From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4_at_msn.com)
Date: Sun Jan 19 2003 - 11:58:10 PST
Gone Ape
January 19, 2003
By CHARLES MCGRATH
Anyone who has watched much nature television knows that
orangutans are by far the handsomest and smartest-looking
of the great apes. They're literal highbrows, with wide,
soulful eyes and broad expressive foreheads. They're
covered not with bathmat fur, like so many apes, but with
what amounts to a couture pelt -- red hair so long and fine
it seems blow-dried. It's true that orangutans drag their
knuckles when they walk, but how else are you going to get
around if your arms are longer than your legs? For
creatures so large, they are uncommonly graceful, not to
mention sweet-natured, so it's gratifying to learn that a
team of scientists, writing in the journal Science, has
recently certified them as ''cultured'' as well.
Metaphorically at least, the news makes you want to extend
a cheerful hand to your fellow primate and pump him by his
auburn, hirsute paw (it would feel sort of like angora, I'm
guessing).
Culture in this sense is not exactly a museum or
concert-hall accomplishment. It's behavior that's not
genetically determined but, rather, learned by watching
others; certain styles of tool use, for example, or systems
of social signaling. The theory is that if animals in one
place do something a certain way, for no particular reason,
and the same animals someplace else do not, then chances
are that behavior is cultural, not instinctive.
In the wild, orangutans tend to be loners, and therefore it
was believed that they lacked a ''system of socially
transmitted behavior.'' But after studying various
orangutan populations in Borneo and Sumatra, the authors of
the Science article concluded that some of them did indeed
show signs of having taught each other stuff. They had
learned how to masturbate with sticks, for example -- male
and female alike -- and to make ritual ''raspberry'' noises
at bedtime before scaling into their nests. They had also
mastered the art of creating funny sounds by blowing into
leaves, and of catching rides in Robert Frost fashion, by
swinging on bent-over tree snags. This is all it takes -- a
few useless but highly amusing tricks -- to promote you
into the highest rank of primates: the elite group that
also includes chimpanzees, most likely bonobos and gorillas
and of course us -- the naked apes, to use Desmond Morris's
label.
Morris was the British zoologist who in 1967, when most
scientists and philosophers were still trying to draw
distinctions between man and beast, shocked everyone by
declaring that Homo sapiens, hairlessness notwithstanding,
was still an ape and thought and behaved like one. ''Behind
the facade of modern city life there is the same old naked
ape,'' Morris wrote. ''Only the names have been changed:
for 'hunting' read 'working,' for 'hunting grounds' read
'place of business' . . . for 'pair bond' read 'marriage.'
'' Our biggest problem, Morris added, is that man prides
himself on having the biggest brain of all the primates
''but attempts to conceal the fact that he also has the
biggest penis, preferring to accord this honor falsely to
the mighty gorilla . . . and it is high time we examined
his basic behavior.''
In Morris's analysis, much of that behavior consisted of
trying to deal with the cruel contradictions of
pair-bonding and gorillalike hypersexuality. On one hand,
we wanted to retain a single mate, so we became exquisitely
and inventively sensual; we turned the female breasts into
substitutes for the buttocks and figured out how to have
frontal intercourse. (This is the epochal moment
memorialized by Rae Dawn Chong and Everett McGill in
''Quest for Fire,'' the 1981 movie on which Morris served
as a consultant.) On the other hand, we couldn't be going
ape (sexually speaking) all the time, so we had to invent
deodorant and the unspoken prohibition against looking
people in the eye on the subway.
Some of Morris's ideas now seem more than a little wacky.
(He claimed, for example, that after orgasm the breast of
the female naked ape increases in size by up to 25
percent.) But Morris gave rise eventually to E.O. Wilson
and sociobiology, and no one doubts for a minute anymore
that many of our social and behavioral traits are rooted in
biological and evolutionary imperatives. We are a lot more
animal than we used to think.
In the years since Morris, meanwhile, a number of other
scientists have been working to erase the man-animal
distinction from the other end -- to suggest, for example,
that language may not be unique to humans, and that
primates may have culture, something we also believed was
uniquely ours. Considering what we think we've learned
about our own natures, though, what's fascinating about the
orangutan discoveries is how little of their learned
behavior has to do with sexual customs (masturbating with
sticks aside) and how much with what amounts to just plain
goofing off.
Not all the orangutans' cultural accomplishments were
pointless. The scientists found them using leaves as gloves
and as napkins, and wielding tools to extract seeds and to
probe into tree cavities. But the Science article includes
a table rating the behaviors in order of frequency, and at
the top of the list are the branch-riding, the various
kinds of noisemaking, scratching games and building nests
just for playing in -- all of which, when you think of it,
have human equivalents. At bedtime we nuzzle our infant
children on the stomach to make the raspberry sound -- that
universal cultural signal, it turns out, at once fond and
silly; we teach kids to make a squeaky noise by blowing on
a blade of grass; we throw a bedspread over a card table so
they can play house. To amuse them (and ourselves), we
scratch and mug and sometimes act like complete orangutans.
Primates that we are, we presumably learned long ago that
our nature at its most essential consists of being able to
entertain someone, and of being entertained in return.
Charles McGrath is the editor of The New York Times Book
Review.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/19/magazine/19WWLN.html?ex=1044005732&ei=1&en=118c015c5f87ce7b
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