A Wet Scenario

Darwin was a male chauvinist; modern theories of evolution are speculative and sexist, and treat women as mere "satellites" of men. That, simply stated, is the opinion of Author Elaine Morgan. Armed with a vivid imagination and a healthy supply of female chauvinism, she has developed a theory that is even more speculative and sexist than those she decries. In The Descent of Woman (Stein & Day; $7.95), Author Morgan proposes that many of mankind's current physical and behavioral characteristics developed during a period when prehominid apes spent much of their time on sandy shores and in neck-high waters. Led by females, she says, the apes abandoned the dying forests, found life on the open plains too threatening and took to the ocean, where they lived for ten million years before resuming a land-based way of life.

Fighting Canines. Elaine Morgan's scientific credentials do not quite measure up to those of, say, Charles Darwin. A 51-year-old mother of three children who lives in Mountain Ash, Wales, she earned an Oxford degree in English and gleaned most of her information about science "from reading books." Two men in particular inspired her. The first was Amateur Ethologist Robert Ardrey, the failed but imaginative playwright whose views she now rejects. The second was Oxford Zoologist Sir Alister Hardy, an authority on plankton who thought up a nonsexist version of aquatic evolution about a dozen years ago.

The flight of man's ancestors to the sea became inevitable, Morgan says, when "torrid heat waves began to scorch the African continent," killing off the trees and drying up the food supply. At the time, things were even tougher for the female than for the male: "She had a greedy and hectoring mate," she lacked his "fighting canines" (teeth, not dogs) to fend off enemies, "she was hampered by a clinging infant," and when chased by a carnivorous cat, she "found there was no tree she could run up to escape." She "loathed getting her feet wet," but "when your homeland's turning into an inferno, the seaside's not at all a bad place to be."

It was in the sea, Morgan states, that the prehominid female began to walk on two feet instead of four to keep her head above water. It was also there that she--and not, as some theorists would have it, the male--became the first to use implements purposefully. Envying the male's dagger-like fangs that he could use to crunch through shells, she picked up a pebble and managed to crack a shell with it. "She tried it again, and it worked every time. So she became a tool user, and the male watched her and imitated her."

Morgan particularly bridles at one suggestion of male writers: that the anatomical changes in females during the transition from ape to woman came about largely to make females sexier. "All these things they write down as erogenous zones developed purely for functional purposes," she asserts. On the seashore, a well-padded underside is comfortable for sitting. In the water, body hair is a nuisance and disappears from most areas. But hair on mother's head is convenient for an infant to grab a hold of. "If the hair floated around her for a yard or so, he wouldn't have to make so accurate a beeline in swimming toward her when he wanted to rest." The infant's gustatory needs are responsible for the female's large breasts; what a baby needs, and therefore gets in the natural course of evolution, is "two lovely pendulous dollopy breasts, as easy to hold onto as a bottle."

Longer Penis. Morgan dauntlessly tackles the questions that interest and titillate most amateur and professional anthropologists: Why did human beings adopt face-to-face sex? And why did the human male develop the largest penis of any primate? In both cases, she maintains, convenience rather than pleasure was the decisive factor. Although an ape's vagina is easily accessible from the rear, the human vagina has moved forward and is "tidily tucked away" deep in the body, "possibly for protection against salt water and abrasive sand." Man's penis thus "grew longer for the same reason as the giraffe's neck --to enable it to reach something otherwise inaccessible." The male "came around to the front because he could no longer make it from the back."

These fanciful notions are not putons, Author Morgan says, and she insists: "I am deadly in earnest." But scientists find it easy to demolish her ideas. Physical Anthropologist Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History notes, for example, that Homo sapiens never made any of the physical adaptations for swimming and "breathing" under water that are exhibited by true aquatic mammals. In fact, in refuting Hardy's aquatic theory, scientists have pointed to ample proof that man has been a land-based creature for the past 15 million years or so. Furthermore, Tattersall notes, there is no evidence whatsoever that male apes possessed large canine teeth while females did not.

Nonetheless, The Descent of Woman has already achieved a distinction of sorts: it has replaced another largely fictional work--Clifford Irving's discredited biography of Howard Hughes --as the Book-of-the-Month Club's June selection.

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