prospects.
What is odd about this point of view—apart from the notion that criminals and sociopaths really take heart from the scientific finding that humans have evolved from other animals—is how selectively it makes contact with the data about animals and, especially, about our closest relatives, the primates. There we can also find friendship, altruism, love, fidelity, courage, intelligence, invention, curiosity, forethought, and a host of other characteristics that we humans should be glad to have in greater measure. Those who deny or decry our “animal” natures underestimate what those natures are. Isn’t there much to be proud of, as well as to be ashamed of, in the lives of the monkeys and apes? Shouldn’t we be glad to acknowledge a connection with Imo, Lucy, Sultan, Leakey, and Kanzi? Remember those macaques who would rather go hungry than profit from harming their fellows; might we have a more optimistic view of the human future if we were sure our ethics were up to their standards?
And if our intelligence is our distinction, and if there are at least two sides to human nature, shouldn’t we be sure to use that intelligence to encourage the one side and restrain the other? When we reconfigure our social structures—and in the last few centuries we’ve been tinkering with them like mad—isn’t it better and safer to have our best understanding of human nature firmly in mind?
Plato was afraid that when the superimposed social controls are slumbering, the wild beast within will incline us to incest “with a mother or anyone else, man, god, or brute,” and other crimes. But monkeys and apes and other “wild beasts” hardly ever commit parent-child or sibling-sibling incest. The inhibitions are already up and running in other primates, and for good evolutionary reasons. We demean the other animals when we attribute to them whatever predispositions to incest we find in ourselves. Plato feared that the animal within will incline us to “any deed of blood.” But monkeys and apes and other “wild beasts” are powerfully inhibited against shedding blood, at least within the group. The established lexicon of dominance and submission, friendships, alliances, and sexual partnerships keeps real crimes of violence down to a dull roar. Mass murder is unknown. True main-force warfare has never been observed. Again, we undervalue our non-human ancestors when we blame them for our violent proclivities. Very likely, they had inhibitions in place that we routinely circumvent.
Killing an enemy with teeth and bare hands is emotionally far more demanding than pulling a trigger or pressing a button. In inventing tools and weapons, in contriving civilization, we have disinhibited the controls—sometimes thoughtlessly and inadvertently, but sometimes with cool premeditation. If the beasts who are our nearest relatives engaged recklessly in incest and mass murder, they would have rendered themselves extinct. If our non-human ancestors did, we would not be here. For the deficiencies of the human condition, we have only ourselves and our statecraft to blame—not the “wild beasts,” and not our distant ancestors, who cannot defend themselves against self-serving accusations.
There is no reason for despair or timidity here. What we should be ashamed of is the counsel that urges us to avoid self-doubt even at the cost of hiding our nature from ourselves. We can solve our problems only if we know who it is we’re dealing with. To balance whatever dangerous tendencies we perceive in ourselves is the knowledge that in our ancestors and close relatives, violence is inhibited, controlled, and, in encounters within the species at least, devoted mainly to symbolic ends; that we are gifted in making alliances and friendships, that politics is our business, that we are capable of self-knowledge and new forms of social organization; and that we are able, better than any species that ever lived on Earth, to figure things out and to build things that never were.
Even in the fossil remains of the earliest lifeforms, there is unmistakable evidence of communal living arrangements and mutual cooperation. We humans have been able to design effective cultures that for hundreds of thousands of years have fostered one set of inborn characteristics and discouraged another. From brain anatomy, human behavior, personal introspection, the annals of recorded history, the fossil record, DNA sequencing, and the behavior of our closest relatives, a clear lesson emerges: There is more than one side to human nature. If our greater intelligence is the hallmark of our species, then we should use it as all the other beings use their distinctive advantages—to help ensure that their offspring prosper and their heredity is passed on. It is our business to understand that some predilections we bear as remnants of our evolutionary history, when coupled with our intelligence—especially with intelligence in the subordinate role—might threaten our future. Our intelligence is imperfect, surely, and newly arisen; the ease with which it can be sweet-talked, overwhelmed, or subverted by other hardwired propensities—sometimes themselves disguised as the cool light of reason—is worrisome. But if intelligence is our only edge, we must learn to use it better, to sharpen it, to understand its limitations and deficiencies—to use it as cats use stealth, as walking sticks use camouflage, to make it the tool of our survival.
ON IMPERMANENCE
Death, like a hidden Tiger, lies in wait to slay the unsuspecting.
ASHVAGHOSHA,
Saundaranandakavya,
ca. A.D. 116538
* Similar examples occur in other species. The playful and intelligent sea otter regularly dives to the ocean floor, retrieves hard-shelled mussels and an appropriate stone, swims to the surface, floats on its back, and then cracks open the mussels using the stone as an anvil. Some birds drop bivalves on rocks to crack them open Egyptian vultures and black-breasted buzzards drop stones from altitude on the large eggs of emus and ostriches in order to dine on the contents.8 In an apocryphal story,9 the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus is said to have been killed when a vulture (or eagle) dropped a heavy stone (or a turtle accounts differ) on his bald head, which it perhaps mistook for the egg of a flightless bird.* Although in the Okorobiko Mountains in Guinea, chimps use large sticks to perforate the mounds; the escaping termites are then gathered up by the handful. Other chimp societies in Guinea are ignorant of this practice, although it is also employed by chimp groups in nearby Cameroon and Gabon.14* Most of the increase in our brain size and the improvements in our brain architecture occurred very quickly—in only the last few million years. There might be some bugs still to be worked out.
Chapter 21
SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS
Already have I once been a boy and a girl, and
a bush and a bird, and a silent fish in the sea.
EMPEDOCLES
Purifications1
The evolutionary process has made the Earth brim over with life. There are beings that walk, jump, hop, fly, glide, float, slither, burrow, stride on the water’s surface, canter, waddle, brachiate, swim, tumble, and patiently wait. Damsel flies molt, deciduous trees bud, great cats stalk, antelopes take fright, birds chatter, nematodes worry a grain of humus, perfect insect imitations of leaves and twigs rest incognito on a branch, earthworms entwine themselves in passionate bisexual embrace, algae and fungi are comfortable roommates in the lichen partnership, great whales sing their plaintive songs as they traverse the world ocean, willows suck moisture from unseen underground aquifers, and a universe of microbes swarms in every thimbleful of muck. There is hardly a clod of soil, a drop of water, a breath of air that is not teeming with life. It fills every nook and cranny of our planet’s surface. There are bacteria in the upper air, jumping spiders at the tops of the highest mountains, sulfur-metabolizing worms in the deep ocean trenches, and heat-loving microbes kilometers below the surface of the land. Almost all these beings are in intimate contact. They eat and drink one another, breathe each other’s waste gases, inhabit one another’s bodies, disguise themselves to look like one another, construct intricate networks of mutual cooperation, and gratuitously fiddle with each other’s genetic instructions. They have generated a web of mutual dependence and interaction that embraces the planet.
By 3 billion years ago, life had changed the color of the inland seas; by 2 billion years ago, the gross composition of the atmosphere; by 1 billion years ago, the weather and the climate; by a third of a billion years ago, the geology of the soil; and in the past few hundred million years the close-up appearance of the planet. These profound changes, all brought about by forms of life we tend to consider “primitive,” and of course by processes we describe as natural, mock the concerns of those who hold that humans, through their technology, have now achieved “the end of Nature.” We are rendering many species extinct; we may even succeed in destroying ourselves. But this is nothing new for the Earth. Humans would then be just the latest in a long sequence of upstart species that arrive on-stage, make some alterations in the scenery, kill off some of the cast, and then themselves exit stage-left forever. New players appear in the next act. The Earth abides. It has seen all this before.
Life has penetrated only a thin surface layer, bounded by the heavens above and something very much like hell below. The planet itself—rotating once a day, revolving about the Sun once a year, circumnavigating the center of the Milky Way Galaxy once every quarter billion years, this world of rock and metal with its deep convection currents that make and destroy continents and generate the planet’s magnetic field—the planet knows nothing of life. The Earth would continue on its way as readily without life as with it. The Earth is indifferent, and all but that shallow clement zone at its very surface is impervious to anything life has been able to serve up.
——
Our family tree was rooted when the Earth was just emerging from a time of massive, obliterating impacts, molten red-hot landscapes, and pitch-black skies; when the oceans and the stuff of life were still falling in from space; when our connection with the Universe around us was manifest. The orphan’s file began in epic style.
The family tree of a few rare individuals of our species, we’ve argued, can be traced back perhaps as much as two or three dozen generations. Most of us, in contrast, are able to penetrate only three or four generations into the past before the record fades and is lost. With a rare exception here and there, all earlier ancestors are the merest phantoms. But hundreds of generations link us to the time that civilization was invented, thousands of generations run to the origin of our species, and a hundred thousand generations lie between us and the first member of the genus Homo. How many generations link us back through our non-human primate, mammal, reptile, amphibian, fish, and still earlier ancestors to the microbes of the primeval sea, and how many generations before that to the first organic molecules able to make crude copies of themselves is unfathomed—but it might approach 100 billion. The family tree of each of us is graced by all those great inventors: the beings who first tried out self-replication, the manufacture of protein machine tools, the cell, cooperation, predation, symbiosis, photosynthesis, breathing oxygen, sex, hormones, brains, and all the rest—inventions we use, some of them, minute-by-minute without ever wondering who devised them and how much we owe to these unknown benefactors, in a chain 100 billion links long.
Many have construed our clear kinship with the other animals as an affront to human dignity. But any one of us is much more closely related to Einstein and Stalin, to Gandhi and Hitler than to any member of another species. Shall we think more or less of ourselves in consequence? The discovery of a deep connection between human nature, all of human nature, and the other living things on Earth comes not a moment too soon. We are helped to know ourselves.
In acknowledging our ties of kinship, we are forced to reconsider the morality (as well as the prudence) of our conduct: wiping out another species every few minutes, night and day, all over the planet. Over the last few decades we have caused the extinction of something like a million species—some providing potential new foods, some desperately needed medicines, but all unique DNA sequences, tortuously evolved over 4 billion years of the evolution of life and all now lost forever. We have been faithless heirs, squandering the family inheritance with little thought for the generations to come.
We must stop pretending we’re something we are not. Somewhere between romantic, uncritical anthropomorphizing of the animals and an anxious, obdurate refusal to recognize our kinship with them—the latter made tellingly clear in the still-widespread notion of “special” creation—there is a broad middle ground on which we humans can take our stand.
If the Universe really were made for us, if there really is a benevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient God, then science has done something cruel and heartless, whose chief virtue would perhaps be a testing of our ancient faiths. But if the Universe is heedless of our aspirations and our destiny, science provides the greatest possible service by awakening us to our true circumstances. In accord with the unforgiving principle of natural selection, we are charged with our own preservation—under penalty of extinction.
And yet we go from massacre to massacre; and as our technology becomes more powerful, the magnitude of the potential tragedy grows. The many sorrows of our recent history suggest that we humans have a learning disability. We might have thought that the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust were enough to innoculate us against the toxins there revealed and unleashed. But our resistance quickly fades. A new generation gladly abandons its critical and skeptical faculties. Old slogans and hatreds are dusted off. What was only recently muttered guiltily is now offered as political axiom and agenda. There are renewed appeals to ethnocentrism, xenophobia, homophobia, racism, sexism, and territoriality. And with a sigh of relief we are apt to surrender to the will of the alpha, or long for an alpha we can surrender to.
Ten thousand generations ago, when we were divided into many small groups, these propensities may have served our species well. We can understand why they are almost reflexive, why they should be so easy to evoke, why they are the stock in trade of every demagogue and hack politician. But we cannot wait for natural selection to further mitigate these ancient primate algorithms. That would take too long. We must work with what tools we have—to understand who we are, how we got to be that way, and how to transcend our deficiencies. Then we can begin to create a society less apt to bring out the worst in us.
Still, from the perspective of the last ten thousand years extraordinary transformations have lately been playing themselves out. Consider how we humans organize ourselves. Dominance hierarchies requiring debasing submission and obedience to the alpha male, as well as hereditary alphahood, were once the global standard of human political structure, justified as right and proper and divinely ordained by our greatest philosophers and religious leaders. These institutions have now almost vanished from the Earth. Chattel slavery—likewise long defended by revered thinkers as preordained and deeply consonant with human nature—has been nearly abolished worldwide. Just a minute ago, all over the planet, with only a few exceptions, women were subordinate to men and denied equal status and power; this also was thought predetermined and inevitable. Here too, clear signs of change are now evident nearly everywhere. A common appreciation of democracy and what are called human rights is, with some backsliding, sweeping the planet.
Taken together, these dramatic societal shifts—often in ten generations or less—provide a compelling refutation of the claim that we are condemned, without hope of reprieve, to live out our lives in a barely disguised chimpanzee social order. Moreover, the shifts are occurring so swiftly that they cannot possibly be due to natural selection. Instead, our culture must be drawing forth propensities and predispositions that already reside deep within us.
We humans hold at least 99.9% of our DNA sequences in common. We are far more closely related to one another than we are to any other animal. By the similarity standards we use in other matters, humans—even of the most disparate cultures and ethnic origins—are essentially identical in our heredities. Of the immense number of possible beings, realized and unrealized, we all are cut from the same cloth, made on the same pattern, granted the same strengths and weaknesses, and will ultimately share the same fate. Given the reality of our mutual interdependence, our intelligence, and what is at stake, are we really unable to break out of behavior patterns evolved to benefit our ancestors of long ago?
We have been dismantling ancient institutions that no longer serve, and are tentatively trying out others. Our species is becoming an intercommunicating whole, with powerful economic and cultural bonds linking up the planet. Our problems, increasingly, are global in venue, admitting only global solutions. We have been uncovering the mysteries of our past and the nature of the Universe around us. We have invented tools of awesome power. We have explored the nearby worlds and have set sail for the stars. Granted, prophecy is a lost art and we are not vouchsafed an unclouded view of our future. Indeed, we are almost wholly ignorant of what is coming. But by what right, what argument can pessimism be justified? Whatever else may be hidden in those shadows, our ancestors have bequeathed us—within certain limits, to be sure—the ability to change our institutions and ourselves. Nothing is preordained.
We achieve some measure of adulthood when we recognize our parents as they really were, without sentimentalizing or mythologizing, but also without blaming them unfairly for our imperfections. Maturity entails a readiness, painful and wrenching though it may be, to look squarely into the long dark places, into the fearsome shadows. In this act of ancestral remembrance and acceptance may be found a light by which to see our children safely home.
EPILOGUE
It is not possible to be ignorant of the end of
things if we know their beginning.
THOMAS AQUINAS
Summa Theologica1
We have described the Earth before humans set foot upon it. We have tried to understand something about our ancestors, using as our guide the fossil record and the gorgeous panorama of life that now graces our planet. While there are still vast numbers of missing pages in our orphan’s file, the progress of science has enabled us to glimpse a few of the lost or forgotten entries—perhaps even many of the important items. But we have explored only the early chapters of the file. Its key central section—chronicling the dawn of our species and its evolution up to the invention of civilization—is the subject of the next book in this series.
Notes
Prologue
THE ORPHAN’S FILE
1. Attributed to Empedocles by Sextus Empiricus, in Against the Mathematicians, VII, 122–125, in Jonathan Barnes, editor and translator, Early Greek Philosophy (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 163.2. Science and Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951). Schrödinger was one of the discoverers of quantum mechanics.3. In many scientific accounts of the origin of the human species, there is a story something like this. (Cf., e.g., Misia Landau, Narratives of Human Evolution [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991].) But rather than being imposed on the evidence, we hold that it flows naturally out of the evidence. Human origins have in fact been very humble. We have in fact, by many standards, become the dominant species on the planet, and done it partly by dint of our own efforts. We are in fact profoundly ignorant of many of the details of our origins. It is natural to represent ourselves in metaphor as a favored child brought up in obscure circumstances, and then as hero venturing forth into the world to seek our identity. The principal danger of the metaphor would be if we thought our success due to one generation or people or nation; or if our success were to blind us to the danger we have placed ourselves in.4. Robert Redfield, The Primitive World and Its Transformations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1953), p. 108.5. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov (1880), translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), Book Six, Chapter 3, p. 318.6. Mary Midgley, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), pp. 4, 5.7. A similar metaphor was employed in The Origin of Species, Chapter 10, where Charles Darwin compared the geological record to “a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history, we possess the last volume alone … Only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page only here and there a few lines.”
Chapter 1
ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN
1. In Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto, translators, Zen Poems of China and Japan: The Crane’s Bill (New York: Grove Press, 1973), p. 20.2. Translated by Dennis Tedlock (New York: Simon and Schuster/Touchstone, 1985, 1986), p. 73.3. What we are describing here is the origin of our Solar System—not the origin of the Universe, or at least its latest incarnation, which is most often described as the Big Bang.4. The Second Law of Thermodynamics specifies that in any process, the net orderliness of the Universe must decrease. Some places may get more orderly as long as others get more chaotic. There is plenty of order to draw on in the Universe, and nothing in the Second Law is inconsistent with the origin of the planets or the beginnings of life.5. Except for a tiny fraction generated by the radioactive decay of atoms hailing originally from elsewhere in the Galaxy.6. Two millennia after his last worshipper died, the name of this god was given to a newly discovered planet.
Chapter 2
SNOWFLAKES FALLEN ON THE HEARTH
1. Translated by Dennis Tedlock (New York: Simon and Schuster/Touchstone, 1985, 1986), p. 72.2. In Just So Stories (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1902), p. 171.3. The image of an hour’s drive up or down is, so far as we know, originally due to the astronomer Fred Hoyle.4. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the primeval sea had just the same size and depth as our present ocean. Suppose also that the organic molecules on the primitive Earth, in the absence of any life to eat them up, lasted about 10 million years before they fell to pieces from molecular old age, or were carried down toward the Earth’s molten interior. Then, in the best case, the primitive oceans would have been about a 0.1% solution of organic matter (about the consistency of a very thin beef broth). For the whole world ocean. Some lakes, bays, and inlets may have been a much more concentrated solution of organic molecules. (Christopher Chyba and Carl Sagan, “Endogenous Production, Exogenous Delivery, and Impact-Shock Synthesis of Organic Molecules: An Inventory for the Origins of Life,” Nature 355 [1992], pp. 125–132.)5. D. H. Erwin, “The End-Permian Mass Extinction,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 21 (1990), pp. 69–91.6. The end-Permian catastrophe was far more severe than the end-Cretaceous catastrophe some 200 million years later in which all the dinosaurs died.7. Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius: Meditations, IV, 48, translated by Maxwell Staniforth (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1964), quoted in Michael Grant, ed., Greek Literature: An Anthology (London and Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 430.8. The Venerable Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation (Historia Ecclesiastica) (London: J. M. Dent, 1910, 1935) (written in 732), Book II, Chapter XIII, p. 91.
Chapter 3
“WHAT MAKEST THOU?”
1. And still it burns. On the day we write this, the authors received yet another expression of outrage from a viewer offended by the endorsement of evolution in our Cosmos television series. “We teach our children that they are descended from monkeys, and then are surprised when they act accordingly,” he writes. “Throw out an absolute standard of morality, make all behavior relative, and the result must be moral chaos.” He offers no critique of the evidence for evolution, but only of its imagined social consequences.Even today, some American high school biology curricula are still giving equal time to special creation (and to a subject oxymoronically called “scientific creationism”). Should time also be devoted in school geography curricula to the evidence for the proposition that the Earth is flat?—a view clearly held by the authors of the Bible and still supported by fringe advocacy groups. Both special creation and the flat Earth hypothesis were reasonable scientific guesses in the sixth century B.C., when Genesis was compiled. They are no longer.Standard works defending creationism include D. T. Gish, Evolution? The Fossils Say No! (San Diego: Creation Life Publishers, 1979), and H. M. Morris, Scientific Creationism (ibid, 1974). Among the many refutations by scientists are A. N. Strahler, Science and Earth History (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1987); D. J. Futuyama, Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution (New York: Pantheon, 1983); G. B. Dalrymple, The Age of the Earth (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991); Tim M. Berra, Evolution and the Myth of Creationism (ibid, 1990); and a forthright pamphlet by the National Academy of Sciences, Science and Creationism (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1984) that describes special creation as “an invalidated hypothesis,” and concludes: “No body of beliefs that has its origin in doctrinal material [such as the Bible] rather than scientific observation should be admissible as science … Incorporating the teaching of such doctrines into a science curriculum stifles the development of critical thinking … and seriously compromises the best interests of public education.” Among the many virtues of Berra’s book is its dedication (“For my mother, who allowed me to read during meals”).In a 1982 Gallup poll, 44% of American respondents supported the statement “God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last ten thousand years.” Only 9% supported the statement “Man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. God had no part in this process.” (Creation/Evolution, No. 10 [Fall 1982], p. 38.)In a 1988 survey of 43 members of the U.S. Congress who chose to answer a questionnaire, 88% felt that “modern evolutionary theory has a valid scientific foundation,” but less than half could say, even roughly, what the basic idea of evolution might be. Only one in three strongly agreed with the statement that the Earth was 4 to 5 billion years old. In an identical survey of a quarter of the members of the Ohio legislature, the corresponding numbers were 74%, 23%, and 23%. (Michael Zimmerman, “A Survey of Pseudoscientific Sentiments of Elected Officials,” Creation/Evolution, No. 29 [Winter 1991/1992], pp. 26–45.)2. Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, Part II, The Loves of the Plants (1789), Canto III, line 456; in Desmond King-Hele, editor, The Essential Writings of Erasmus Darwin (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968), p. 149.3. Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time, Volume One, Jefferson the Virginian (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), p. 52.4. Gerhard Wichler, Charles Darwin: The Founder of the Theory of Evolution and Natural Selection (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1961), p. 23.5. London, 1803 (published posthumously). Quoted in Howard E. Gruber, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 50.6. This example is from J. B. S. Haldane, The Causes of Evolution (New York: Harper, 1932), p. 130.7. And in August Weismann’s late-nineteenth-century experiment, five successive generations of mice had their tails cut off with no effect on the progeny. George Bernard Shaw dismissed such examples as missing Lamarck’s point: The mice do not aspire to be tailless, as the giraffes are purported to strive for long necks (Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch [New York: Brentano’s, 1929]). This is magical thinking. Surviving incarnations of Lamarck’s hypothesis include the idea that the disobedience of Adam in the Garden of Eden caused an “original sin” genetically propagated to future generations (accepted by the Catholic Church at the Council of Trent and reaffirmed in a 1950 papal encyclical of Pius XII); and the fraudulent agricultural genetics of Stalin’s favorite pseudoscientist, Trofim Lysenko. Nevertheless, the inheritance of acquired characteristics—while apparently wrong at the level of the organism—may be right at the level of the gene: A mutation is a chemical accident slightly changing the structure of a gene. Descendent genes inherit the accident. But the knife of August Weismann was too blunt to reach into the genes.8. Sir Francis Darwin, editor, Charles Darwin’s Autobiography, with His Notes and Letters Depicting the Growth of the ORIGIN OF SPECIES (New York: Henry Schuman, 1950), pp. 29, 30.9. Ibid., pp. 34, 35.10. John Bowlby, Charles Darwin: A New Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), p. 110.11. Ibid., p. 118.12. Charles Darwin’s Autobiography, p. 33.13. Ibid., p. 37.14. Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 33.15. Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1906), p. 18.16. Frank H. T. Rhodes, “Darwin’s Search for a Theory of the Earth: Symmetry, Simplicity and Speculation,” British Journal of the History of Science 24 (1991), pp. 193–229.17. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (unexpurgated edition edited by Nora Barlow, his granddaughter) (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958), p. 95.18. Bowlby, op. cit., p. 233.19. Francis Darwin, editor, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (London: John Murray, 1888), Volume II, p. 16.20. Ronald W. Clark, The Survival of Charles Darwin: A Biography of a Man and an Idea (New York: Random House, 1984), p. 90.21. Ibid., pp. 90, 91.22. Ibid., p. 105.23. An excerpt from Wallace’s article:
“Wild cats are prolific and have few enemies; why then are they never as abundant as rabbits? The only intelligible answer is, that their supply of food is more precarious. It appears evident, therefore, that so long as a country remains physically unchanged, the numbers of its animal population cannot materially increase. If one species does so, some others requiring the same kind of food must diminish in proportion. The numbers that die annually must be immense; and as the individual existence of each animal depends upon itself, those that die must be the weakest—the very young, the aged, and the diseased,—while those that prolong their existence can only be the most perfect in health and vigour—those who are best able to obtain food regularly, and avoid their numerous enemies. It is, as we commenced by remarking, ‘a struggle for existence,’ in which the weakest and least perfectly organized must always succumb …” (Alfred Russel Wallace, “On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type” [Wallace’s contribution to Darwin and Wallace, “On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection”], in Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society: Zoology, Volume III [London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts, and Williams and Norgate, 1859], pp. 56, 57.)24. In subsequent editions, the sentence was amended to read “Much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history” (our emphasis).
Chapter 4
A GOSPEL OF DIRT
1. In Philosophical Works, with Notes and Supplementary Dissertations by Sir William Hamilton, with an Introduction by Harry M. Bracken, 2 volumes (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1967), Vol. 1, p. 52.2. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life (New York: The Modern Library, n.d.) (originally published in 1859) (Modern Library edition also contains The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex), Chapter XV, “Recapitulation and Conclusion,” p. 371.3. Of course, the traditional religious understanding of adaptation has been God’s will. However, this is not an explication of process.4. Unattributed quotations in this chapter are excerpted from Charles Darwin, op. cit., pp. 29, 31, 33, 34, 64–67, 359, and 370; and from Charles Darwin and Alfred R. Wallace, “On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection,” Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society: Zoology, Volume III (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts, and Williams and Norgate, 1859), p. 51.5. Francis Darwin, editor, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (John Murray: London, 1888), Volume III, p. 18.6. The Westminster Review 143 (January 1860), pp. 165–168.7. The Edinburgh Review 226 (April 1860), pp. 251–275.8. John A. Endler’s Natural Selection in the Wild (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986) provides a useful modern summary of what natural selection is and isn’t, its role in evolution, and how to test that it operates. His Table 5.1, culled from the recent scientific literature, summarizes over 160 “direct demonstrations” of natural selection in the wild.9. The North American Review 90 (April 1860), pp. 487 and 504.10. The London Quarterly Review 215 (July 1860), pp. 118–138.11. The North British Review 64 (May 1860), pp. 245–263.12. The London Quarterly Review 36 (July 1871), pp. 266–309.13. George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methusaleh: A Metabiological Pentateuch (New York: Brentano’s, 1929), p. xlvi. The last sentence is in fact the modern evolutionary point of view.14. James Watt, U.S. Secretary of the Interior in the first Reagan term, justified despoiling public lands on the grounds that he was unsure how much time we had “until the Lord comes.” Manuel Lujan, U.S. Secretary of the Interior under President Bush, argued against protecting endangered species because “[M]an is at the top of the pecking order. I think that God gave us dominion over these creatures … consider the human being on a higher scale. Maybe that’s because a chicken doesn’t talk … God created Adam and Eve, and from there all of us came. God created us pretty much as we look today.” (Ted Gup, “The Stealth Secretary,” Time, May 25, 1992, pp. 57–59.) Genesis urges us to “subdue” Nature, and predicts that “fear” and “dread” of us is to be upon “every beast.” These religious precepts have practical consequences in the human assault on the environment (cf. John Passmore, Man’s Responsibility for Nature: Ecological Problems and Western Traditions [New York: Scribner’s, 1974]). Leaders of a wide variety of religions have nevertheless taken forthright stands and political action to protect the environment (e.g., Carl Sagan, “To Avert a Common Danger: Science and Religion Forge an Alliance,” Parade, March 1, 1992, pp. 10–15).15. Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer with Darwin of evolution by natural selection—a generous and self-effacing man who described himself as “shy, awkward and unused to good society”—differed with him on one crucial matter. He was willing to accept that every beast and vegetable had so evolved, but not humans. Some divine (and self-reproducing) spark had to be injected at a comparatively recent date in the evolutionary process, he held. Wallace’s evidence?Unlike the racists of his time, Wallace was struck that the brain size and anatomy of all humans are sensibly the same: “The more I see of uncivilized people, the better I think of human nature, and the essential differences between civilized and savage men seem to disappear … We find many broad statements as to the low state of morality and of intellect in all prehistoric men which the facts hardly warrant.” (Quoted in Loren Eiseley, Darwin’s Century [New York: Doubleday, 1958], p. 303.) But pretechnological peoples, he thought, had no need of a brain able, say, to invent steam engines. So the human brain must somehow have been contrived early in order to perform complex adaptive functions much later. Such foresight, he well understood, was inconsistent with the fortuitous and short-term nature of natural selection. Thus, “some higher intelligence may have directed the process by which the human race was developed.” (Ibid., p. 312.)However, Wallace greatly underestimated the complexity of pre-industrial societies. There has never been a pretechnological human culture. Fashioning stone tools and hunting large animals are by no means easy. Big brains were an advantage to us from the start.Wallace was also transfixed by the spate of spiritualist demonstrations so popular in late Victorian England, including spirit rapping, seances, conversations with the dead, materializations of “ectoplasm,” and the like. These seemed to reveal a hidden spirit component of humans, but of no other living things. So far as we know, this heady brew was concocted out of equal parts skillful charlatans and credulous upper-class audiences. The magician Harry Houdini played an important role in later exposing some of these impostures. Wallace was hardly the only eminent Victorian to be taken in.When, toward the end of this book, we explore the extraordinary cognitive talents of chimpanzees as revealed in laboratory tests, a similar question occurs to us: How can they be preadapted to solve such complex problems? And the answer, or at least part of it, may be the same as for Wallace’s conundrum: In their everyday lives in the wild, chimps need a broad-gauge, multi-purpose intelligence—not nearly as advanced as what humans have, but much more than we might think.16. Nora Barlow, editor, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958), p. 95.17. James H. Jandl, Blood: Textbook of Hematology (Boston: Little Brown, 1987), pp. 319 et seq. See also David G. Nathan and Frank A. Oski, Hematology of Infancy and Childhood, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1987), Chapter 22.18. A. C. Allison, “Abnormal Haemoglobin and Erythrocyte Enzyme Deficiency Traits,” in D. F. Roberts, editor, Human Variation and Natural Selection, Symposium of the Society for the Study of Human Biology 13 (1975), pp. 101–122.19. Nora Barlow, op. cit., p. 93.20. An influential modern assessment from the Darwinian perspective of the behavior of animals in groups is E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). The book in general excited little controversy, but the closing chapter—in which natural selection was applied to humans—elicited a storm of criticism, including the pouring of a pitcher of water over the author’s head at a scientific meeting. Wilson has taken care to stress that human behavior is the product of both hereditary and environmental influences, and has generally made his claims modestly and cautiously: “I might easily be wrong—in any particular conclusion, in the grander hopes for the role of the natural sciences, and in the trust gambled on scientific materialism … The uncompromising application of evolutionary theory to all aspects of human existence will come to nothing if the scientific spirit itself falters, if ideas are not constructed so as to be submitted to objective testing and hence made mortal.” (E. O. Wilson, On Human Nature [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978], pp. x-xi.)We can glimpse something of the fervor of this debate in the following, perhaps intemperate, remarks: “American social scientists fear and despise biology, although few of them have troubled to learn any … Again and again in the writings of social scientists, we find ‘biological’ equated with ‘Invariant’ … This usage betrays an incomprehension of the domain of biology.” (Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Homicide [New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1988], p. 154.)Excellent recent books on evolution for the general reader include those by Richard Dawkins (e.g., The Selfish Gene [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976]; The Extended Phenotype [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982]; The Blind Watchmaker [New York: Norton, 1986]) and by Stephen J. Gould (e.g., Ever Since Darwin [New York: Norton, 1977]; The Panda’s Thumb [New York: Norton, 1980]; Wonderful Life [New York: Norton, 1990]). By comparing these books, we can glimpse the healthy and vigorous scientific debate that thrives under the aegis of modern evolutionary biology.21. John Bowlby, Charles Darwin: A New Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), p. 381.22. Francis Darwin, op. cit., Volume I, pp. 134, 135.23. Ibid., Volume III, p. 358.24. See, e.g., Leonard Huxley, Thomas Henry Huxley (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1969); Cyril Bibby, Scientist Extraordinary (Oxford: Pergamon, 1972).25. Cyril Bibby, T. H. Huxley: Scientist, Humanist and Educator (London: Watts, 1959), pp. 35, 36.26. Thomas H. Huxley, “On the Hypothesis that Animals Are Automata, and its History” (1874), in Collected Essays, Volume I, Method and Results: Essays (London: Macmillan, 1901), p. 243.27. Francis Darwin, editor, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (London: John Murray, 1888), Volume III, p. 358.28. Bibby, 1959, op. cit., p. 259.29. All quotations except that attributed to Emma Darwin at the end are taken from eyewitness accounts, although most were written down years and even decades after the event. A memorable essay on the debate, “Knight Takes Bishop?” is in Steven J. Gould’s Bully for Brontosaurus (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991). Our version of Huxley’s response to Wilberforce is from the recollections of G. Johnstone Stoney, who was present. (Stoney did pioneering work on the escape to space of planetary atmospheres, and was the first to understand why the Moon is airless.) It differs from Huxley’s own later recollection, which went like this: “If then, said I, the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence, & yet who employs those faculties & that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion—I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.” (Bibby, 1959, op. cit., p. 69.)
Chapter 5
LIFE IS JUST A THREE-LETTER WORD
1. The Bhagavad Gita, translated by Juan Mascaró (London: Penguin, 1962), Introduction, p. 14.2. Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto, translators, Zen Poems of China and Japan: The Crane’s Bill (New York: Grove Press, 1973), p. 87.3. Even in our language there remains the idea that motion requires a soul. But if there is a dusty soul that decides for every mote how and when it is to move, what animates that soul? Does it have a still smaller soul—a soul’s soul—and so on, in an infinite regress of microscopic immaterial motivators? No one believes this. And if the soul of the dust mote doesn’t need its own smaller soul to tell it what to do, why does the dust mote itself need a soul? Might it move on its own, without spiritual direction?4. The discovery of discrete units of heredity, the genes, dates back to experiments first published in 1866 by the plant breeder Gregor Mendel. His work was essentially unread until his laws of genetics were independently rediscovered at the beginning of the twentieth century. Charles Darwin knew nothing about Mendel’s work; it would have made his task much easier if he had. While nucleic acids were discovered in cells in 1868, their central importance for heredity was first suspected only in the 1940s. The remarkable structure of DNA—with long chains of nucleotides like the letters in a book, and two intertwined strands suggesting a ready means of replication—was first understood in 1953 by James Watson and Francis Crick. Classical genetics had been wholly innocent of the chemistry of the gene.5. How reading the genetic instructions of different organisms might unlock the evolutionary record was first stated by Emile Zuckerkandl and Linus Pauling, “Molecules as Documents of Evolutionary History,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 9 (1965), pp. 357–366.6. Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey (New York: Vintage, 1957).7. Wen-Hsiung Li and Dan Graur, Fundamentals of Molecular Evolution (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 1991), Figure 21, p. 135. The sequences shown are from the DNA encoding the 5S ribosomal-RNA [r-RNA] sequences.8. Ibid., pp. 6, 10.9. Cf. Edward N. Trifonov and Volker Brendel, Gnomic: A Dictionary of Genetic Codes (New York: Balaban Publishers, 1986), p. 8.10. Natalie Angier, “Repair Kit for DNA Saves Cells from Chaos,” New York Times, June 4, 1991, pp. C1, C11.11. Daniel E. Dykhuizen, “Experimental Studies of Natural Selection in Bacteria,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 21 (1990), pp. 373–398.12. Quoted in Monroe W. Strickberger, Evolution (Boston: Jones and Bartlett, 1990), p. 34.13. A semi-popular early exposition by Lord Kelvin of his argument (he was then merely “W. Thomson” of the University of Glasgow) appeared as “On the Age of the Sun’s Heat” in the March 1862 number of Macmillan’s Magazine.14. Thomas Henry Huxley, “On a Piece of Chalk,” in Collected Essays, Volume VIII, Discourses: Biological and Geological (London and New York: Macmillan, 1902), p. 31.15. Niles Eldredge, Time Frames: The Rethinking of Darwinian Evolution and the Theory of Punctuated Equilibria (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985). There are several different kinds of “punctuation” possible. Those stressed (and for good reason) by Eldredge and Gould are consistent with the prevailing views of evolutionary biologists since World War II (e.g., George Gaylord Simpson, Tempo and Mode in Evolution [New York: Columbia University Press, 1944]), or, indeed, with the views of Darwin himself (e.g., Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker [New York: Norton, 1986], Chapter 9). Contrary to the claims of creationists, the debate about punctuated equilibrium poses no challenge to evolution or natural selection. Gould has been especially effective in defending the teaching of Darwinian evolution in the schools.16. More exactly, each strand manufactures a complementary strand, in which As are substituted for Ts, Gs for Cs, and vice versa. When, in due time, the complement reproduces, the original strand is duplicated, and so on. But the same genetic information is copied every generation.17. RNA is the messenger by which DNA conveys what proteins are to be made by the cell. It is also the catalyst that presides over the linking up of amino acids into the proteins specified by the DNA. (M. Mitchell Waldrop, “Finding RNA Makes Proteins Gives ‘RNA World’ a Big Boost,” Science 256 [1992], pp. 1396–1397, and other articles in the June 5, 1992 issue of Science.) To an increasing number of molecular biologists, these facts suggest an early form of life in which RNA did the information storage, replication, and catalysis all by itself, with DNA and proteins taking over later.18. Jong-In Jong, Qing Feng, Vincent Rotello, and Julius Rebek, Jr., “Competition, Cooperation, and Mutation: Improvement of a Synthetic Replicator by Light Irradiation,” Science 255 (1992), pp. 848–850; J. Rebek, Jr., private communication, 1992. A survey of the present state of knowledge is Leslie Orgel, “Molecular Replication,” Nature 358 (1992), pp. 203–209.19. In Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto, translators, Zen Poems of China and Japan: The Crane’s Bill (New York: Grove Press, 1973), p. xlii.
Chapter 6
US AND THEM
1. Book XXII, line 262.2. Lynn Margulis, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1981).3. Andrew H. Knoll, “The Early Evolution of Eukaryotes: A Geological Perspective,” Science 256 (1992), pp. 622–627.4. Margulis, op. cit.5. L. L. Woodruff, “Eleven Thousand Generations of Paramecium,” Quarterly Review of Biology 1 (1926), pp. 436–438.6. Z. Y. Kuo, “The Genesis of the Cat’s Response to the Rat,” Journal of Comparative Psychology 11 (1930), pp. 1–30.7. Benjamin L. Hart, “Behavioral Adaptations to Pathogens and Parasites: Five Strategies,” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 14 (1990), pp. 273–294.8. George C. Williams and Randolph M. Nesse, “The Dawn of Darwinian Medicine,” Quarterly Review of Biology 66 (1991), pp. 1–22.9. Harry J. Jerison, “The Evolution of Biological Intelligence,” Chapter 12 of Robert J. Sternberg, editor, Handbook of Human Intelligence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), Figure 12–11, p. 774.10. A view championed in recent times by the neurophysiologist Paul D. MacLean and described in Carl Sagan’s The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (New York: Random House, 1977). MacLean sets forth a comprehensive summary of his views in The Triune Brain in Evolution: Role in Paleocerebral Functions (New York and London: Plenum Press, 1990).11. This approach is made most accessible to the general reader in Richard Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene, revised edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). In a vivid passage (pp. 19–20), he describes the genes as swarming “in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence … [W]e are their survival machines.”12. A related and even more heated controversy—on whether the mother bird has any notion of what she’s doing or is merely some carbon-based automaton—is addressed later in this book. Reciprocal altruism, an exchange of present for future favors, is also admitted by those who deny group selection per se.13. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Homicide (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1988), pp. 88, 89.14. W. D. Hamilton, “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behavior,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 7 (1964), pp. 1–51; John Maynard Smith, “Kin Selection and Group Selection,” Nature 201 (1964), pp. 1145–1147.15. Imagine that the huddled group (of, say, insects) is in the shape of a sphere. The heat generated by the group is proportional to its volume (to the cube of its size), but the heat radiatively lost by the group is proportional to its area (to the square of its size). Thus the bigger the group is, the more heat it retains. In a large group, only a small proportion of members are on the surface of the sphere, where an individual is exposed to the cold; the remainder are satisfyingly surrounded by warm bodies on all sides. The smaller the group is, the greater the proportion of individuals on the chilly periphery.16. Up to some limit, when the individuals doing the mobbing get in each other’s way.17. Dawkins, op. cit., p. 171, citing the work of Amotz Zahavi.18. Ibid., Preface to 1989 edition. For an opposing, now minority, point of view, see V. C. Wynne-Edwards, Evolution Through Group Selection (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986): “The view, widely held, that group selection can be dismissed as an effective evolutionary force is based on assumptions, not on evidence … It is an argument uncritically derived from human experience, of cheaters, criminals and oppressors who live at other people’s expense; and it ignores the fact that all viable kinds of exploiters in the animal world must be able when necessary to limit their own numbers” (p. 313).It seems strange that, in the real world as well as in contrived optical illusions, two completely different interpretations can give equivalent results. But this is a commonplace in physics—in quantum mechanics, say, or in the study of elementary particles—where two approaches with different starting assumptions and different mathematical apparatus turn out to give identical quantitative answers, and are therefore understood to be equivalent formulations of the solution to the problem.19. K. Aoki and K. Nozawa, “Average Coefficient of Relationship Within Troops of the Japanese Monkey and Other Primate Species with Reference to the Possibility of Group Selection,” Primates 25 (1984), pp. 171–184; J. F. Crow and Kenichi Aoki, “Group Selection for a Polygenic Behavioral Trait: Estimating the Degree of Population Subdivision,” Proceedings, National Academy of Sciences 81 (1984), pp. 6073–6077.20. Aoki and Nozawa, op. cit.21. Jules H. Masserman, S. Wechkin, and W. Terris, “ ‘Altruistic’ Behavior in Rhesus Monkeys,” American Journal of Psychiatry 121 (1964), pp. 584, 585; Stanley Wechkin, J. H. Masserman, and W. Terris, “Shock to a Conspecific as an Aversive Stimulus,” Psychonomic Science 1 (1964), pp. 47, 48.22. Especially when there is an authority figure urging us to administer the electric shocks, we humans seem disturbingly willing to cause pain—and for a reward much more paltry than food is for a starving macaque (cf. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View [New York: Harper & Row, 1974]).23. Translated by Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951), Book XXI, lines 463–466, p. 430.
Chapter 7
WHEN FIRE WAS NEW
1. Fragment 118 in Herakleitos and Diogenes, Guy Davenport, translator (Bolinas, CA: Grey Fox Press, 1979).2. Jonathan Barnes, editor, Early Greek Philosophy (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 104.3. Wen-Hsiung Li and Dan Graur, Fundamentals of Molecular Evolution (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 1991), pp. 10–12.4. B. Widegren, U. Arnason, and G. Akusjarvi, “Characteristics of Conserved 1,579-bp High Repetitive Component in the Killer Whale, Orcinus orea,” Molecular Biology and Evolution 2 (1985), pp. 411–419 (bp is an abbrevation for nucleotide basepairs, the letters in the genetic sequences).5. It can be very serious on the human level. For example, on Chromosome 19 most people have a sequence of nucleotides that goes CTGCTGCTGCTGCTG, a five-fold repeat. But some have hundreds or even thousands of consecutive CTG sequences, and they suffer in consequence from a grave disease called myotonic dystrophy. Some other genetic diseases may have a similar cause.6. M. Herdman, “The Evolution of Bacterial Genomes,” In The Evolution of Genome Size, T. Cavalier-Smith, ed. (New York: Wiley, 1985), pp. 37–68.7. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: Norton, 1986), pp. 46–49.8. J. W. Schopf, private communication, 1991; Andrew W. Knoll, “The Early Evolution of Eukaryotes: A Geological Perspective,” Science 256 (1992), pp. 622–627.9. Philip W. Signor, “The Geologic History of Diversity,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 21 (1990), pp. 509–539.10. Sewall Wright, Evolution and the Genetics of Populations: A Treatise in Four Volumes, Volume 4, Variability Within and Among Natural Populations (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 525.11. Sewall Wright, “Surfaces of Selective Value Revisited,” The American Naturalist 131 (1) (January 1988), p. 122. This article was written when the pioneering population geneticist was ninety-eight.12. Cf. Ilkka Hanski and Yves Cambefort, editors, Dung Beetle Ecology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Natalie Angier, “In Recycling Waste, the Noble Scarab Is Peerless,” New York Times, December 19, 1991.13. Charles Darwin, Origin of Species, quoted in John L. Harper, “A Darwinian Plant Ecology,” in D. S. Bendall, editor, Evolution from Molecules to Men (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 323.14. Clair Folsome, “Microbes,” in T. P. Snyder, editor, The Biosphere Catalogue (Fort Worth, TX: Synergetic Press, 1985), quoted in Dorion Sagan, Biospheres: Metamorphosis of Planet Earth (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990), p. 69.
Chapter 8
SEX AND DEATH
1. George Santayana, The Works of George Santayana, Volume II, The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Æesthetic Theory, edited by William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1988), Part II, §13, p. 41.2. Richard Taylor, editor, quoted in George Seldes, The Great Thoughts (New York: Random House, 1985), p. 373.3. The first clear explanations of sex both as a means of rapid evolution and as an escape of populations—especially small populations—from the cumulative impact of deleterious mutations were made by the geneticist H. J. Muller (e.g., “Some Genetic Aspects of Sex,” American Naturalist 66 [1932], pp. 118–138; “The Relation of Recombination to Mutational Advance,” Mutation Research 1 [1964], pp. 2–9). There is theoretical and experimental support for his proposals (e.g., Joseph Felsenstein, “The Evolutionary Advantage of Recombination,” Genetics 78 [1974], pp. 737–756; Graham Bell, Sex and Death in Protozoa: The History of an Obsession [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988]; Lin Chao, Thutrang Than, and Crystal Matthews, “Muller’s Ratchet and the Advantage of Sex in the RNA Virus Φ6,” Evolution 46 [1992], pp. 289–299).Muller stressed that sexual reproduction was hardly necessary for survival, but that “lack of recomination would greatly handicap a species, in long-term evolutionary advancement, in keeping pace with sexually reproducing competitors.” The idea of sex providing a long-term benefit for the species certainly seems to be an example of group selection, as was explicitly noted, without undue alarm, by one of the founders of modern population genetics, R. A. Fisher (The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930]). Fisher was one of the first to suggest that, in other cases, what superficially looks like group selection may in fact be kin selection.4. D. Crews, “Courtship in Unisexual Lizards: A Model for Brain Evolution,” Scientific American 259 (June 1987), pp. 116–121.5. Raoul E. Benveniste, “The Contributions of Retroviruses to the Study of Mammalian Evolution,” Chapter 6 in R. I. Maclntyre, editor, Molecular Evolutionary Genetics (New York: Plenum, 1985), pp. 359–417.6. We have scarcely touched on the complexity and diversity of the sexual machinery, both on the molecular level and the level of individual organisms. Nor have we given a full flavor of the debate on what sex is good for. An excellent short summary is in James L. Gould and Carol Grant Gould, Sexual Selection (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1989). See also the influential book by John Maynard Smith, The Evolution of Sex (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); H. O. Halvorson and A. Monroy, editors, The Origin and Evolution of Sex (New York: A. R. Liss, 1985); Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Origins of Sex (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); R. E. Michod and B. R. Levin, The Evolution of Sex (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer, 1988); Alun Anderson, “The Evolution of Sexes,” Science 257 (1992), pp. 324–326; and Bell, op. cit. in Note 3.7. D. J. Roberts, A. B. Craig, A. R. Berendt, R. Pinches, G. Nash, K. Marsh and C. I. Newbold, “Rapid Switching to Multiple Antigenic and Adhesive Phenotypes in Malaria,” Nature 357 (1992), pp. 689–692.8. W. D. Hamilton, R. Axelrod, and R. Tanese, “Sexual Reproduction as an Adaptation to Resist Parasites (A Review),” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 87 (1990), pp. 3566–3573.9. Helen Fisher, “Monogamy, Adultery, and Divorce in Cross-Species Perspective,” in Michael H. Robinson and Lionel Tiger, editors, Man and Beast Revisited (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), p. 97.10. E. A. Armstrong, Bird Display and Bird Behaviour. An Introduction to the Study of Bird Psychology (New York: Dover, 1965), p. 305.11. W. D. Hamilton and M. Zuk, “Heritable True Fitness and Bright Birds: A Role for Parasites?” Science 218 (1982), pp. 384–387.12. The same bargain is made in the common, sexually repressive version of the story of the Garden of Eden—in which it is sexual activity between Adam and Eve that excites God’s wrath and makes them mortal.13. This wonderfully vivid image is Frans de Waal’s, in Peacemaking Among Primates (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 11.14. Translated by Edward Kissam and Michael Schmidt (Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 1983), p. 47.
Chapter 9
WHAT THIN PARTITIONS …
1. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, Frank Brady, editor (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965) (originally published in 1733–1734), Epistle I, “Argument of the Nature and State of Man, with Respect to the Universe,” p. 13, lines 221–226.2. An updating after Jakob von Uexküll, “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds” (1934), reprinted in Claire H. Schiller, translator and editor, Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept (New York: International Universities Press, 1957), pp. 6 ff.3. Six carbon atoms make up the ring in this molecule. Chemists number them in sequence from 1 to 6. The chlorine atoms are attached in the 2 and 6 positions. If instead they were attached in, say, the 2 and 5 positions, the tick of the opposite sex would not be interested.4. Ticks are arachnids with eight legs, like spiders, tarantulas, and scorpions. They’re a matter of practical concern because they are the vectors for the spread of Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Lyme disease, and other illnesses—of livestock as well as of humans. We’ve described many of the essential sensory skills of a particular species, but other strategies and capabilities appear on closer examination or in other species. Some species have not one but three different mammalian hosts at different stages of their life cycles. Those ticks that live in caves may wait years for an appropriate host. Ticks chemically interfere with fibrinogen and other machinery that works to staunch the flow of their host’s blood, permitting some species to stuff themselves with a hundred times their unfed body weight in blood. Not only butyric acid is sensed in their quest for mammalian blood, but also lactic acid (CH3HCOHCOOH) and ammonia (NH3). Ticks use pheromones for purposes other than attracting the opposite sex—an assembly pheromone, for example, for a gathering of the tribes in cracks and crevices, or in caves. (See Daniel E. Sonenshine, Biology of Ticks, Volume 1 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991]). Nevertheless, the basic sensory armamentarium of tick life still seems, as it did in the 1930s, very simple.5. J. L. Gould and C. G. Gould, “The Insect Mind: Physics or Metaphysics?” in D. R. Griffin, editor, Animal Mind-Human Mind (Report of the Dahlem Workshop on Animal Mind-Human Mind, Berlin, March 22–27, 1981) (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1982), p. 283.6. Thomas H. Huxley, “On the Hypothesis that Animals Are Automata, and its History” (1874), in Collected Essays, Volume I, Method and Results: Essays (London: Macmillan, 1901), p. 218.7. von Uexküll, op. cit., pp. 43, 46.8. Karl von Frisch, The Dancing Bees (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953).9. A provocative modern discussion, informed by neurophysiology and computer science, is Daniel C. Dennett’s Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991). Optimistic assessments of the near future of artificial intelligence and artificial life include Hans Moravec, Mind Children (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988) and Maureen Caudill, In Our Own Image: Building an Artificial Person (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). A more pessimistic assessment is Roger Penrose, The Emperors New Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).10. Quoted in Konrad Lorenz, “Companionship in Bird Life: Fellow Members of the Species as Releasers of Social Behavior,” in Schiller, op. cit., p. 126.11. René Descartes, letter to the Marquis of Newcastle, quoted in Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, Great Treasury of Western Thought: A Compendium of Important Statements on Man and His Institutions by the Great Thinkers in Western History (New York and London: R. R. Bowker Company, 1977), p. 12.12. Aristotle, History of Animals, Book VIII, 1, 588a, in The Works of Aristotle, Great Books edition, Volume II, translated into English under the editorship of W. D. Ross (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952) p. 114.13. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: The Modern Library, n.d.) (originally published in 1871) (Modern Library edition also contains The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life), Chapters 1 and 3.14. René Descartes, Traité de l’Homme, Victor Cousin, editor, pp. 347, 427, as translated by T. H. Huxley, in Huxley, Collected Essays, Volume I, Method and Results: Essays (London: Macmillan, 1901), “On Descartes’ ‘Discourse Touching the Method of Using One’s Reason Rightly and of Seeking Scientific Truth’ ” (1870).15. Voltaire, “Animals,” Philosophical Dictionary (1764), T. H. Huxley, translator, op. cit., ref. 14.16. Thomas H. Huxley, “On Descartes’ ‘Discourse Touching the Method of Using One’s Reason Rightly and of Seeking Scientific Truth’ ” (1870), and “On the Hypothesis that Animals Are Automata, and its History” (1874), in Huxley, Collected Essays, Volume I, Method and Results Essays (London Macmillan, 1901), pp. 186–187, 184, 187–189, 237–238, 243–244.17. J. L. and C. J. Gould, “The Insect Mind: Physics or Metaphysics?” in D. R. Griffin, editor, Animal Mind-Human Mind (Report of the Dahlem Workshop on Animal Mind-Human Mind, Berlin, March 22–27, 1981) (Berlin. Springer-Verlag, 1982), pp. 288, 289, 292.
Chapter 10
THE NEXT-TO-LAST REMEDY
1. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, Michael Oakeshott, editor (Oxford Basil Blackwell, 1960), Part 2, Chapter 30, p. 227.2. Charles Darwin and Alfred R. Wallace, “On the Tendency of Species to Form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection,” Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society: Zoology, Volume III (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts, and Williams and Norgate, 1859), p. 50. Here Darwin also describes sexual selection in which the males compete for the favors of the female, or she selects from among several males on the basis of some quality she finds attractive: “This kind of selection, however, is less rigorous than the other,” Darwin said; “it does not require the death of the less successful, but gives to them fewer descendants.”3. Curt P. Richter, “Rats, Man, and the Welfare State,” The American Psychologist 14 (1959), pp. 18–28.4. John B. Calhoun, “Population Density and Social Pathology,” Scientific American 206 (2) (February 1962), pp. 139–146, 148; and references cited there.5. Frans de Waals, Peacemaking Among Primates (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989)6. Richard Dawkins argues that lowered birth rates in response to overcrowding are explained equally well (not better) by individual as by group selection (The Selfish Gene [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989], p. 119).7. John F. Eisenberg, “Mammalian Social Organization and the Case of Alouatta,’ in Michael H. Robinson and Lionel Tiger, editors, Man and Beast Revisited (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), p. 135.8. Peter Marler, “Golobus guereza: Territoriality and Group Composition,” Science 163 (1969), pp. 93–95.9. John F. Eisenberg and Devra G. Kleiman, “Olfactory Communication in Mammals,” in Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 3 (1972), pp. 1–32.10. As first pointed out by Charles Darwin (1872) in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and the Animals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965, 1967), p. 119.11. C. G. Beer, “Study of Vertebrate Communication—Its Cognitive Implications,” in D. R. Griffin, editor, Animal Mind-Human Mind (Report of the Dahlem Workshop on Animal Mind-Human Mind, Berlin, March 22–27, 1981) (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1982), p. 264.12. Lorenz’s translation from cranish. Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1966), pp. 174, 175.13. An example:“My friend and teacher, Bill Drury, invited me to go bird-watching one day on a small island off the coast of Maine. We left bird books and binoculars behind and strode to the nearest small tree growing alone in the open. He then made a series of high-pitched bird sounds and soon the tree began to fill up with birds, themselves making a series of calls. As the tree started to fill up, it seemed to attract more and more birds, so that as if by magic all small songbirds in the area were streaking toward the tree under which we were standing. By this time Bill was down on his knees, bent over, and most of the time making a deep kind of moaning sound. The birds actually appeared to wait in line to get the closest look at Bill they could; that is, they hopped from branch to branch until they rested on a branch about eight feet off the ground and not more than two feet from my face. As each bird hopped down, Bill, as if on cue, would introduce them. This is a male, black-capped chickadee. You can tell because of the black along the neck and shoulders. I would guess he’s about two to three years old. Can you see if there is yellow on his back between his shoulders? This is a good index of age.“For me the moment was utterly magical. In a matter of minutes Bill had reduced the distance between us and these birds by orders of magnitude, both physically and socially. Our relationship was so completely different that I was permitted individual introductions at a distance of a couple of feet. Obviously Bill was pulling some kind of trick and had induced some kind of trance through his bird song.… Bill was at first only imitating the mobbing calls of a couple of the small passerines in the area and interspersing these with occasional owl hoots. The owl is deadly at night but is vulnerable in the daytime, and groups of songbirds will mob it in order (presumably) to run it out of their area, or even harass and kill it on the spot. This drew them into the tree at an ever-increasing rate, since mobbing assemblages gain in individual safety with each new arrival (as well as gaining in power to harass the owl). Once they landed in the tree, however, they could see two four-eyed human beings but could not see the owl. Bill’s bending over and hooting from the ground was meant to suggest the owl was hidden underneath him. This drew them as close as they could get for a good look, which put them two feet from my face. Unlike some magic tricks, knowing how Bill’s was done did not detract from my enjoyment.” (Robert Trivers, “Deceit and Self-Deception: The Relationship Between Communication and Consciousness,” in Michael H. Robinson and Lionel Tiger, editors, Man and Beast Revisited [Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991], pp. 182, 183.)14. Mary Jane West-Eberhard, “Sexual Selection and Social Behavior,” in Robinson and Tiger, op. cit., p. 165.15. T. J. Fillion and E. M. Blass, “Infantile Experience with Suckling Odors Determines Adult Sexual Behavior in Male Rats,” Science 231 (1986), pp. 729–731.16. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, translated with an introduction by Maxwell Staniforth (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1964), II, 17, p. 51.
Chapter 11
DOMINANCE AND SUBMISSION
1. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life (New York: The Modern Library, n.d.) (originally published in 1859) Chapter XV, “Recapitulation and Conclusion,” p. 371.2. From George Seldes, The Great Thoughts (New York: Ballantine, 1985), p. 302.3. E.g., Natalie Angier, “Pit Viper’s Life: Bizarre, Gallant and Venomous,” New York Times, October 15, 1991, pp. C1, C10.4. Snakes certainly fight over territory as well—rat snakes, for example, over knotholes in trees where birds nest. The loser looks for another tree.5. David Duvall, Stevan J. Arnold, and Gordon W. Schuett, “Pit Viper Mating Systems: Ecological Potential, Sexual Selection, and Microevolution,” in Biology of Pitvipers, J. A. Campbell and E. D. Brodie, Jr., editors (Tyler, TX: Selva, 1992).6. B. J. Le Boeuf, “Male-male Competition and Reproductive Success in Elephant Seals,” American Zoologist 14 (1974), pp. 163–176.7. C. R. Cox and B. J. Le Boeuf, “Female Incitation of Male Competition: A Mechanism in Sexual Selection,” American Naturalist 111 (1977), pp. 317–335.8. E.g., Peter Maxim, “Dominance: A Useful Dimension of Social Communication,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4 (3) (September 1981), pp. 444, 445.9. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: The Modern Library, n.d.) (originally published in 1871) Part II, “Sexual Selection,” Chapter XVIII, “Secondary Sexual Characters of Mammals—continued,” p. 863.10. Paul F. Brain and David Benton, “Conditions of Housing, Hormones, and Aggressive Behavior,” in Bruce B. Svare, editor, Hormones and Aggressive Behavior (New York and London: Plenum Press, 1983), p. 359.11. Ibid., Table II, “Characteristics of Dominant and Subordinate Mice from Small Groups,” p. 358.12. Dominance in a one-on-one encounter and dominance rank within a hierarchy are not necessarily the same and cannot always be predicted from one another. See Irwin S. Bernstein, “Dominance: The Baby and the Bathwater,” and subsequent commentary, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4 (3) (September 1981), pp. 419–457. Some animals distinguish only between those lower and those higher in rank. Others—baboons, for example—behave differently to those of very distant rank than to those nearly co-equal in rank (Robert M. Seyfarth, “Do Monkeys Rank Each Other?” ibid., pp. 447–448).13. W. C. Allee, The Social Life of Animals (Boston: Beacon Press paperback, 1958), especially p. 135 (originally published in 1938 by Abelard-Schuman Ltd.; this revised edition published in hardback in 1951 under the title Cooperation Among Animals With Human Implications).14. V. C. Wynne-Edwards, Evolution Through Group Selection (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 8–9.15. Neil Greenberg and David Crews, “Physiological Ethology of Aggression in Amphibians and Reptiles,” in Svare, op. cit., pp. 483 (varanids), 481 (crocodiles), 474 (Dendrobates [dendratobids]), and 483 (skinks).16. B. Hazlett, “Size Relations and Aggressive Behaviour in the Hermit Crab, Clibanarius Vitatus,” Zeitschrift fur Tierpsychologie 25 (1968), pp. 608–614.17. Patricia S. Brown, Rodger D. Humm, and Robert B. Fischer, “The Influence of a Male’s Dominance Status on Female Choice in Syrian Hamsters,” Hormones and Behavior 22 (1988), pp. 143–149.18. One of many other examples: Bart Kempenaers, Geert Verheyen, Marleen van den Broeck, Terry Burke, Christine van Broeck-hoven, and Andre Dhondt, “Extra-pair Paternity Results from Female Preference for High-Quality Males in the Blue Tit,” ?ature 357 (1992), pp. 494–496.19. Mary Jane West-Eberhard, “Sexual Selection and Social Behavior,” in Michael H. Robinson and Lionel Tiger, editors, Man and Beast Revisited (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), p. 165.20. In 1857, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote: “[H]ow perfectly [woman’s dress] describes her condition. Her tight waist and long, trailing skirts deprive her of all freedom of breath and motion. No wonder man prescribes her sphere. She needs his aid at every turn. He must help her up stairs and down, in the carriage and out, on the horse, up the hill, over the ditch and fence, and thus teach her the poetry of dependence.” (J. C. Lauer and R. H. Lauer, “The Language of Dress: A Sociohistorical Study of the Meaning of Clothing in America,” Canadian Review of American Studies 10 [1979], pp. 305–323.) Stunning change has occurred since 1857, although the poetry of dependence is still widely recited in the women’s fashion industry.21. Owen R. Floody, “Hormones and Aggression in Female Mammals,” in Svare, op. cit., pp. 51, 52.
Chapter 12
THE RAPE OF CAENIS
1. Elizabeth Wyckoff, translator (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), line 781.2. David Grene, translator (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), line 1268.3. Ovid, Metamorphoses, translation by Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge: Harvard University Press/Loeb Classical Library, 1916, 1976), Book XII, pp. 192–195; Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1955, 1960), Volume 1, pp. 260–262; Froma Zeitlin, “Configurations of Rape in Greek Myth,” in Sylvana Tomaselli and Roy Porter, editors, Rape: An Historical and Social Enquiry (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 133, 134.4. Smaller amounts of androgens are produced in the cortex of the adrenal gland that surmounts each kidney, from other hormones in the body, and in the placenta.5. R. M. Rose, I. S. Bernstein, and J. W. Holaday, “Plasma Testosterone, Dominance Rank, and Aggressive Behavior in a Group of Male Rhesus Monkeys,” Nature 231 (1971), pp. 366–368; G. G. Eaton and J. A. Resko, “Plasma Testosterone and Male Dominance in a Japanese Macaque (Macaca fuscata) Troop Compared with Repeated Measures of Testosterone in Laboratory Males,” Hormones and Behavior 5 (1974), pp. 251–259.6. Peter Marler and William J. Hamilton III, Mechanisms of Animal Behavior (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966), p. 177.7. D. Michael Stoddart, The Scented Ape: The Biology and Culture of Human Odour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 136, 137, 163.8. J. Money and A. Ehrhardt, Man and Woman, Boy and Girl: The Differentiation and Dimorphism of Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972); J. Money and M. Schwartz, “Fetal Androgens in the Early Treated Adrenogenital Syndrome of 46XX Hermaphroditism: Influence on Assertive and Aggressive Types of Behavior,” in Aggressive Behavior 2 (1976), pp. 19–30; J. Money, M. Schwartz, and V. G. Lewis, “Adult Erotosexual Status and Fetal Hormonal Masculinization and Demasculinization,” Psychoneuroendocrinology 9 (1984), pp. 405–414; Sheri A. Berenbaum and Melissa Hines, “Early Androgens Are Related to Childhood Sex-Typed Toy Preferences,” Psychological Science 3 (1992), pp. 203–206.9. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, in The Oxford Translation of Aristotle, W. D. Ross, translator and editor (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), 737a28.10. Stefan Hansen, “Mechanisms Involved in the Control of Punished Responding in Mother Rats,” Hormones and Behavior 24 (1990), pp. 186–197.11. Mary Midgley, Beast and Man (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 39.12. John Sparks with Tony Soper, Parrots: A Natural History (New York: Facts on File, 1990), p. 90.13. Owen R. Floody, “Hormones and Aggression in Female Mammals,” in Bruce B. Svare, editor, Hormones and Aggressive Behavior (New York: Plenum Press, 1983), pp. 44–46.14. Alfred M. Dufty, Jr., “Testosterone and Survival: A Cost of Aggressiveness?” Hormones and Behavior 23 (1989), pp. 185–193.15 Hansen, op. cit.16. Lester Grinspoon, Harvard Medical School, private communication, 1991.17. John C. Wingfield and M. Ramenofsky, “Testosterone and Aggressive Behaviour During the Reproductive Cycle of Male Birds,” in R. Gilles and J. Balthazart, editors, Neurobiology (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1985), pp. 92–104.18. Stephen T. Emlen, Cornell University, private communication, 1991.19. R. L. Sprott, “Fear Communication via Odor in Inbred Mice,” Psychological Reports 25 (1969), pp. 263–268; John F. Eisenberg and Devra G. Kleiman, “Olfactory Communication in Mammals,” in Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 3 (1972), pp. 1–32.20. These classic experiments were described by Konrad Lorenz in 1939 and by Nikko Tinbergen in 1948. Some later research suggests that the chicks and goslings become less afraid of a silhouette as they become habituated to it (and it doesn’t eat anyone). Wolfgang Schleidt (“Über die Auslösung der Flucht vor Raubvögeln bei Truthühnern,” Die Naturwissenschaften 48 [1961], pp. 141–142) suggests that birds on the ground are afraid of any unfamiliar flying silhouette, become used to the harmless image of a flying goose, but retain a fear of the less familiar hawk. This is not far from the toddler’s shyness about strangers and fear of “monsters.”21. Peter Marler, “Communication Signals of Animals: Emotion or Reference?” Address, Centennial Conference, Department of Psychology, Cornell University, July 20, 1991.22. Marcel Gyger, Stephen J. Karakashian, Alfred M. Dufty, Jr., and Peter Marler, “Alarm Signals in Birds: The Role of Testosterone,” Hormones and Behavior 22 (1988), pp. 305–314.23. Stoddart, op. cit., pp. 116–119.24. The chemicals in question are gamma aminobutyric acid and serotonin. Cf., e.g., Jon Franklin, Molecules of the Mind (New York: Laurel/Dell, 1987), pp. 155–157.23. Heidi H. Swanson and Richard Schuster, “Cooperative Social Coordination and Aggression in Male Laboratory Rats: Effects of Housing and Testosterone,” Hormones and Behavior 21 (1987), pp. 310–330.
Chapter 13
THE OCEAN OF BECOMING
1. Edward Conze, editor, Buddhist Scriptures (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1959), p. 241.2. The initial rate of increase of the new mutation in the population is very slow. The thousand-generation estimate, courtesy of the population geneticist James F. Crow, is what it takes to go from gene frequencies of 0.001 (almost nobody) to 0.9 (almost everybody).3. Sewall Wright, Evolution and the Genetics of Populations: A Treatise in Four Volumes, Volume 4, Variability Within and Among Natural Populations (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978); Wright, Evolution: Selected Papers, edited by William B. Provine (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986); Wright, “Surfaces of Selective Value Revisited,” The American Naturalist 131 (January 1988), pp. 115–123; William B. Provine, Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); J. F. Crow, W. R. Engels, and C. Denniston, “Phase Three of Wright’s Shifting-Balance Theory,” Evolution 44 (1990), pp. 233–247. Also, Roger Lewin, “The Uncertain Perils of an Invisible Landscape,” Science 240 (1988), pp. 1405, 1406.4. Carl Sagan, “Croesus and Cassandra: Policy Responses to Global Change,” American Journal of Physics 58 (1990), pp. 721–730.5. Plutarch, “Antony,” The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, translated by John Dryden and revised by Arthur Hugh Clough (New York: The Modern Library, 1932), p. 1119.6. Stewart Henry Perowne, “Cleopatra,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th Edition (1974), Macropaedia, Volume 4, p. 712.7. Graham Bell, Sex and Death in Protozoa: The History of an Obsession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 65–66.8. K. Ralls, J. D. Ballou, and A. Templeton, “Estimates of Lethal Equivalents and Cost of Inbreeding in Mammals,” Conservation Biology 2 (1988), pp. 185–193; P. H. Harvey and A. F. Read, “Copulation Genetics: When Incest Is Not Best,” Nature 336 (1988), pp. 514–515.9. James L. Gould and Carol Grant Gould, Sexual Selection (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1989), p. 64.10. Anne E. Pusey and Craig Packer, “Dispersal and Philopatry,” Chapter 21 of Barbara B. Smuts, Dorothy L. Cheney, Robert M. Seyfarth, Richard W. Wrangham, and Thomas T. Struhsaker, editors, Primate Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 263.11. P. H. Harvey and K. Ralls, “Do Animals Avoid Incest?” Nature 320 (1986), pp. 575, 576; D. Charlesworth and B. Charlesworth, “Inbreeding Depression and Its Evolutionary Consequences,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 18 (1987), pp. 237–268. The latter reference contains a good summary of the means by which the incest taboo is enforced in plants.12. John Paul Scott and John L. Fuller, Genetics and the Social Behavior of the Dog (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 406, 407.13. William J. Schull and James V. Neel, The Effects of Inbreeding on Japanese Children (New York: Harper and Row, 1965).14. Morton S. Adams and James V. Neel, “Children of Incest,” Pediatrics 40 (1967), pp. 55–62.15. Theodosius Dobzhansky was a leading twentieth-century geneticist. He gives this example in his Mankind Evolving (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), p. 281.16. Over long enough intervals, isolation—even in large populations—generates diversity. When, for example, the Pangaea supercontinent broke up, the populations on adjacent land masses were no longer able (or at least not much able) to interbreed, and gene combinations established on one continent would by no means automatically be transferred to another; no longer did outbreeding link up the gene pools of widely separated populations. The unique biology of such isolated regions as Australia, New Zealand, Madagascar, or the Galapagos Islands is due to tectonic or other kinds of geographical isolation.17. George Gaylord Simpson, Tempo and Mode in Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), p. 119.18. We recognize with Wright that we are close to postulating group selection here. But any argument for optimum gene frequencies in a population must, it seems to us, do so.19. John Tyler Bonner, The Evolution of Culture in Animals (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980): “We can see the seeds, the origins, of everything we know about our culture in the distant past. This means that every aspect of our culture can benefit from some understanding of the biology from which it sprang” (p. 186).
Chapter 14
GANGLAND
1. (London and Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate, 1863), p. 59.
Chapter 15
MORTIFYING REFLECTIONS
1. Translated by E. Gurney Salter (London: J. M. Dent and Co., 1904), Chapter VIII, p. 85.2. Book III, Chapter 30 (added as a footnote to the edition of 1781); translated by Arthur O. Lovejoy in The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 235.3. For Hanno’s expedition, see Jacques Ramin, “The Periplus of Hanno,” British Archaeological Reports, Supplementary Series 3 (Oxford: 1976). For scholarly debate on which kind of primates Hanno and his men slaughtered, see William Coffmann McDermott, The Ape in Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1938), pp. 51–55.4. Aristotle, History of Animals, Book II, 8–9, 502a-502b, in The Works of Aristotle, Great Books edition, Volume II, translated into English under the editorship of W. D. Ross (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952) (originally published by Oxford University Press), pp. 24, 25.5. H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: University of London, 1952).6. Paul H. Barrett et al, editors, Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–1844 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 539.7. Thomas N. Savage and Jeffries Wyman, “Observations on the External Characters and Habits of the Troglodytes niger, by Thomas N. Savage, M.D., and on its Organization, by Jeffries Wyman, M.D.,” Boston Journal of Natural History, Volume IV, 1843–4; quoted in Thomas Henry Huxley, Mans Place in Nature and Other Anthropological Essays (London and New York: Macmillan, 1901).8. Quoted in Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), p. 66.9. William Congreve, The Way of the World, edited by Brian Gibbons (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), pp. 37, 42, 44.10. Letter of July 10, 1695; in William Congreve, Letters and Documents, John C. Hodges, editor (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964), p. 178.11. Jeremy Collier, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, edited by Benjamin Hellinger (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987) (originally published in London in 1698), p. 13.12. G. L. Prestige, The Life of Charles Gore: A Great Englishman (London: William Heinemann, 1935), pp. 431, 432.13. Aelian, quoted by McDermott, op. cit., p. 76.14. The Linnaean Society of London was named after Linnaeus. It was in this Society’s journal that the world first learned, from the pens of Darwin and Wallace, about natural selection.15. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 235.16. Letter to J. G. Gmelin, February 14, 1747, quoted in George Seldes, The Great Thoughts (New York: Ballantine, 1985), p. 247.17. Thomas Henry Huxley, Evidence as to Mans Place in Nature (London and Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate, 1863), pp. 69, 70.18. Ibid., p. 102.19. Quoted in Monroe W. Strickberger, Evolution (Boston: Jones and Bartlett, 1990), p. 57.20. Michael M. Miyamoto and Morris Goodman, “DNA Systematics and Evolution of Primates,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 21 (1990), pp. 197–220. In humans the genes coding for beta-globins are on Chromosome 11.21. M. Goodman, B. F. Koop, J. Czelusniak, D. H. A. Fitch, D. A. Tagle, and J. L. Slightom, “Molecular Phylogeny of the Family of Apes and Humans,” Genome 31 (1989), pp. 316–335; and Morris Goodman, private communication, 1992. Similar results are found from DNA hybridization studies: C. G. Sibley, J. A. Comstock and J. E. Ahlquist, “DNA Hybridization Evidence of Hominoid Phylogeny: A Reanalysis of the Data,” Journal of Molecular Evolution 30 (1990) pp. 202–236.22. Based on data in Strickberger, op cit., pp. 227, 228.23. E.g., Richard C. Lewontin, “The Dream of the Human Genome,” New York Review of Books, May 28, 1992, pp. 31–40. (This is, incidentally, an engaging critical review of the justifications offered for the project to map all of the roughly 4 billion nucleotides in human DNA, and is at variance with the views of many prominent molecular biologists). Also ref. 21.24. Donald R. Griffin, “Prospects for a Cognitive Ethology,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1 (4) (December 1978), pp. 527–538.25. Jane Goodall, The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986); Goodall, Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990); Toshisada Nishida and Mariko Hiraiwa-Hasegawa, “Chimpanzees and Bonobos: Cooperative Relationships among Males,” Chapter 15 in Barbara B. Smuts, Dorothy L. Cheney, Robert M. Seyfarth, Richard W. Wrangham, and Thomas T. Struhsaker, editors, Primate Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Nishida, “Local Traditions and Cultural Transmission,” Chapter 38 in Smuts et al., eds., op. cit.; Nishida, editor, The Chimpanzees of the Mahale Mountains: Sexual and Life History Strategies (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1990); Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes (New York: Harper & Row, 1982); de Waal, Peacemaking among Primates (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).26. B. M. F. Galdikas, “Orangutan Reproduction in the Wild,” in C. E. Graham, editor, Reproductive Biology of the Great Apes (New York: Academic Press, 1981), pp. 281–300.27. Anne C. Zeller, “Communication by Sight and Smell,” Chapter 35 of Barbara B. Smuts, Dorothy L. Cheney, Robert M. Seyfarth, Richard W. Wrangham, and Thomas T. Struhsaker, editors, Primate Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 438.28. Jane Goodall, The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior, (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 368.29. Very much the vengeance that—in the horrifying close to one of the most beautiful of the Psalms—the Israelites during the Babylonian exile proposed visiting on the children of their captors: O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.—Psalm 137, verses 8 and 930. Janis Carter, “A Journey to Freedom,” Smithsonian 12 (April 1981), pp. 90–101.31. Goodall, The Chimpanzees of Gombe, pp. 490, 491.32. Thomas, op. cit. (ref. 8), p. 22.33. Euripides, The Trojan Women, in The Medea, Gilbert Murray, translator (New York: Oxford University Press, 1906), p. 59.
Chapter 16
LIVES OF THE APES
1. In Greg Whincup, editor and translator, The Heart of Chinese Poetry (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1987), p. 48.2. The principal sources for unattributed details on chimpanzee life in Chapters 14, 15, and 16 are Goodall, Nishida, and de Waal: Jane Goodall, The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986); Goodall, Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990); Toshisada Nishida and Mariko Hiraiwa-Hasegawa, “Chimpanzees and Bonobos: Cooperative Relationships among Males,” Chapter 15 in Barbara B. Smuts, Dorothy L. Cheney, Robert M. Seyfarth, Richard W. Wrangham, and Thomas T. Struhsaker, editors, Primate Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Nishida, “Local Traditions and Cultural Transmission,” Chapter 38 in Smuts et al., eds., op. cit.; Nishida, editor, The Chimpanzees of the Mahale Mountains: Sexual and Life History Strategies (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1990); Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes (New York: Harper & Row, 1982); de Waal, Peacemaking among Primates (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Also other chapters of Smuts, et al.3. Chapter III, verse 1.4. Frans de Waal, Peacemaking among Primates (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 49.5. Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 37, 38.6. Here is Darwin’s argument about pink bottoms in the season of love:“In the discussion on Sexual Selection in my ‘Descent of Man,’ no case interested and perplexed me so much as the brightly-coloured hinder ends and adjoining parts of certain monkeys. As these parts are more brightly coloured in one sex than the other, and as they become more brilliant during the season of love, I concluded that the colours had been gained as a sexual attraction. I was well aware that I thus laid myself open to ridicule; though in fact it is not more surprising that a monkey should display his bright-red hinder end than that a peacock should display his magnificent tail. I had, however, at that time no evidence of monkeys exhibiting this part of their bodies during their courtship; and such display in the case of birds affords the best evidence that the ornaments of the males are of service to them by attracting or exciting the females.… Joh. von Fischer, of Gotha … finds that not only the mandrill but the drill and three other kinds of baboons, also Cynopithecus niger, and Macacus rhesus and nemestrinus, turn this part of their bodies, which in all these species is more or less brightly coloured, to him when they are pleased, and to other persons as a sort of greeting. He took pains to cure a Macacus rhesus, which he had kept for five years, of this indecorous habit, and at last succeeded. These monkeys are particularly apt to act in this manner, grinning at the same time, when first introduced to a new monkey, but often also to their old monkey friends; and after this mutual display they begin to play together …“[T]he habit with adult animals is connected to a certain extent with sexual feelings, for Von Fischer watched through a glass door a female Cynopithecus niger, and she during several days, ‘turned and displayed her intensely reddened backside while making gurgling sounds—something I had never before observed in this animal. Seeing this, the male grew agitated; he vigorously rattled the bars of the cage, likewise emitting gurgling noises’ [this quotation was cautiously rendered by Darwin in the original German and is translated here]. As all the monkeys which have the hinder parts of their bodies more or less brightly coloured live, according to Von Fischer, in open rocky places, he thinks that these colours serve to render one sex conspicuous at a distance to the other; but, as monkeys are such gregarious animals, I should have thought there was no need for the sexes to recognise each other at a distance. It seems to me more probable that the bright colours, whether on the face or hinder end, or, as in the mandrill, on both, serve as a sexual ornament and attraction.” (Charles Darwin, “Supplemental Note on Sexual Selection in Relation to Monkeys,” Nature, November 2, 1876, p. 18.)7. R. M. Yerkes and J. H. Elder, “Oestrus, Receptivity and Mating in the Chimpanzee,” Comparative Psychology Monographs 13 (1936), pp. 1–39.8. Helen Fisher, “Monogamy, Adultery, and Divorce in Cross-Species Perspective,” in Michael H. Robinson and Lionel Tiger, editors, Man and Beast Revisited (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), p. 98.9. de Waal, Peacemaking among Primates, p. 82.10. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, “The Primate Origins of Human Sexuality,” in Robert Bellig and George Stevens, eds., Nobel Conference XXIII: The Evolution of Sex (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), pp. 112 ff.11. Kelly J. Stewart and Alexander H. Harcourt, “Gorillas: Variation in Female Relationships,” Chapter 14 of Barbara B. Smuts, Dorothy L. Cheney, Robert M. Seyfarth, Richard W. Wrangham, and Thomas T. Struhsaker, editors, Primate Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 163.12. Work of Nicholas Davies in the U.K., described by Stephen Emlen, private communication, 1991.13. Emily Martin, “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16 (1991), pp. 485–501.14. This is less true to the extent that the attributes of the sperm cells are determined by the fathers genes, and not the DNA instructions for making the next generation that the sperm cell itself is carrying. Sperm competition will in any case be very important in those animals—primates prominent among them—where more than one male ejaculates in rapid succession into a given female.15. Goodall, The Chimpanzees of Gombe, p. 366.16. H[ippolyte] A. Taine, History of English Literature, translated by H. van Laun, second edition (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1872), Volume I, p. 340.17. Jacqueline Goodchilds and Gail Zellman, “Sexual Signaling and Sexual Aggression in Adolescent Relationships,” in Pornography and Sexual Aggression, Neil Malamuth and Edward Donnerstein, editors (New York: Academic Press, 1984).18. Neil Malamuth, “Rape Proclivity among Males,” Journal of Social Issues 37 (1981), pp. 138–157; Malamuth, “Aggression against Women: Cultural and Individual Causes,” in Malamuth and Donnerstein, editors, op. cit.19. The most comprehensive national survey was sponsored by the National Victim Center and the Crime Victims Research and Treatment Center of the Medical University of South Carolina, with financial support from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. See David Johnston, “Survey Shows Number of Rapes Far Higher than Official Figures,” New York Times, April 24, 1992, p. A14.20. Bondage and rape are popular themes in pornography designed for male audiences in, e.g., Britain, France, Germany, South America, and Japan, as well as the United States. A recurrent subject of Japanese pornographic movies is the rape of a high school girl (Paul Abramson and Haruo Hayashi, “Pornography in Japan,” in Malamuth and Donnerstein, editors, op. cit.).21. Robert A. Prentky and Vernon L. Quinsey, Human Sexual Aggression: Current Perspectives, Volume 528 of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1988); Howard E. Barbaree and William L. Marshall, “The Role of Male Sexual Arousal in Rape: Six Models,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 59 (1991), pp. 621–630; Gene Abel, J. Rouleau, and J. Cunningham-Rather, “Sexually Aggressive Behavior,” in Modern Legal Psychiatry and Psychology, A. L. McGarry and S. A. Shah, editors (Philadelphia: Davis, 1985); Gene Abel, quoted in Faye Knopp, Retraining Adult Sex Offenders: Methods and Models (Syracuse, NY: Safer Society Press, 1984), p. 9.22. E.g., Lee Ellis, “A Synthesized (Biosocial) Theory of Rape,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 59 (1991), pp. 631–642.23. E.g., Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975); Judith Lewis Herman, “Considering Sex Offenders: A Model of Addiction,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 13 (1988), pp. 695–724.24. Lee Ellis, Theories of Rape (New York: Hemisphere, 1989).25. Peggy Reeves Sanday, “The Socio-Cultural Context of Rape: A Cross-Cultural Study,” Journal of Social Issues 37 (1981), pp. 5–27.
Chapter 17
ADMONISHING THE CONQUEROR
1. (London and Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate, 1863), p. 105.2. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, “Raising Darwin’s Consciousness: Females and Evolutionary Theory,” in Robert Bellig and George Stevens, editors, Nobel Conference XXIII: The Evolution of Sex (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 161.3. John Paul Scott, “Agonistic Behavior of Primates: A Comparative Perspective,” in Ralph L. Holloway, editor, Primate Aggression, Territoriality, and Xenophobia: A Comparative Perspective (New York: Academic Press, 1974), especially p. 427; Shirley C. Strum, Almost Human: A Journey into the World of Baboons (New York-Random House, 1987).4. Dorothy L. Cheney, “Interactions and Relationships Between Groups,” Chapter 22 in Barbara B. Smuts, Dorothy L. Cheney, Robert M. Seyfarth, Richard W. Wrangham, and Thomas T. Struhsaker, editors, Primate Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 281.5. Solly Zuckerman, The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932), pp. 49, 50.6. Solly Zuckerman, From Apes to Warlords (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), p. 39.7. Ibid., p. 12.8. F. W. Fitzsimons, The Natural History of South Africa, Volume 1, Mammals (London: Longmans, Green, 1919), quoted in Zuckerman, The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes, p. 293.9. Zuckerman, From Apes to Warlords, pp. 220, 219, and footnote, p. 220.10. Zuckerman, The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes, pp. 228, 229.11. Ibid., p. 237.12. Scott, op. cit.; H. Kummer, Social Origin of Hamadryas Baboons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).13. Zuckerman, From Apes to Warlords, p. 41.14. Ibid., p. 42.15. Zuckerman, The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes, p. 148.16. Hrdy, op. cit. (ref. 2), p. 163.17. Donna Robbins Leighton, “Gibbons: Territoriality and Monogamy,” Chapter 12 in Smuts et al., eds., op. cit., pp. 135–145.18. Randall Susman, editor, The Pygmy Chimpanzee: Evolutionary Biology and Behavior (New York: Plenum, 1984).19. Frans de Waal, Peacemaking among Primates (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 181.20. Toshisada Nishida and Mariko Hiraiwa-Hasegawa, “Chimpanzees and Bonobos: Cooperative Relationships among Males,” Chapter 15 in Smuts et al., op. cit., p. 167.21. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: The Modern Library, n.d.) (originally published in 1871) pp. 396, 397. Both Pliny and Aelian wrote about wine-imbibing apes who could be captured when drunk.22. Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 538.23. Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, The Biology of Peace and War. Men, Animals, and Aggression, translated by Eric Mosbacher (New York: The Viking Press, 1979) (originally published in 1975 as Krieg und Frieden by R. Piper, München), p. 108.24. Paul D. MacLean, “Special Award Lecture: New Findings on Brain Function and Sociosexual Behavior,” Chapter 4 in Joseph Zubin and John Money, editors, Contemporary Sexual Behavior. Critical Issues in the 1970s (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. 65.25. Barbara B. Smuts, “Sexual Competition and Mate Choice,” Chapter 31 in Barbara B. Smuts, Dorothy L. Cheney, Robert M. Seyfarth, Richard W. Wrangham, and Thomas T. Struhsaker, editors, Primate Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 392.26. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, “The Primate Origins of Human Sexuality,” in Robert Bellig and George Stevens, editors, Nobel Conference XXIII: The Evolution of Sex (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988).27. Alison F. Richard, “Malagasy Prosimians: Female Dominance,” Chapter 3 in Smuts et al, eds., op. cit., p. 32. Reference for quotation within passage: A. Jolly, “The Puzzle of Female Feeding Priority,” in M. Small, ed., Female Primates: Studies by Women Primatologists (New York: Alan R. Liss, 1984), p. 198.28. Toshisada Nishida and Mariko Hiraiwa-Hasegawa, “Chimpanzees and Bonobos: Cooperative Relationships among Males,” Chapter 15 in Smuts et al., eds., op. cit., p. 174.29. Mireille Bertrand, Bibliotheca Primatologica, Number 11, The Behavioral Repertoire of the Stumptail Macaque: A Descriptive and Comparative Study (Basel: S. Karger, 1969), p. 191.30. Frans de Waal, Peacemaking among Primates (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 153, 154.31. Frank E. Poirier, “Colobine Aggression: A Review,” in Ralph L. Holloway, editor, Primate Aggression, Territoriality, and Xenophobia: A Comparative Perspective (New York and London: Academic Press, 1974), pp. 146–147, 130–131, 140–141.32. Sherwood L. Washburn, “The Evolution of Human Behavior,” in John D. Roslansky, editor, The Uniqueness of Man (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1969), p. 170.33. Robert M. Seyfarth, “Vocal Communication and Its Relation to Language,” Chapter 36 in Smuts et al., eds., op. cit., pp. 444, 450, 445.34. P. D. MacClean, “New Findings on Brain Function and Sociosexual Behavior,” in Contemporary Sexual Behavior, Zubin and Money, eds., op. cit.35. Solly Zuckerman, The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932), p. 259.36. Darwin, op. cit., p. 449.37. Zuckerman, op. cit., p. 474.38. Patricia L. Whitten, “Infants and Adult Males,” Chapter 28 in Smuts et al., eds., op. cit., pp. 343, 344.
Chapter 18
THE ARCHIMEDES OF THE MACAQUES
1. Translated by John Dryden and revised by Arthur Hugh Clough (New York: The Modern Library, 1932), pp. 378, 379.2. Work of Wendy Bailey and Morris Goodman; private communication from Morris Goodman, 1992. See also ref. 12.3. Michael M. Miyamoto and Morris Goodman, “DNA Systematics and Evolution of Primates,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 21 (1990), pp. 197–220.4. Marc Godinot and Mohamed Mahboubi, “Earliest Known Simian Primate Found in Algeria,” Nature 357 (1992), pp. 324–326.5. Leonard Krishtalka, Richard K. Stucky, and K. Christopher Beard, “The Earliest Fossil Evidence for Sexual Dimorphism in Primates,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 87 (13) (July 1990), pp. 5223–5226.6. Almost 9% of the volume of the brain of insectivores (“insect-eaters,” small mammals that may resemble the ancestors of primates) is concerned with the analysis of odors. For prosimians, the number is down to 1.8%; for monkeys, around o. 15%; and for great apes, 0.07%. The fraction for humans is only 0.01%: Only one part in ten thousand of the volume of our brain is devoted to the understanding of smell. (H. Stephan, R. Bauchot, and O. J. Andy, “Data on Size of the Brain and of Various Brain Parts in Insectivores and Primates,” in The Primate Brain, C. Noback and W. Montagna, editors [New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970], pp. 289–297.) For insectivores, smell is a major part of what the brain does. For humans, it is an almost insignificant part of our perception of the world—as everyday experience confirms. Humans require 10 million times more butyric acid in the air than dogs do in order to smell it reliably. For acetic acid the factor is 200 million; for caproic acid, 100 million; and for ethyl mercaptan, which is not involved in sexual signaling, two thousand times. (R. H. Wright, The Sense of Smell [London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964]; D. Michael Stoddart, The Scented Ape: The Biology and Culture of Human Odour [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], Table 9.1, p. 235.)7. J. Terborgh, “The Social Systems of the New World Primates: An Adaptationist View,” in J. G. Else and P. C. Lee, eds., Primate Ecology and Conservation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 199–211.8. H. Sigg, “Differentiation of Female Positions in Hamadryas One-Male-Units,” Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie 53 (1980), pp. 265–302.9. Connie M. Anderson, “Female Age: Male Preference and Reproductive Success in Primates,” International Journal of Primatology 7 (1986), pp. 305–326.10. Dorothy L. Cheney and Richard W. Wrangham, “Predation,” Chapter 19 in Barbara B. Smuts, Dorothy L. Cheney, Robert M. Seyfarth, Richard W. Wrangham, and Thomas T. Struhsaker, editors, Primate Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 227–239.11. Susan Mineka, Richard Keir, and Veda Price, “Fear of Snakes in Wild- and Laboratory-reared Rhesus Monkeys (Macaca mulatta),” Animal Learning and Behavior 8 (4) (1980), pp. 653–663.12. Wendy J. Bailey, Kenji Hayasaka, Christopher G. Skinner, Susanne Kehoe, Leang C. Sien, Jerry L. Slighton and Morris Goodman, “Re-examination of the African Hominoid Trichotomy with Additional Sequences from the Primate β-Globin Gene Cluster,” Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, in press, 1993. See also, C. G. Sibley, J. A. Comstock and J. E. Ahlquist, “DNA Hybridization Evidence of Hominid Phylogeny: a Reanalysis of the Data,” Journal of Molecular Evolution 30 (1990), pp. 202–236.13. Toshisada Nishida, “Local Traditions and Cultural Transmission,” Chapter 38 in Smuts et al., eds., op. cit., pp. 467, 468. One of the original discussions is by S. Kawamura, “The Process of Subculture Propagation Among Japanese Macaques,” Journal of Primatology 2 (1959), pp. 43–60. See also Kawamura, “Subcultural Propagation Among Japanese Macaques,” in Primate Social Behavior, C. A. Southwick, ed. (New York: van Nostrand, 1963); and A. Tsumori, “Newly Acquired Behavior and Social Interaction of Japanese Monkeys,” in Social Communication Among Primates, S. Altman, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).14. Masao Kawai, “On the Newly-Acquired Pre-Cultural Behavior of the Natural Troop of Japanese Monkeys on Koshima Islet,” Primates 6 (1965), pp. 1–30.15. These findings have led to a widely accepted, but wholly unsubstantiated myth sometimes called the hundredth-monkey phenomenon (Lyall Watson, Lifetide [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979]; Ken Keyes, Jr., The Hundredth Monkey [Coos Bay, OR: Vision, 1982]). Potato washing spread slowly through the macaque colony, it is said, until some critical threshold was reached; as soon as the hundredth monkey learned the technique, this knowledge was achieved by everyone, “overnight”—a kind of paranormal collective consciousness. Various edifying lessons for human society are then drawn. Unfortunately, there is no evidence at all in support of this heartwarming account (Ron Amundson, “The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon,” in The Hundredth Monkey and Other Paradigms of the Paranormal, Kendrick Frazier, editor [Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1991], pp. 171–181.) It seems to have been invented out of whole cloth.16. The pioneering physicist Max Planck remarked, after encountering enormous resistance to his new quantum theory, that it takes a generation for physicists to accept radically new ideas, no matter how much they explain.17. William Coffmann McDermott, The Ape in Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1938).18. Julian Huxley, The Uniqueness of Man (London: Chatto and Windus, 1943), p. 3.19. H. T. Gardner and R. A. Gardner, “Comparing the Early Utterances of Child and Chimpanzee,” in A. Pick, editor, Minnesota Symposium in Child Psychology (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1974), volume 8, pp. 3–23.20. H. S. Terrace, L. A. Pettito, R. J. Sanders, and T. G. Bever, “Can an Ape Create a Sentence?” Science 206 (1979), pp. 891–902; C. A. Ristau and D. Robbins, “Cognitive Aspects of Ape Language Experiments,” in D. R. Griffin, editor, Animal Mind-Human Mind (Report of the Dahlem Workshop on Animal Mind-Human Mind, Berlin, March 22–27, 1981) (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1982), p. 317.21. Herbert S. Terrace, Nim (New York: Knopf, 1979); H. S. Terrace, L. A. Pettito, R. J. Sanders, and T. G. Bever, “Can an Ape Create a Sentence?” Science 206 (1979), pp. 891–902; Robert M. Seyfarth, “Vocal Communication and Its Relation to Language,” Chapter 36 in Smuts et al., eds., op. cit.22. Roger S. Fouts, Deborah H. Fouts, and Thomas E. Van Cantfort, “The Infant Loulis Learns Signs from Cross-fostered Chimpanzees,” in R. A. Gardner, B. T. Gardner, and T. E. Van Cantfort, eds., Teaching Sign Language to Chimpanzees (New York: State University of New York Press, 1989).23. The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World, Volume II, Mortimer J. Adler, editor in chief, William Gorman, general editor, Volume 3 of Great Books of the Western World, Robert Maynard Hutchins, editor in chief (Chicago: William Benton/Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952, 1977), Introduction to Chapter 51, “Man.”24. E. S. Savage-Rumbaugh, D. M. Savage-Rumbaugh, S. T. Smith, and J. Lawson, “Reference—the Linguistic Essential,” Science 210 (1980), pp. 922–925.25. Patricia Marks Greenfield and E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, “Grammatical Combination in Pan paniscus: Processes of Learning and Invention in the Evolution and Development of Language,” in “Language” and Intelligence in Monkeys and Apes, Sue Taylor Parker and Kathleen Gibson, editors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); idem, “Imitation, Grammatical Development, and the Invention of Protogrammar by an Ape,” in Biological and Behavioral Determinants of Language Development, Norman Krasnegor, D. M. Rumbaugh, R. L. Schiefelbusch and M. Studdert-Kennedy, editors (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1991).26. These experiments by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Duane Rumbaugh are briefly described in D. S. Rumbaugh, “Comparative Psychology and the Great Apes: Their Competence in Learning, Language and Numbers,” The Psychological Record 40 (1990), pp. 15–39. A detailed description is in E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Jeannine Murphy, Rose Sevcik, S. Williams, K. Brakke, and Duane M. Rumbaugh, “Language Comprehension in Ape and Child,” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, in press, 1993.27. D. M. Rumbaugh, W. D. Hopkins, D. A. Washburn, and E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, “Comparative Perspectives of Brain, Cognition and Language,” In N. A. Krasnegor, et al, editors, op. cit. (ref. 22).28. David Premack, Intelligence in Ape and Man (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1976).29. D. J. Gillan, D. Premack, and G. Woodruff, “Reasoning in the Chimpanzee: I. Analogical Reasoning,” Journal of Experimental Psychology and Animal Behavior 7 (1981), pp. 1–17; D. J. Gillan, “Reasoning in the Chimpanzee: II. Transitive Inference,” ibid., pp. 150–164.30. David Premack and G. Woodruff, “Chimpanzee Problem-solving: A Test for Comprehension,” Science 202 (1978), pp. 532–535; Premack and Woodruff, “Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?” Behavior and Brain Sciences 4 (1978), pp. 515–526.31. An early, although limited attempt: Duane M. Rumbaugh, Timothy V. Gill and E. C. von Glasersfeld, “Reading and Sentence Completion by a Chimpanzee (Pan),” Science 182 (1973), pp. 731–733; James L. Pate and Duane M. Rumbaugh, “The Language-Like Behavior of Lana Chimpanzee,” Animal Learning and Behavior 11 (1983), pp. 134–138.32. This quotation and the basis for its supporting paragraph is from Derek Bickerton’s stimulating Language and Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).33. E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh et al., op. cit. (Note 24).34. Eugene Linden, Silent Partners: The Legacy of the Ape Language Experiments (New York: Times Books, 1986), pp. 144, 145.35. Jane Goodall, Through a Window (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), p. 13.36. Linden, op. cit., pp. 79, 81.37. Janis Carter, “Survival Training for Chimps: Freed from Keepers and Cages, Chimps Come of Age on Baboon Island,” The Smithsonian 19 (1) (June 1988), pp. 36–49.38. The total number of chimps left on Earth is now about fifty thousand. They are very much an endangered species.39. II, 17, translated by Maxwell Staniforth (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1964); in Michael Grant, editor, Greek Literature: An Anthology (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1977) (first published in Pelican Books as Greek Literature in Translation, 1973), p. 427.
Chapter 19
WHAT IS HUMAN?
1. Quoted in Gavin Rylands de Beer, editor, “Darwin’s Notebooks on Transmutation of Species, Part IV: Fourth Notebook (October 1838–10 July 1839),” Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History), Historical Series (London) 2 (5) (1960), pp. 151–183; quotation (from notebook entry 47) appears on p. 163.2. Frank Roper, The Missing Link: Consul the Remarkable Chimpanzee (Manchester: Abel Heywood, 1904). A now-extinct primate of some 30 million years ago, perhaps ancestral to both apes and humans, has been named Proconsul, in honor of the Victorian sophisticate.3. Mortimer J. Adler, The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), p. 84.4. Theodosius Dobzhansky, Mankind Evolving (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), p. 339.5. George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), p. 284.6. Adler, op. cit., p. 136.7. This answer was first proposed in a lecture to the Yale Divinity School in 1880 by Darwin’s friend, the botanist and evolutionary biologist Asa Gray (Natural Science and Religion [New York: Scribner’s, 1880]).8. Metaphysics, Materialism and the Evolution of Mind: Early Writings of Charles Darwin, transcribed and annotated by Paul H. Barrett, commentary by Howard E. Gruber (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 187.9. Especially in The Descent of Man.10. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Edwin Cannan, editor (New York: Modern Library/Random House, 1937), Chapter II, “Of the Principle Which Gives Occasion to the Division of Labour,” p. 13.11. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon, 1983), p. 31.12. Frans de Waal, Peacemaking Among Primates (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 82.13. Smith, op. cit., p. 14.14. Tacitus, The Histories, translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb, in Volume 15 of Great Books of the Western World, Robert Maynard Hutchins, editor in chief (Chicago: William Benton/Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952, 1977), Book IV, 13, 17, pp. 269, 271.15. Another purported distinction of humans based solely on bodily form: “Man is, I believe the only animal that has a marked projection in the middle of the face,” an opinion of the eighteenth-century aesthete Uvedale Price. (Quoted in Keith Thomas, op. cit., p. 32.) He may have been ignorant of tapirs and proboscis monkeys, but elephants?16. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Volume I, translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, revised by Daniel J. Sullivan, Volume 19 of Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), Second Part, Part I, I. “Treatise on the Last End,” Question I, “On Man’s Last End” (p. 610); Part I, II. “Treatise on Human Acts,” Question XIII, “Of Choice” (pp. 673, 674); and Question XVII, “Of the Acts Commanded by the Will” (p. 688).17. Jakob von Uexküll, “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds” (1934), Part I of Claire H. Schiller, translator and editor, Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept (New York: International Universities Press, 1957), p. 42.18. John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York: Henry Holt, 1920), p. 1.19. Hugh Morris, The Art of Kissing (1946), forty-seven pages, no publisher is given in this demure little pamphlet.20. Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape (New York: Dell, 1984) (originally published in 1967 by McGraw Hill; revised edition published in 1983), p. 62.21. Donald Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 78, 79.22. Gerritt S. Miller, “Some Elements of Sexual Behavior in Primates, and Their Possible Influence on the Beginnings of Human Social Development,” Journal of Mammalogy 9 (1928), pp. 273–293.23. Gordon D. Jensen, “Human Sexual Behavior in Primate Perspective,” Chapter 2 in Joseph Zubin and John Money, editors, Contemporary Sexual Behavior: Critical Issues in the 1970s (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. 20.24. Cf. ibid., p. 22.25. For example, K. Imanishi, “The Origin of the Human Family: A Primatological Approach,” Japanese Journal of Ethnology 25 (1961), pp. 110–130 (in Japanese); discussed in Toshisada Nishida, editor, The Chimpanzees of the Mahale Mountains: Sexual and Life History Strategies (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1990), p. 10.26. By the philosopher Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (Boston: Beacon, 1955).27. Epictetus, The Discourses of Epictetus, translated by George Long, pp. 105–252 of Volume 12, Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), Book IV, Chapter 11, “About Purity,” pp. 240, 241. (In Book III, Chapter 7, Epictetus proposes another “unique” quality: shame and blushing.)28. E.g., Jane Goodall, Through a Window: My Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1990).29. Plato, The Dialogues of Plato, translated by Benjamin Jowett (in Volume 7 of Great Books of the Western World), Laws, Book VII, p. 715.30. Goodall, op. cit.31. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: The Modern Library, n.d.) (originally published in 1871) p. 449.32. Leo K. Bustad, “Man and Beast Interface: An Overview of Our Interrelationships,” in Michael H. Robinson and Lionel Tiger, editors, Man and Beast Revisited (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), p. 250.33. Toshisada Nishida, “Local Traditions and Cultural Transmission,” Chapter 38 of Barbara B. Smuts, Dorothy L. Cheney, Robert M. Seyfarth, Richard W. Wrangham, and Thomas T. Struhsaker, editors, Primate Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 473.34. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Homicide (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1988), p. 187.35. Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the 19th Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 269.36. Solly Zuckerman, The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932), p. 313.37. Leslie A. White, “Human Culture,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, Macropaedia (1978), Volume 8, p. 1152.38. Toshisada Nishida, “A Quarter Century of Research in the Mahale Mountains: An Overview,” Chapter 1 of Nishida, editor, The Chimpanzees of the Mahale Mountains, p. 34.39. Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (New York: Holt, 1935).40. Nishida, op. cit. (Note 38), p. 24. Chimpanzee folk medicine seems to have been independently rediscovered by other primatologists (Ann Gibbons, “Plants of the Apes,” Science 255 [1992], p. 921). Among pre-industrial humans, most plants are used for something. The botanist Gillian Prance and his colleagues found (private communication, 1992) that 95 percent of the rainforest trees accessible to a group of Bolivian indigenous peoples are employed—for example, the sap of a tree in the nutmeg family as a potent fungicide.41. E.g., Raymond Firth, Elements of Social Organisation (London: Watts and Co., 1951), pp. 183, 184; D. Michael Stoddart, The Scented Ape: The Biology and Culture of Human Odour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 126.42. Napoleon A. Chagnon, Yanomamo: The Fierce People (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1968), p. 65.43. Desmond Morris, The Biology of Art (London: Methuen, 1962); R. A. Gardner and B. T. Gardner, “Comparative Psychology and Language Acquisition,” in K. Salzinger and F. E. Denmarks, editors, Psychology: The State of the Art (New York: Annals of New York Academy of Sciences, 1978), pp. 37–76; K. Beach, R. S. Fouts, and D. H. Fouts, “Representational Art in Chimpanzees,” Friends of Washoe, 3:2–4, 4:1–4. Oil paintings by a chimp named Congo, which today hang in several private collections, exhibit a gaudy abstract expressionism and are considered the best of the chimp oeuvres.44. Birds, for example, recognize and mob a novel predator (or even a milk bottle) that frightened their ancestors four generations earlier. And speaking of milk bottles, soon after one blue tit pierced the metal foil cap of a milk bottle left on a doorstep and drank the cream, blue tits all over England are said to have begun drinking cream. (John Tyler Bonner, The Evolution of Culture in Animals [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980].) Of course no one knows who this pioneering bird was. This may not be learning by imitation, though. An already opened milk bottle and another bird present nearby and happy may be enough to give a naive bird the idea. (D. F. Sherry and B. G. Galef, Jr., “Social Learning Without Imitation: More About Milk Bottle Opening by Birds,” Animal Behaviour 40 [1990], pp. 987–989)45. Zuckerman, op. cit., pp. 315, 316.46. Nishida, “A Quarter Century of Research,” p. 12.47. So could souls have provided consciousness back then? A deity responsible on a case-by-case basis for precision injection of souls into this immense host of tiny creatures over the full range of geological time would be a very fussy as well as a very inefficient creator. Why not design it right from the beginning, and let life run by itself? Would the god responsible for the subtle, elegant, and universally applicable laws of physics do such slapdash, error-ridden, journeyman work in biology—requiring hands-on attention to every pathetic little microbe when they already know perfectly well how to reproduce themselves and vast stores of information? Instead, all the god has to do is to encode directly into the DNA of a few ancestors whatever information souls are required to know. Souls and consciousness could then pass, on their own, from generation to generation, freeing the god for other matters, perhaps some of greater urgency. But if the information in the DNA has come to be through the patient evolutionary process, why is a god needed to explain the injection of data, genes, or souls in the first place?48. A. I. Hallowell, “Culture, Personality and Society,” in Anthropology Today, A. L. Kroeber, editor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 597–620; Hallowell, “Self, Society and Culture in Phylogenetic Perspective,” in Evolution After Darwin, Volume 2, S. Tax, editor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 309–371. The contention that only humans are self-aware can be found in many philosophical and scientific disquisitions, e.g., Karl R. Popper and John C. Eccles, The Self and Its Brain (New York: Springer, 1977).49. G. G. Gallup, Jr., “Self-Recognition in Primates: A Comparative Approach to the Bidirectional Properties of Consciousness,” American Psychologist 32 (1977), pp. 329–338.50. A common literary and iconographic theme in medieval Europe beginning in the thirteenth century is an alleged propensity for apes to admire themselves in mirrors. Cf. H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: University of London, 1952), pp. 212 et seq.51. Montaigne, The Essays of Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Book II, Essay XII, “Apology for Raimond de Sebonde,” translated by Charles Cotton, edited by W Carew Hazlitt, Volume 25 of Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), p. 227. In a nearby passage, Montaigne quotes the Roman epigramist Juvenal: “What stronger lion ever took the life from a weaker?” But, as we’ve mentioned, lions routinely kill all the cubs on taking over a pride. This saves the male the trouble of caring for young not his, and helps bring the females back into heat.52. E.g., R. L. Trivers, Social Evolution (Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin/Cummings, 1985), especially the chapter “Deceit and Self-Deception”; Joan Lockard and Delroy Paulhus, editors, Self-Deception: An Adaptive Mechanism? (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1989).53. C. G. Beer, “Study of Vertebrate Communication—Its Cognitive Implications,” in D. R. Griffin, editor, Animal Mind-Human Mind (Report of the Dahlem Workshop on Animal Mind-Human Mind, Berlin, March 22–27, 1981) (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1982), p. 264; E. W. Menzel, “A Group of Young Chimpanzees in a One-acre Field,” in A. M. Schrier and F. Stollnitz, editors, Behavior of Nonhuman Primates (New York: Academic Press, 1974).54. Stuart Hampshire, Thought and Action (London: Chatto and Windus, 1959).55. T. H. Huxley, Evidence as to Mans Place in Nature (London: Williams and Norgate, 1863), p. 132.56. Letter of February 5, 1649, in Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, Great Treasury of Western Thought: A Compendium of Important Statements on Man and His Institutions by the Great Thinkers in Western History (New York and London: R. R. Bowker Company, 1977), p. 12.57. See, for example, Eugene Linden, Silent Partners: The Legacy of the Ape Language Experiments (New York: Times Books, 1986); Roger Fouts, “Capacities for Language in the Great Apes,” in Proceedings, Ninth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (The Hague: Mouton, 1973).58. For example, “Man is the only animal … that can use symbols” (Max Black, The Labyrinth of Language [New York: Praeger, 1968]); “Animals cannot have language … If they had it, they would … no longer be animals. They would be human beings” (K. Goldstein, “The Nature of Language,” in Language: An Enquiry into Its Meaning and Function [New York: Harper, 1957]); “There seems to be no substance to the view that human language is simply a more complex instance of something to be found elsewhere in the animal world” (Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972]). These examples are taken from Donald R. Griffin’s The Question of Animal Awareness, revised edition (New York: Rockefeller University Press, 1981). Only occasionally is a contrary note sounded (e.g., A. I. Hallowell, Philosophical Theology, Vol. 2 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937], p. 94.)59. Derek Bickerton, Language and Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), especially pp. 8, 15–16.60. Bickerton, op. cit., proposes that the early speech of children is a “protolanguage” fundamentally different from fully developed human languages, that this protolanguage may be accessible to apes, and that it was used by our ancestors in the transition from apes to humans.
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