Word: ardrey
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Unlike Sunday Darwins like Robert Ardrey (African Genesis), Jane van Lawick-Goodall does not press the homosimian parallels or insist that psychocosmic mysteries can be solved by watching a bunch of monkeys in a tree. Yet the parallels are strong, and so is the reader's temptation to see in the chimpanzee a hairy mirror of mankind. A woman as well as a scientist, Jane loves her subjects and makes the reader love them too-not as clever pets but as serious and struggling individuals. All the more painful, then, to be told that throughout Africa chimpanzees are being...
...danger. Embattled America will probe sources. Marx, Franz Boas- Jewish prophet of egalitarian cultural anthropology (universalism kills anti-Semitism), Hoffman, Rubin, Dohrn, Rudd, Chomsky. Recent outcry against Brandeis University as radical nest. Jewish Defense League. Young Jews rediscovering Judaism and Jewishness. Racial inequality doctrine returning via Lorenz, Ardrey, others. Carleton Putnam thoughtfully exploring such matters in Race and Reason and Race and Reality...
Closed Societies. According to Ardrey, every animal society-including man's-is "a group of unequal beings organized to meet common needs." A successful society will form a power hierarchy in which each individual knows and keeps his place; otherwise, relentless competition would doom to extinction any colony composed exclusively of top dogs. The individual is nothing, the group everything, Ardrey says. Hence, for example, it is not just the baboon or the human that evolves but the societies to which they belong...
Besides enforcing a pecking order accepted by all, Ardrey argues, successful societies must present a united front to the enemy. The enemy is everyone else. "That animal societies are closed, and kept separated by distrust and antagonism," he writes, "has been a worry to all Utopians devoted to an ultimate brotherhood of man." Yet this xenophobia, which Ardrey considers innate, not only knits a society but defines it: "The stranger is necessary, and antagonism directed against him has a biological basis beyond wishful denial. The hostility assures that the group will consist of familiars...
...Ardrey contends that as man's brain grew, its new potential was vetoed for untold generations by the demands of the hunting society, a social structure so stable that it persisted-by Ardrey's reckoning, at least-for 15 million years. The hunting group needed not only leaders but also followers-and more followers than leaders. "I find no other persuasive explanation," writes Ardrey, "for the failure of the hominid line, through such an expanse of evolutionary time, to do anything much but survive...