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,