Ethology: That Animal That Is Man

WHAT is man? To this age-old question, the social sciences are now proposing some extraordinarily complicated new answers. First and foremost, man is an animal--but he is neither the end product of evolution nor much more than a mediocre biological success. The body he inhabits is primitive, at least 50,000 years out of date. Basically, he is one of the world's most aggressive beasts, who, the scientists say, fundamentally enjoys torturing and killing other animals, including his fellow man in the sport known as war.

He considers himself more or less monogamous. But, according to the new scientific theory, he is not really, and he was never intended to be. His hormones urge him to copulate with his sisters and daughters, just as all other mammals generally do. But his cortex tells him to barter his females to strangers for political advantage, and he listens. He would like to murder his father, but this natural impulse is cunningly suppressed: one day he will be the old man. He feels as strong an affinity for his buddy as for his wife--or even his mother, once he has been weaned. But, says the expert, the rage and the lust in him are perpetually rampant. Everything he possesses, everything he is, he owes to the intellectual control that stays the trigger finger.

Flesh and Bone. Such a sober, even cynical analysis of man does not fit well with his image of himself as a civilized and cultured being. Yet within the past decade, this rough vision of man as a relative of the primates one step removed from the jungle has been put forward by a number of behavioral scientists working in such fields as genetics, neurophysiology and primatology. Says Anthropologist Robin Fox of Rutgers, whose specialty is the sexual conduct of man the animal: "We are only beginning to understand the implications of extending to behavior the same kind of analysis that has proved successful with flesh and bone."

The subject of man as an animal is older than Darwin. But to Darwin's insights into man's evolution, the new approach is adding radical new dimensions. It rejects the view that biology has nothing to do with behavior, and proposes the hypothesis that culture itself has a biological basis. "What we are saying," says Fox, "is that it is highly probable that the species is predisposed to behave in certain ways and that these ways are probably more numerous and specific than has been thought."

One obvious way to learn about these predispositions is to study the behavior of man's nearest neighbors, the monkeys and great apes--and to study them not just in the zoo or laboratory but in their natural habitat. In studying the baboon, for example, Berkeley Anthropologist Sherwood L. Washburn and his Harvard disciple, Irven DeVore, are concerned mainly with what this primate can reveal about man. The baboon's hierarchical society, commanded by dominant males, suggests the fundamental pattern to which man's ancestors may have subscribed, long before marriage was invented. So far no primate study has turned up a societal unit that duplicates the human family.

Monogamy, in fact, turns out to be biologically "unnatural." As Fox puts it, "Man is by nature promiscuous, but works hard in the opposite direction." How then did the family structure evolve? The answer, suggest the ethologists, has a great deal to do with the uncertain history of the development of man's only major biological specialization--his brain. From a scratch start with the simians, this marvelous cultural device grew threefold in man in one million years--an evolutionary rate of unprecedented rapidity. Asks Fox: "Did the growth of the brain lead to the capacity for greater social complexity, or vice versa?"

One widely accepted speculation is that the pressures of survival put a heavy premium on the dawning intelligence of man. The first toolmaker gained an enormous survival advantage over his fellows--and may have asserted it by cornering the local supply of women. This male dominance operated to drive less intellectual males to the periphery of the troop, or tribe; it also served to transmit the toolmaker's genes to the next generation.

Gene Pool. Had early man been naturally monogamous, evolution might not have favored intelligence and the dramatic expansion of the brain. "If every male had been allowed the opportunity to contribute equally to the gene pool," writes Fox, "then we might have been forever stuck as Homo stupidus." He and others, notably Washburn and British Ethologist Michael Chance, have devised theories for explaining how the banished, peripheral males might eventually win their spurs.

They had to be both patient and abstemious--qualities that, on examination, involve considerable intelligence. Chance has called this process "equilibration"--defined by Fox as "the ability to control and to time responses, to understand the consequences of one's actions." The foolish peripheral male obeyed only his hormones, invaded the dominant male's harem and was either killed or ostracized. The clever male restrained this impulse and intelligently awaited a fruitful opportunity to topple, replace or succeed the Sultan.

From this conjecture flows a host of fascinating theories. On the ability to inhibit the sex drive, all of civilization may be based. Says Fox: "Control over sex and aggression; feelings about status and personal wellbeing; group loyalty; conscience and guilt; sensitivity to incestuous impulses; identification with and rebellion against the older generation; possessiveness over females and sexual jealousy; the desire for variety in sex life--all these are part and parcel of the evolution of the brain."

The new investigation of man's animal nature is rather humbling in its impact, but it also goes a long way, in the ethologists' view, to explain why he acts as he does. Canada's Lionel Tiger--who appropriately met Fox at the London Zoo and now works with him at Rutgers--has a theory to explain why men dominate politics. He argues that men are biologically more political than women, in the sense that they have a greater ability for what psychologists call "bonding" or the ability to forge lasting relationships. He suggests that there is an attraction of man for man that is of the same order of intensity as sex but that exists for political rather than reproductive purposes.

Animal studies can also be used to criticize existing social institutions. In all the lower primates, the education process is informal. Washburn has shown, for instance, that primate curiosity--which in man would be called basic research--comes into play when the animal is well-fed and secure; only then is he in the mood to gratify this intellectual need. Similarly, the juvenile ape, observing grownup behavior, mimes it in his games. For this pleasurable educational system, modern man has substituted the discipline of the classroom and the material rewards of grades, both of which, in Washburn's view, offend man's basic biological nature.

Murder and War. Probably the most controversial studies of man and animal --notably by Konrad Lorenz--have to do with the biology of aggression and its implication for modern society. Evolution indicates that the aggressive instinct tended to preserve order within a tribal structure. But most human aggregates have gone beyond the tribe. And perhaps as an inevitable result, aggression no longer keeps but strains the peace. In man's simpler and less crowded past, aggression was both useful and effective; in man's present, it can lead to such thoroughly unanimal behavior as murder and war.

This is partly because the human animal straddles the past and the present. "It is not only our bodies that are primitive, but also our customs," Washburn writes. "They are not adapted to the crowded, technical world, dominated by a fantastic acceleration of scientific knowledge. There is a fundamental difficulty in the fact that contemporary human groups are led by primates whose evolutionary history dictates a strong desire to dominate. Attempts to build personal or international relations on the wishful basis that people will not be aggressive is as futile as it would be to try to build the institution of banking with no auditing on the basis that all employees will be honest."

As the proponents of the new theory themselves admit, it is still only theory. They are not working with fossil teeth and jaws but with habits and customs that naturally left no physical trace. All that they have guessed about man's biological history remains to be proved. But the guesses carry many implications. Perhaps the most significant is that civilization's splendid institutions owe a part of their balance to the wily jungle primate still surviving beneath man's cultural veneer. He is really a part of the design. His contribution, only just beginning to be perceived, can be ignored only at the risk of civilization itself.

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