Customer Reviews

Significant Others: The Ape-human Continuum And The Quest For Human Nature

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3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book is a great introduction to the relationships among the higher primates including humans. The discussion of tool use, cognitive abilities, cultural practices, and language skills is both very easy to read and highly informative. Readers with background in the subject may find a new perspective on some issues, but the book is most appropriate for someone who wants a short overview of how we are related to the other primates and why we should care. For those who wish to explore further, enough references to other works and to the current scientific literature are provided to open many doors.

A good, quick read that demonstrates our kinship to those "significant others".

Craig Stanford has written a book that continues to inform the public of just how similar we are to the primates by attempting to show the reader that the differences between us are actually very minute. Through data and analysis Stanford points out how the behaviors of primates can be applied to our own human nature, which supports his thesis that "to understand human nature, you must understand the apes." (p.xviii). Stanford self describes Significant Others as a "field guide to the current state of our understanding of both human and ape culture..." (p. xviii). Through the descriptions of social interactions, tool usage, language, and culture Stanford provides a strong case in support of his thesis.
Starting right from the beginning in his introduction, Stanford uses data and research theory to support his thesis and to refute the alternatives. He is not afraid to discuss behaviors that are of questionable regard. He delves into the subject of infanticide with similar gusto as he does in the chapter on language. Stanford's bottom line is the same throughout that we can use the studies of the great apes to explain our human nature and why problem behaviors like human infanticide persist today.
Overall Significant Others is a good read. Stanford does an exceptional job of providing research that supports the notion that many of our human behaviors and traits can be explained by similar behaviors studied in the great apes. Although this was not pointed out until the end of the book by supporting his thesis Stanford also was providing strong evidence for the importance of conserving and protecting the great apes. Stanford was not afraid to indulge into his own opinions when he felt the need and this added a personal touch to the reading that provided interest to sometimes dry research findings. He also covered highly debatable information well by giving equal consideration to both sides of the picture, even though it was often evident what side of the debate he was on. I would recommend Significant Others to those that enjoyed reading Roger Fout's Next of Kin and want to further their knowledge of great ape behavior and how it might be related to human nature.

Craig Stanford is a good authority on the subject. He holds the position of the Director of the Jane Goodall research institute (And if you dont know who she is, perhaps you should begin with The chimpanzees of Gombe, written by her).

The book is wonderfully written and easy to read. The reason I am not giving it five is that the writer seems to digress from the central theme often. However, there is some wonderful elaboration of chimpanzee societies and their rituals, that brings a sense of eerieness to our own humanity and makes one sit up and think.

The book is wonderfully balanced and brings out many hitherto covered truths - such as the male dominated bastion of anthropology and hence masculine myths propagated, the views of the 'science' of evolutionary psychology etc. This is a book which allows you to develop your own theories after stating the facts of chimp interactions in a highly narrative and gripping story-format.

All in all a good book. If you are the kind who has a book collection of origins books which include Leakey and Jared Diamond, then Craig Stanford deserves his place there. If you are not a collector and are not planning on buying this, then check with your library and do read this, but read this you should - if indeed you have an interest in anthropolgy and the origins question.

University of Southern California anthropologist (and primatologist) Craig Stanford's thesis in this attractive but somewhat breezy (and politically considered) book is that the difference between humans and apes is one of degree and not of kind. That is why the word "continuum" is used in the title.

I agree with his thesis, and I think he does a great job of making the case. His prose is readable and his enthusiasm is genuine. However there are some problems. In attempting to walk the tightrope of political correctness while conveying to the reader what he has learned as a scientist, Stanford sometimes slips into a fuzzy and inexplicit expression.

To begin with (p. 16) he contends that if women "crave" men with resources (he is attempting to answer David Buss, et al.) it is "mainly in patriarchal societies in which they must depend on men to obtain resources and power for them." This is gratuitous because, as Stanford himself notes on page 147, "Human societies are, political correctness notwithstanding, universally patriarchal." Whether women would behave differently if the societies were matriarchal (or otherwise) is unknown. Citing an isolated society in special circumstances that is matriarchal really does not prove the general case, although it does point to a range of possibilities, and that is good. However it is ingenuous to pretend that women are not looking for resources in a mate if they can find them. Why would a reasonable woman, given a choice, choose a poor, ineffective, unsuccessful man, to one who has the ability to help her provide for her children?

In the same paragraph, Stanford contends that the "old adage about _what women want_ should more accurately be phrased as _what women can realistically hope to achieve in their cultural context_." In the first place, it's not an adage, it's a joke or a lament, and it's a question, "What DOES a woman want?" The original is lost in the prehistory, but Ernest Jones attributed these words to Freud: "The great question...which I have not been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is _What does a woman want?_" This is probably the source that Stanford had in mind--and, by the way, this is a question that evolutionary psychology has largely answered, much to the dismay of those who would prefer to keep the mystery. In the second place it is NOT enough to merely say "in their cultural context." There is a biological context as well, exemplified by nine months of being pregnant, and several years of intense maternal responsibility that is fundamental to all cultures that can't be explained away as something from the patriarchy unless you believe that human biology itself is patriarchal.

There is also Stanford's summary dismissal of evolutionary psychology in Chapter 8 to consider, a strange dismissal since part of his title is "the Quest for Human Nature" (from the study of primates), which is one of the ways that evolutionary psychologists work. (He is actually being an evolutionary psychologist himself but apparently doesn't know it.) Evolutionary psychology should be compared with other psychologies, say, psychoanalytical theory, or behaviorism, and not to, e.g., biology.

It's important to add that the work of anthropologists is no more scientific or rigorous than the work of evolutionary psychologists, as can be demonstrated from reading this book. For example on page 129 Stanford tells a story of seeing the low-ranking chimp Beethoven make a sexual display through a cluster of chimpanzees. He writes: "This enraged the alpha, Wilkie, who chased Beethoven off into the thickets, whereupon Beethoven circled around and came back to mate with an eager female before Wilkie realized what was happening."

Stanford uses this as an example of planned deceptive behavior in chimps, but whether Beethoven displayed foresight or just got lucky is unclear. To be picky I could also point out that "enraged" and "realized" are anthropomorphic projections of Stanford's lively mind and not something that could be tested scientifically (which is the essence of his criticism of evolutionary psychology on page 134).

Yet, Professor Stanford understands that social scientists today are mightily constrained by a postmodern culture in academia that demands politically correct findings first, and scientifically persuasive findings only if they are in agreement with the PC party line. He writes, "Some of this sentiment [not admitting "essential cultural commonalities"] reflects anthropologists' political burden of favoring the cultural underdog at all costs. Postmodernism's purpose has become a vehicle, in part, to give meaning to identity politics in the battle of the oppressed against the perceived enemy, the white male elite." (p. 146)

There is a lot more worth discussing in this book. (I wish I had more space.) The chapter on what it's like in the field (Chapter 12) is vivid and compelling; and in the concluding chapters we can see that Stanford is a scientist who cares passionately about the great apes and their environments. He is also a man who can communicate what he knows to a general readership as long as he avoids the trap of imagining that there is a political censor sitting on his shoulder as he writes. The truth will out, and the educated public that reads books written by professional scientists is much more sophisticated than is sometimes supposed.

Mr. Stanford has written yet another fascinating and gripping book about human origins and primate behavior that is easy for the lay person to read and understand.

It is one the best books I have read on evolutionary psychology for many years, even if the author claims that his book is not about evolutionary psychology. There is an obvious continuum between apes and humans and many of human behaviours have certainly a strong biological component to the point that by studying apes we can find important keys for understanding human behaviours. However the main idea of the book is that human behaviours and human culture form so complex a system that all explanations based on evolutionary psychology, ethnology, primatology, and linguistics are reductionist and cannot give a true account of the complexity that link genetic inheritance with evolutionary pressure resulting from the environment, cognitive capacity, social behaviours and culture.

In the introduction of the book Stanford start by debunking five myths of human origin. For the sake of brevity I will just mention the five myths without entering into the reasons that Stanford gives for rejecting those theories as "prime movers". I will just say that the arguments are very convincing and purely based on Darwinian evolutionary biology and palaeontology.

The first myth is hat morphological and cognitive evolution of humans was driven by bipedal posture because being upright freed the hands for making tools. Stanford notes that "the brain changed very little in that first shift from ape to human". Stanford reviews a number of facts that put that theory in shamble despite that bipedal posture is often considered as "the hall park of membership in the human family". The second myth is the Savanna Model that considers that the essential stage in the humanization process of apes is the "canard" that apes "left the tree for the open grass land". The third myth is the myth of the hunter versus the scavenger. The fourth myth is the theory that opposes promiscuous males to monogamous females. The last myth is the myth of what Stanford calls the monolithic Palaeolithic, i-e that the transition from ape to human requires "a prime mover". Stanford write: "Meat-eating (...), cooking, protection against infanticide, concealed ovulation, social complexity: there has been no shortage of prime movers offered up. In reality, of course, there was certainly no one overriding selection pressure; instead there ware many interacting pressures that varied in importance in different times and place" (pp. 16-17).

The fist part of the book is about "love, death, and food". It reviews issues related to aggressive behaviours, sexual coercion, warfare, and meat-eating. That part includes a very interesting comparison between bonobos and chimpanzees and leads to the debunking of another myth propagated by de Waal that "the chimpanzee resolves sexual issues with power; the bonobo resolves power issues with sex". In fact, things are far more complicated and more recent finding about bonobos "have led anthropologists to place humans squarely at an evolutionary crossroads" (p. 27) and shows that "the type of society in which a primate lives is strongly influenced by food for which it must forage (p. 32) because the type of diet will influence the size and structure of the group (the solitary way of life of Orangutans can be largely explained by their diet) meanwhile the size of the group will put pressure to develop strategies for solving social conflicts. There is no doubt that the shift to meat-eating, by making available condensed package of calories, protein and fat, was a fundamental change that in turn "enabled other changes in critical body systems, such as the growth and reorganization of the brain". Yet there might be other factors in this evolution such as the discovery of fire that enabled the cooking of plant food that might has been as important as meat consumption (p. 56). This part of the book end by a long discussion of the role of infanticide.

The second part of the book deals mostly with culture and language and their relation to evolutionary psychology. This part start with an analysis of the nature-nurture debate that I will not attempt to summarize, jumping directly to the conclusion: "Searching for direct genetic bases for specific human social behaviours is a fool's mission; they are not to be found except in rare instances. Cultural and biological foundations of behaviours interact in ways that will likely mask the separate influence of them" (p. 149). I can only agree. The chapter on linguistic is less interesting probably because the subject cannot be cover in such a small number of pages. But I do not thing that Stanford shows a deep knowledge of that subject and often he over-simplifies.

The third and last part starts is completely different in nature from the rest of the book. It deals with Stanford personal experience in observing gorillas and chimpanzees in the wild and provides mainly a reinforcement for the more theoretical ideas developed in the first two parts.
I think that Stanford shows very rightly that drawing conclusion from apes' behaviour to explain human behaviour is at best a tricky business. There is a tendency of evolutionary psychologists to work in isolation and to minimise the influence of culture. We will understand human nature only when we will be able to strike the right balance between behaviours inherited from our genes and other factors such as culture, individual psychology, social environment, etc.

I was pleased at how fast my book was delivered and I was glad that it was still new and not scratched up or anything from shipping.

Stanford notes his thesis thus (page xi): "Apes and humans are cut from the same evolutionary cloth; all that fundamentally distinguishes us is posture, we being upright walkers and the apes quadrupeds . . . 'Significant Others' is about the continuum between humanity and the great apes. What was once a bold line dividing us has turned out to be fairly blurry. . . ."

In his Introduction, he sets out by addressing hat he sees as key myths about early humans (they were clumsy bipeds, their hunting defined key aspects of their evolution, etc.). From there, he explores a wide ranging set of issues. Part One examines "Love, Death, and Food." Part Two looks at "Culture, Language, and the Trouble with Evolutionary Psychology." He provocatively entitles Part Three "Islands in the Human Sea."

Chapter after chapter explores the continuum of ape and human. One important issue here is, as he notes (page 206): "The great apes and we form a pint-sized cluster of five species that are the tips of one of the great lineages in Earth's history."

All in all, a very readable and provocative volume.

In Significant Others, Craig Stanford thoughtfully considers the ape-human continuum and the quest for human nature as he persuasively argues that the gap between apes and humans is very narrow, and not a vast unbridgeable realm. Stanford's argument draws close associations between apes and humans, considering their complex societies, social groups, and communications. An intriguing study.

While the author has many axes to grind-not all related to the subject, the book is worth reading.