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.