We Are (Unique) Animals: The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond
Book Review
The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond
First Edition Published by Harper Perennial in 1992
Jared Diamond’s best known work is Guns, Germs, and Steel, the Pulitzer Prize winning thesis of why and how Euroasians were able to conquer, displace, or decimate Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, and other peoples, and why these groups were not able to do the reverse. In that groundbreaking book, Jared Diamond postulated how geography and its effect on the distribution of plant and animal life played a role in the relatively modern eventual displacements of sets of peoples by other distant groups. In The Third Chimpanzee, the author digs much further back—to the animal kingdom and ape life especially—to conjecture how we developed our unique and not so unique human characteristics and were able to eventually conquer the world and dominate each other and all other species.
Just Another Species of Big Animal
Diamond first explains why we are indeed the third chimpanzee besides the pygmy (a.k.a. Bonobo) and the common chimpanzee. Because taxonomy is based on physical characteristics and often anthropocentric, Diamond argues that cladistics—the classification of animals based on genetic distance of time of divergence—is more objective and scientifically sound:
“All taxonomists agree now that red-eyed and white-eyed vireos belong together in the genus Vireo, the various species of gibbons in the genus Hylobates. Yet the members of these pairs of species are genetically more distant from each other than are humans from the other two chimpanzees, and diverged longer ago. On this basis, then, humans don’t constitute a distinct family, or even a distinct genus, but belong in the same genus as common and pygmy chimps. Since our genus name Homo was proposed first, it takes priority, by the rules of zoological nomenclature, over the genus name Pan coined for the ‘other’ chimps. So there are not one but three species of genus Homo on earth today: the common chimpanzee, Homo troglodytes; the pigmy chimpanzee, Homo paniscus; and the third chimpanzee or human chimpanzee, Homo sapiens. Since the gorilla is only slightly more distinct, it has almost equal right to be considered a fourth species of Homo.
Even taxonomists espousing cladistics are anthropocentric, and the lumping of humans and chimps into the same genus will undoubtedly be a bitter pill for them to swallow. There is not doubt, however, that whenever chimpanzees learn cladistics, or whenever taxonomists from Outer Space visit Earth to inventory its inhabitants, they will unhesitatingly adopt the new classification.”
It wasn’t until after the Great Leap Forward, perhaps as recently as 40,000 years ago, that humans diverged from other apes through mainly cultural and not genetic change. Diamond suggests that the enormous cultural changes since then were made possible because of the development of human language.
An Animal with a Strange Life Cycle
The focus of the next section is the human life cycle, including sexuality and lifespan. Diamond’s analysis of why women developed ovulation and menopause, why it’s mostly men and not women who practice adultery, how we pick our sex partners, and why we grow old and die are fascinating and convincing because of his use of precedents in the animal kingdom. Another thought-provoking hypothesis is on extraterrestrial life: Diamond argues that even with billions of potentially habitable planets, we could be the only intelligent life in the universe because convergent evolution is not universal (he cites the family of woodpeckers, which evolved only once), and because the lifespan of an intelligent species such as ours could be short given humans’ destructiveness of each other and other species. And if contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life were to happen? Diamond writes,
“I find it mind-boggling that the astronomers now eager to spend a hundred million dollars on the search for extraterrestrial life have never thought seriously about the most obvious question: what would happen if we found it, or if it found us. The astronomers tacitly assume that we and the little green monsters would welcome each other and settle down to fascinating guidance. We’ve already discovered two species that are very intelligent but technically less advanced than we are—the common chimpanzee and pygmy chimpanzee. Has our response been to sit down and try to communicate with them? Of course not. Instead we shoot them, dissect them, cut off their hand for trophies, put them on exhibit in cages, inject them with AIDS virus as a medical experiment, and destroy or take over their habitats. That response was predictable, because human explorers who discovered technically less advances humans also regularly responded by shooting them, decimating their populations with new diseases, and destroying or taking over their habitats.”
Uniquely Human
They include language, art, agriculture, and our propensity to use addictive substances. With respect to art, it may not be uniquely human at all—the paintings of Siri, a captive elephant, were described as having “a kind of flair and decisiveness and originality” by Willem de Kooning himself (he of course did not know that the artist was not human). As to why animals don’t paint in the wild, Diamond writes:
“Perhaps we can now answer the questions why art as we know it characterizes us but no other animals. Since chimps paint in captivity, why don’t they do so in the wild? As an answer, I suggest that wild chimps still have their day filled with problems of finding food surviving, and fending off rival chimp groups. If wild chimps had more leisure time plus the means to manufacture paints, they would be painting. The proof of my theory is that it actually happened: we’re still 98 percent chimps in our genes.”
The author also proposes an interesting theory on dangerous behaviors: they may have a biological purpose as a useful tool for sexual selection. Equally intriguing is the section on human language—it turns out that some animals learn to emit the correct sounds (words in their language) based on the context from their parents, just as human babies learn to pronounce words correctly and use them in a proper context.
World Conquerors
Diamond next discusses how contacts between distant people change culture and language (it is essentially a prelude to Guns, Germs, and Steel). The author’s first-hand accounts of his visits to and his analysis of New Guinea are fascinating:
“Europe today has only about fifty languages, most of them belonging to a single language family (Indo-European). In contrast, New Guinea, with less than one-tenth of Europe’s area and less than one-hundredth of its population, has about a thousand languages, many of them unrelated to any other known languages in New Guinea or elsewhere. The average New Guinea language is spoken by a few thousand people living within a radius of ten miles. When I traveled sixty miles from Okapa to Karimui in New Guinea’s eastern highlands, I passed through six languages, starting with Fore (a language with postpositions, like Finnish) and ending with Tudawhe (a language with alternative tones and nasalized vowels, like Chinese).
New Guinea shows linguists what the world used to be like, with each isolated tribe having its own language, until agriculture’s rise permitted a few groups to expand and spread their tongue over large areas.”
The section on the Indo-European group of languages (of which English is a part of) is likewise intriguing and surprising. Diamond convincingly speculates that the origins of the Indo-European languages lie on the Ukrainian/Russian steppes north of the Caucasus, not in Western Europe as some anthropologists believe.
Contact between peoples also involves genocide, an unfortunate human hallmark that has roots in the animal kingdom as well:
“…of all our human hallmarks—art, spoken language, drugs, and the others—the one that has been derived most straightforwardly from animal precursors is genocide. Common chimps already carried out planned killings, extermination of neighboring bands, wars of territorial conquest, and abduction of young nubile females. If chimps were given spears and some instructions in their use, their killings would undoubtedly begin to approach ours in efficiency. Chimpanzee behavior suggests that a major reason for our human hallmark of group living was defense against other human groups, especially once we acquired weapons and a large enough brain to plan ambushes. If this reasoning is correct, then anthropologists’ traditional emphasis on ‘man the hunter’ as a driving force of human evolution might be valid after all—with the difference that we ourselves were our own prey as well as the predator that forced us into group living.”
Reversing Our Progress Overnight
Diamond argues that the two most pressing issues facing humanity are our destruction of the environment (a prelude to his most recent book, Collapse) and the possibility of nuclear obliteration:
“The risks of a nuclear holocaust and of an environmental holocaust constitute the two really pressing questions facing the human race today. Compared to these two clouds, our usual obsessions with cancer, AIDS, and diet pale into insignificance, because those problems don’t threaten the survival of the human species. If the nuclear and environmental risks should not materialize, we’ll have plenty of leisure time to solve bagatelles like cancer. If we fail to avert those two risks, solving cancer won’t have helped us anyway.”
As sociobiologist Edward Wilson has done in numerous books including The Future of Life
and The Creation, Diamond writes that the rate of extinction has indeed gone up exponentially in modern times, and that the interdependence of species is part of our survival and that is why it is important to try to save all species.
“Dismissing the extinction crisis on the grounds that extinction is natural would be just like dismissing genocide on the grounds that death is the natural fate of all humans.”
The Third Chimpanzee is an all-encompassing book on the evolution of human traits, many of which are shared or have precedents in the animal kingdom. The drawbacks, if any, are miniscule: the contents are a bit jumbled, some of the theories are perhaps incomplete (he fails to mention the theory that the click sounds of Khoisan and Bantu languages in southern Africa may have roots of the first spoken human languages in the “Bridges to Human Language” section), and some facts are omitted (in describing genocide, he names all “tribes” by their nationalities except for Germans in WWII, which he calls “Nazis”; he also does not mention the Chinese genocide of millions in the 1950s and 1960s). The Third Chimpanzee is well-written, fascinating to read, and because it has elements of seminal theories expounded on in his later books, it may be Jared Diamond's best book yet.
Just Another Species of Big Animal
Diamond first explains why we are indeed the third chimpanzee besides the pygmy (a.k.a. Bonobo) and the common chimpanzee. Because taxonomy is based on physical characteristics and often anthropocentric, Diamond argues that cladistics—the classification of animals based on genetic distance of time of divergence—is more objective and scientifically sound:
“All taxonomists agree now that red-eyed and white-eyed vireos belong together in the genus Vireo, the various species of gibbons in the genus Hylobates. Yet the members of these pairs of species are genetically more distant from each other than are humans from the other two chimpanzees, and diverged longer ago. On this basis, then, humans don’t constitute a distinct family, or even a distinct genus, but belong in the same genus as common and pygmy chimps. Since our genus name Homo was proposed first, it takes priority, by the rules of zoological nomenclature, over the genus name Pan coined for the ‘other’ chimps. So there are not one but three species of genus Homo on earth today: the common chimpanzee, Homo troglodytes; the pigmy chimpanzee, Homo paniscus; and the third chimpanzee or human chimpanzee, Homo sapiens. Since the gorilla is only slightly more distinct, it has almost equal right to be considered a fourth species of Homo.
Even taxonomists espousing cladistics are anthropocentric, and the lumping of humans and chimps into the same genus will undoubtedly be a bitter pill for them to swallow. There is not doubt, however, that whenever chimpanzees learn cladistics, or whenever taxonomists from Outer Space visit Earth to inventory its inhabitants, they will unhesitatingly adopt the new classification.”
It wasn’t until after the Great Leap Forward, perhaps as recently as 40,000 years ago, that humans diverged from other apes through mainly cultural and not genetic change. Diamond suggests that the enormous cultural changes since then were made possible because of the development of human language.
An Animal with a Strange Life Cycle
The focus of the next section is the human life cycle, including sexuality and lifespan. Diamond’s analysis of why women developed ovulation and menopause, why it’s mostly men and not women who practice adultery, how we pick our sex partners, and why we grow old and die are fascinating and convincing because of his use of precedents in the animal kingdom. Another thought-provoking hypothesis is on extraterrestrial life: Diamond argues that even with billions of potentially habitable planets, we could be the only intelligent life in the universe because convergent evolution is not universal (he cites the family of woodpeckers, which evolved only once), and because the lifespan of an intelligent species such as ours could be short given humans’ destructiveness of each other and other species. And if contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life were to happen? Diamond writes,
“I find it mind-boggling that the astronomers now eager to spend a hundred million dollars on the search for extraterrestrial life have never thought seriously about the most obvious question: what would happen if we found it, or if it found us. The astronomers tacitly assume that we and the little green monsters would welcome each other and settle down to fascinating guidance. We’ve already discovered two species that are very intelligent but technically less advanced than we are—the common chimpanzee and pygmy chimpanzee. Has our response been to sit down and try to communicate with them? Of course not. Instead we shoot them, dissect them, cut off their hand for trophies, put them on exhibit in cages, inject them with AIDS virus as a medical experiment, and destroy or take over their habitats. That response was predictable, because human explorers who discovered technically less advances humans also regularly responded by shooting them, decimating their populations with new diseases, and destroying or taking over their habitats.”
Uniquely Human
They include language, art, agriculture, and our propensity to use addictive substances. With respect to art, it may not be uniquely human at all—the paintings of Siri, a captive elephant, were described as having “a kind of flair and decisiveness and originality” by Willem de Kooning himself (he of course did not know that the artist was not human). As to why animals don’t paint in the wild, Diamond writes:
“Perhaps we can now answer the questions why art as we know it characterizes us but no other animals. Since chimps paint in captivity, why don’t they do so in the wild? As an answer, I suggest that wild chimps still have their day filled with problems of finding food surviving, and fending off rival chimp groups. If wild chimps had more leisure time plus the means to manufacture paints, they would be painting. The proof of my theory is that it actually happened: we’re still 98 percent chimps in our genes.”
The author also proposes an interesting theory on dangerous behaviors: they may have a biological purpose as a useful tool for sexual selection. Equally intriguing is the section on human language—it turns out that some animals learn to emit the correct sounds (words in their language) based on the context from their parents, just as human babies learn to pronounce words correctly and use them in a proper context.
World Conquerors
Diamond next discusses how contacts between distant people change culture and language (it is essentially a prelude to Guns, Germs, and Steel). The author’s first-hand accounts of his visits to and his analysis of New Guinea are fascinating:
“Europe today has only about fifty languages, most of them belonging to a single language family (Indo-European). In contrast, New Guinea, with less than one-tenth of Europe’s area and less than one-hundredth of its population, has about a thousand languages, many of them unrelated to any other known languages in New Guinea or elsewhere. The average New Guinea language is spoken by a few thousand people living within a radius of ten miles. When I traveled sixty miles from Okapa to Karimui in New Guinea’s eastern highlands, I passed through six languages, starting with Fore (a language with postpositions, like Finnish) and ending with Tudawhe (a language with alternative tones and nasalized vowels, like Chinese).
New Guinea shows linguists what the world used to be like, with each isolated tribe having its own language, until agriculture’s rise permitted a few groups to expand and spread their tongue over large areas.”
The section on the Indo-European group of languages (of which English is a part of) is likewise intriguing and surprising. Diamond convincingly speculates that the origins of the Indo-European languages lie on the Ukrainian/Russian steppes north of the Caucasus, not in Western Europe as some anthropologists believe.
Contact between peoples also involves genocide, an unfortunate human hallmark that has roots in the animal kingdom as well:
“…of all our human hallmarks—art, spoken language, drugs, and the others—the one that has been derived most straightforwardly from animal precursors is genocide. Common chimps already carried out planned killings, extermination of neighboring bands, wars of territorial conquest, and abduction of young nubile females. If chimps were given spears and some instructions in their use, their killings would undoubtedly begin to approach ours in efficiency. Chimpanzee behavior suggests that a major reason for our human hallmark of group living was defense against other human groups, especially once we acquired weapons and a large enough brain to plan ambushes. If this reasoning is correct, then anthropologists’ traditional emphasis on ‘man the hunter’ as a driving force of human evolution might be valid after all—with the difference that we ourselves were our own prey as well as the predator that forced us into group living.”
Reversing Our Progress Overnight
Diamond argues that the two most pressing issues facing humanity are our destruction of the environment (a prelude to his most recent book, Collapse) and the possibility of nuclear obliteration:
“The risks of a nuclear holocaust and of an environmental holocaust constitute the two really pressing questions facing the human race today. Compared to these two clouds, our usual obsessions with cancer, AIDS, and diet pale into insignificance, because those problems don’t threaten the survival of the human species. If the nuclear and environmental risks should not materialize, we’ll have plenty of leisure time to solve bagatelles like cancer. If we fail to avert those two risks, solving cancer won’t have helped us anyway.”
As sociobiologist Edward Wilson has done in numerous books including The Future of Life
and The Creation, Diamond writes that the rate of extinction has indeed gone up exponentially in modern times, and that the interdependence of species is part of our survival and that is why it is important to try to save all species.“Dismissing the extinction crisis on the grounds that extinction is natural would be just like dismissing genocide on the grounds that death is the natural fate of all humans.”
The Third Chimpanzee is an all-encompassing book on the evolution of human traits, many of which are shared or have precedents in the animal kingdom. The drawbacks, if any, are miniscule: the contents are a bit jumbled, some of the theories are perhaps incomplete (he fails to mention the theory that the click sounds of Khoisan and Bantu languages in southern Africa may have roots of the first spoken human languages in the “Bridges to Human Language” section), and some facts are omitted (in describing genocide, he names all “tribes” by their nationalities except for Germans in WWII, which he calls “Nazis”; he also does not mention the Chinese genocide of millions in the 1950s and 1960s). The Third Chimpanzee is well-written, fascinating to read, and because it has elements of seminal theories expounded on in his later books, it may be Jared Diamond's best book yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment