BOOKS
Of dominant males
J.Z. Young
The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes S. Zuckerman (Routledge SI. Kegan Paul pp. 511, £1750) Those who are fed up with the popular, literature of Naked Apes and Talking, Chimps will be pleased to read this reprint of a book written in 1932 by someone who really knows about Primates. In his recently added 'Postscript' Lord Zuckerman says that 'in seeking a solution to our own social and political problems, we have little or nothing to gain from watching the behaviour of animals'.
Yet the work described in his book shows how such study can indeed help with human problems. The coloured swelling of the sexual skirt of female baboons provided him with the key to analysis of the menstrual cycle. This regular periodicity occurs in all female primates and understanding of it allows the possibility for the control of conception, with all that this implies in an overpopulated world. It is difficult nowadays to believe the confusion that reigned in the 1930s over the significance of the cycle. Indeed false analogies led to erroneous comparison of menstruation with the oestrus or heat of cattle and other animals, Zuckerman showed that the maximum swelling of the sexual skin of a baboon provides an indicator that an egg has been released from the ovary and that at this time the female is maximally attractive and receptive. Similarly the time of conception in women is at the middle of the cycle, though it took some further years before this was firmly established.
Zuckerman went on to build a hypothesis about the two phases of glandular secretion ' that control the sexual cycle and this was the basis of the work of Pincus that led to the development of the contraceptive pill. In such studies of the physiology of the animals the author used what he calls a 'deterministic method', in which the facts are 'scientific' and can be confirmed by anyone. Such studies are obviously useful, but can we be equally sure of the value of comparison between the social and 'family Re of men and apes? Zuckerman was very early in tnis field too. As a young man in South Africa he was able to follow the daily behaviour of wild troops of Chacma Baboons and the book contains fascinating accounts of this and many pictures of the Hamadryas Baboons be studied on Monkey Hill at the London Zoo. From these observations he developed the hypothesis that the social unit of many monkey and ape societies is a family group consisting of a male overlord and a variable number of females and their young. The unmated males may form 'drones clubs' and continually try to capture receptive females. This theory has in general been supported by later workers, though criticised by others. In the present edition the Postscript is largely occupied by the author's defence of his views.
Of more interest to general readers will be his attacks on those who 'humanise' their description of animal life. For example Jane Goodall seems to be 'concerned about the welfare of some gentle but "subnormal" relation, Her descriptions not only tend to humanise her chimpanzees but also focus on unusual behaviour such as meat-eating, hunting of animals, use of implements of straw. . . In most respects her charges are more "taught" than wild animals'. He is particularly critical of Konrad Lorenz, who 'is more responsible than anyone else for importing a pretence of respectability to the resurrection of the anecdotal, anthropomorphic style of writing about animal behaviour'. Of course 'the public loves the sort of thing they all turn out' (ie Desmond Morris and Lorenz). A particularly vicious result of such work is the belief such as that of Washburn that we 'inherit the biology of aggression' that was adaptive in the past, and that men 'enjoy aggression'.
Lord Zuckerman after all has been more concerned with war than most scientists (or indeed any other civilians). He, if anyone, should have been ready and able to use knowledge of animal behaviour to help in the solution of these human problems. But his conclusions are quite definite; 'I totally fail to see how any analogical comparisons with the ways of monkeys and apes can help us in what some see as the major problem of human life today'. The trouble is that such comparisons are the very opposite of the 'deterministic method' of science. The book that Lorenz wrote on Civilised Man's Eight Deadly Sins is characterised here as 'a text for young scientists to illustrate what science is not — a mass of unsubstantiated assertions and generalisations'.
Zuckerman does not try to tell us what science is, but it is interesting that his own personal contributions to what one might call 'Public Science' have been so varied. When he helped during the war, with Desmond Bernal, to organise the better use of a bomber force he was applying 'the deterministic method'. The insistence then was on the verification of results rather than trusting to individual reports and opinions. Scientists operate by exact study of whatever system they are faced with, however complex it may be. They do not only seek to discover the parts of which it is composed, science does not necessarily consist of reducing everything to the behaviour of atoms. Good biologists never cease to do both things together, to be physiologists, ethologists and ecologists at the same time. This was what Solly Zuckerman learned from his early acquaintance with baboons and their physiology. And it was this insistence on keeping attention on both the parts and the whole that made him a successful Scientific Adviser in Whitehall.
In his final pages however he allows himself to draw one lesson from his studies of primates. When man's ancestors became hunters ('the only omnivorous and carnivorous Old World primate') a process of selection produced a repression of the tendency for dominant males to collect harems. They could not gather enough food for so many young. 'The price of our emergency as man [was] the overt renunciation of a dominant primate impulse in the field of sex. The price of our continued existence may well be further repressions of dominant impulses and further developments of co-operative behaviour'. The implication is that only societies composed of individuals who restrain their selfishness will survive.
Previous page
