by Carl Sagan
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 t
he 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 Re
search 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)
