From: Wade T. Smith (wade.t.smith@verizon.net)
Date: Sun 19 Jan 2003 - 15:43:21 GMT
Gone Ape
By CHARLES MCGRATH
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/19/magazine/
19WWLN.html?pagewanted=print&position=top
Anyone who has watched much nature television knows that orangutans are
by far the handsomest and smartest-looking of the great apes. They're
literal highbrows, with wide, soulful eyes and broad expressive
foreheads. They're covered not with bathmat fur, like so many apes, but
with what amounts to a couture pelt -- red hair so long and fine it
seems blow-dried. It's true that orangutans drag their knuckles when
they walk, but how else are you going to get around if your arms are
longer than your legs? For creatures so large, they are uncommonly
graceful, not to mention sweet-natured, so it's gratifying to learn
that a team of scientists, writing in the journal Science, has recently
certified them as ''cultured'' as well. Metaphorically at least, the
news makes you want to extend a cheerful hand to your fellow primate
and pump him by his auburn, hirsute paw (it would feel sort of like
angora, I'm guessing).
Culture in this sense is not exactly a museum or concert-hall
accomplishment. It's behavior that's not genetically determined but,
rather, learned by watching others; certain styles of tool use, for
example, or systems of social signaling. The theory is that if animals
in one place do something a certain way, for no particular reason, and
the same animals someplace else do not, then chances are that behavior
is cultural, not instinctive.
In the wild, orangutans tend to be loners, and therefore it was
believed that they lacked a ''system of socially transmitted
behavior.'' But after studying various orangutan populations in Borneo
and Sumatra, the authors of the Science article concluded that some of
them did indeed show signs of having taught each other stuff. They had
learned how to masturbate with sticks, for example -- male and female
alike -- and to make ritual ''raspberry'' noises at bedtime before
scaling into their nests. They had also mastered the art of creating
funny sounds by blowing into leaves, and of catching rides in Robert
Frost fashion, by swinging on bent-over tree snags. This is all it
takes -- a few useless but highly amusing tricks -- to promote you into
the highest rank of primates: the elite group that also includes
chimpanzees, most likely bonobos and gorillas and of course us -- the
naked apes, to use Desmond Morris's label.
Morris was the British zoologist who in 1967, when most scientists and
philosophers were still trying to draw distinctions between man and
beast, shocked everyone by declaring that Homo sapiens, hairlessness
notwithstanding, was still an ape and thought and behaved like one.
''Behind the facade of modern city life there is the same old naked
ape,'' Morris wrote. ''Only the names have been changed: for 'hunting'
read 'working,' for 'hunting grounds' read 'place of business' . . .
for 'pair bond' read 'marriage.' '' Our biggest problem, Morris added,
is that man prides himself on having the biggest brain of all the
primates ''but attempts to conceal the fact that he also has the
biggest penis, preferring to accord this honor falsely to the mighty
gorilla . . . and it is high time we examined his basic behavior.''
In Morris's analysis, much of that behavior consisted of trying to deal
with the cruel contradictions of pair-bonding and gorillalike
hypersexuality. On one hand, we wanted to retain a single mate, so we
became exquisitely and inventively sensual; we turned the female
breasts into substitutes for the buttocks and figured out how to have
frontal intercourse. (This is the epochal moment memorialized by Rae
Dawn Chong and Everett McGill in ''Quest for Fire,'' the 1981 movie on
which Morris served as a consultant.) On the other hand, we couldn't be
going ape (sexually speaking) all the time, so we had to invent
deodorant and the unspoken prohibition against looking people in the
eye on the subway.
Some of Morris's ideas now seem more than a little wacky. (He claimed,
for example, that after orgasm the breast of the female naked ape
increases in size by up to 25 percent.) But Morris gave rise eventually
to E.O. Wilson and sociobiology, and no one doubts for a minute anymore
that many of our social and behavioral traits are rooted in biological
and evolutionary imperatives. We are a lot more animal than we used to
think.
In the years since Morris, meanwhile, a number of other scientists have
been working to erase the man-animal distinction from the other end --
to suggest, for example, that language may not be unique to humans, and
that primates may have culture, something we also believed was uniquely
ours. Considering what we think we've learned about our own natures,
though, what's fascinating about the orangutan discoveries is how
little of their learned behavior has to do with sexual customs
(masturbating with sticks aside) and how much with what amounts to just
plain goofing off.
Not all the orangutans' cultural accomplishments were pointless. The
scientists found them using leaves as gloves and as napkins, and
wielding tools to extract seeds and to probe into tree cavities. But
the Science article includes a table rating the behaviors in order of
frequency, and at the top of the list are the branch-riding, the
various kinds of noisemaking, scratching games and building nests just
for playing in -- all of which, when you think of it, have human
equivalents. At bedtime we nuzzle our infant children on the stomach to
make the raspberry sound -- that universal cultural signal, it turns
out, at once fond and silly; we teach kids to make a squeaky noise by
blowing on a blade of grass; we throw a bedspread over a card table so
they can play house. To amuse them (and ourselves), we scratch and mug
and sometimes act like complete orangutans. Primates that we are, we
presumably learned long ago that our nature at its most essential
consists of being able to entertain someone, and of being entertained
in return.
Charles McGrath is the editor of The New York Times Book Review.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun 19 Jan 2003 - 15:42:53 GMT