A family resemblance

摘要

Scientists often become agitated when confronted with someone who does not believe in evolution — especially when, as in the United States, such people try to dictate what facts our schoolchildren are taught. Only slightly less distressing is meeting someone who enthusiastically embraces evolution but with enough misconceptions to make Darwin turn in his grave. In this excellent book for the public, Frans de Waal tackles some exasperating misconceptions about the evolution of the social behaviour of apes, particularly humans. The misconceptions rest on two things: Jane Goodall and the number 98. Goodall has long astonished the world with her discoveries about the behaviour of wild chimpanzees. And it was she who reported the profoundly disturbing fact that chimpanzee social life can include murder, cannibalism and organized inter-group violence, findings widely disseminated by the National Geographic. And 98 is approximately the unnervingly high percentage of DNA that humans share with chimps. Combine those two and our fate appears sealed: our closest relative, with whom we are nearly genetically identical, is a murderous thug. There you have it, our human-as-killer-ape destiny.