Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

by Carl Sagan

  14. Mary Jane West-Eberhard, “Sexual Selection and Social Behavior,” in Robinson and Tiger, op. cit., p. 165.

  15. T. J. Fillion and E. M. Blass, “Infantile Experience with Suckling Odors Determines Adult Sexual Behavior in Male Rats,” Science 231 (1986), pp. 729–731.

  16. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, translated with an introduction by Maxwell Staniforth (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1964), II, 17, p. 51.

  Chapter 11

  DOMINANCE AND SUBMISSION

  1. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life (New York: The Modern Library, n.d.) (originally published in 1859) Chapter XV, “Recapitulation and Conclusion,” p. 371.

  2. From George Seldes, The Great Thoughts (New York: Ballantine, 1985), p. 302.

  3. E.g., Natalie Angier, “Pit Viper’s Life: Bizarre, Gallant and Venomous,” New York Times, October 15, 1991, pp. C1, C10.

  4. Snakes certainly fight over territory as well—rat snakes, for example, over knotholes in trees where birds nest. The loser looks for another tree.

  5. David Duvall, Stevan J. Arnold, and Gordon W. Schuett, “Pit Viper Mating Systems: Ecological Potential, Sexual Selection, and Microevolution,” in Biology of Pitvipers, J. A. Campbell and E. D. Brodie, Jr., editors (Tyler, TX: Selva, 1992).

  6. B. J. Le Boeuf, “Male-male Competition and Reproductive Success in Elephant Seals,” American Zoologist 14 (1974), pp. 163–176.

  7. C. R. Cox and B. J. Le Boeuf, “Female Incitation of Male Competition: A Mechanism in Sexual Selection,” American Naturalist 111 (1977), pp. 317–335.

  8. E.g., Peter Maxim, “Dominance: A Useful Dimension of Social Communication,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4 (3) (September 1981), pp. 444, 445.

  9. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: The Modern Library, n.d.) (originally published in 1871) Part II, “Sexual Selection,” Chapter XVIII, “Secondary Sexual Characters of Mammals—continued,” p. 863.

  10. Paul F. Brain and David Benton, “Conditions of Housing, Hormones, and Aggressive Behavior,” in Bruce B. Svare, editor, Hormones and Aggressive Behavior (New York and London: Plenum Press, 1983), p. 359.

  11. Ibid., Table II, “Characteristics of Dominant and Subordinate Mice from Small Groups,” p. 358.

  12. Dominance in a one-on-one encounter and dominance rank within a hierarchy are not necessarily the same and cannot always be predicted from one another. See Irwin S. Bernstein, “Dominance: The Baby and the Bathwater,” and subsequent commentary, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4 (3) (September 1981), pp. 419–457. Some animals distinguish only between those lower and those higher in rank. Others—baboons, for example—behave differently to those of very distant rank than to those nearly co-equal in rank (Robert M. Seyfarth, “Do Monkeys Rank Each Other?” ibid., pp. 447–448).

  13. W. C. Allee, The Social Life of Animals (Boston: Beacon Press paperback, 1958), especially p. 135 (originally published in 1938 by Abelard-Schuman Ltd.; this revised edition published in hardback in 1951 under the title Cooperation Among Animals With Human Implications).

  14. V. C. Wynne-Edwards, Evolution Through Group Selection (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 8–9.

  15. Neil Greenberg and David Crews, “Physiological Ethology of Aggression in Amphibians and Reptiles,” in Svare, op. cit., pp. 483 (varanids), 481 (crocodiles), 474 (Dendrobates [dendratobids]), and 483 (skinks).

  16. B. Hazlett, “Size Relations and Aggressive Behaviour in the Hermit Crab, Clibanarius Vitatus,” Zeitschrift fur Tierpsychologie 25 (1968), pp. 608–614.

  17. Patricia S. Brown, Rodger D. Humm, and Robert B. Fischer, “The Influence of a Male’s Dominance Status on Female Choice in Syrian Hamsters,” Hormones and Behavior 22 (1988), pp. 143–149.

  18. One of many other examples: Bart Kempenaers, Geert Verheyen, Marleen van den Broeck, Terry Burke, Christine van Broeck-hoven, and Andre Dhondt, “Extra-pair Paternity Results from Female Preference for High-Quality Males in the Blue Tit,” ?ature 357 (1992), pp. 494–496.

  19. Mary Jane West-Eberhard, “Sexual Selection and Social Behavior,” in Michael H. Robinson and Lionel Tiger, editors, Man and Beast Revisited (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), p. 165.

  20. In 1857, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote: “[H]ow perfectly [woman’s dress] describes her condition. Her tight waist and long, trailing skirts deprive her of all freedom of breath and motion. No wonder man prescribes her sphere. She needs his aid at every turn. He must help her up stairs and down, in the carriage and out, on the horse, up the hill, over the ditch and fence, and thus teach her the poetry of dependence.” (J. C. Lauer and R. H. Lauer, “The Language of Dress: A Sociohistorical Study of the Meaning of Clothing in America,” Canadian Review of American Studies 10 [1979], pp. 305–323.) Stunning change has occurred since 1857, although the poetry of dependence is still widely recited in the women’s fashion industry.

  21. Owen R. Floody, “Hormones and Aggression in Female Mammals,” in Svare, op. cit., pp. 51, 52.

  Chapter 12

  THE RAPE OF CAENIS

  1. Elizabeth Wyckoff, translator (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), line 781.

  2. David Grene, translator (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), line 1268.

  3. Ovid, Metamorphoses, translation by Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge: Harvard University Press/Loeb Classical Library, 1916, 1976), Book XII, pp. 192–195; Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1955, 1960), Volume 1, pp. 260–262; Froma Zeitlin, “Configurations of Rape in Greek Myth,” in Sylvana Tomaselli and Roy Porter, editors, Rape: An Historical and Social Enquiry (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 133, 134.

  4. Smaller amounts of androgens are produced in the cortex of the adrenal gland that surmounts each kidney, from other hormones in the body, and in the placenta.

  5. R. M. Rose, I. S. Bernstein, and J. W. Holaday, “Plasma Testosterone, Dominance Rank, and Aggressive Behavior in a Group of Male Rhesus Monkeys,” Nature 231 (1971), pp. 366–368; G. G. Eaton and J. A. Resko, “Plasma Testosterone and Male Dominance in a Japanese Macaque (Macaca fuscata) Troop Compared with Repeated Measures of Testosterone in Laboratory Males,” Hormones and Behavior 5 (1974), pp. 251–259.

  6. Peter Marler and William J. Hamilton III, Mechanisms of Animal Behavior (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966), p. 177.

  7. D. Michael Stoddart, The Scented Ape: The Biology and Culture of Human Odour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 136, 137, 163.

  8. J. Money and A. Ehrhardt, Man and Woman, Boy and Girl: The Differentiation and Dimorphism of Gender Identity from Conception to Maturity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972); J. Money and M. Schwartz, “Fetal Androgens in the Early Treated Adrenogenital Syndrome of 46XX Hermaphroditism: Influence on Assertive and Aggressive Types of Behavior,” in Aggressive Behavior 2 (1976), pp. 19–30; J. Money, M. Schwartz, and V. G. Lewis, “Adult Erotosexual Status and Fetal Hormonal Masculinization and Demasculinization,” Psychoneuroendocrinology 9 (1984), pp. 405–414; Sheri A. Berenbaum and Melissa Hines, “Early Androgens Are Related to Childhood Sex-Typed Toy Preferences,” Psychological Science 3 (1992), pp. 203–206.

  9. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, in The Oxford Translation of Aristotle, W. D. Ross, translator and editor (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), 737a28.

  10. Stefan Hansen, “Mechanisms Involved in the Control of Punished Responding in Mother Rats,” Hormones and Behavior 24 (1990), pp. 186–197.

  11. Mary Midgley, Beast and Man (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 39.

  12. John Sparks with Tony Soper, Parrots: A Natural History (New York: Facts on File, 1990), p. 90.

  13. Owen R. Floody, “Hormones and Aggression in Female Mammals,” in Bruce B. Svare, editor, Hormones and Aggressive Behavior (New York: Plenum Press, 1983), pp. 44–46.

  14. Alfred M. D
ufty, Jr., “Testosterone and Survival: A Cost of Aggressiveness?” Hormones and Behavior 23 (1989), pp. 185–193.

  15 Hansen, op. cit.

  16. Lester Grinspoon, Harvard Medical School, private communication, 1991.

  17. John C. Wingfield and M. Ramenofsky, “Testosterone and Aggressive Behaviour During the Reproductive Cycle of Male Birds,” in R. Gilles and J. Balthazart, editors, Neurobiology (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1985), pp. 92–104.

  18. Stephen T. Emlen, Cornell University, private communication, 1991.

  19. R. L. Sprott, “Fear Communication via Odor in Inbred Mice,” Psychological Reports 25 (1969), pp. 263–268; John F. Eisenberg and Devra G. Kleiman, “Olfactory Communication in Mammals,” in Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 3 (1972), pp. 1–32.

  20. These classic experiments were described by Konrad Lorenz in 1939 and by Nikko Tinbergen in 1948. Some later research suggests that the chicks and goslings become less afraid of a silhouette as they become habituated to it (and it doesn’t eat anyone). Wolfgang Schleidt (“Über die Auslösung der Flucht vor Raubvögeln bei Truthühnern,” Die Naturwissenschaften 48 [1961], pp. 141–142) suggests that birds on the ground are afraid of any unfamiliar flying silhouette, become used to the harmless image of a flying goose, but retain a fear of the less familiar hawk. This is not far from the toddler’s shyness about strangers and fear of “monsters.”

  21. Peter Marler, “Communication Signals of Animals: Emotion or Reference?” Address, Centennial Conference, Department of Psychology, Cornell University, July 20, 1991.

  22. Marcel Gyger, Stephen J. Karakashian, Alfred M. Dufty, Jr., and Peter Marler, “Alarm Signals in Birds: The Role of Testosterone,” Hormones and Behavior 22 (1988), pp. 305–314.

  23. Stoddart, op. cit., pp. 116–119.

  24. The chemicals in question are gamma aminobutyric acid and serotonin. Cf., e.g., Jon Franklin, Molecules of the Mind (New York: Laurel/Dell, 1987), pp. 155–157.

  23. Heidi H. Swanson and Richard Schuster, “Cooperative Social Coordination and Aggression in Male Laboratory Rats: Effects of Housing and Testosterone,” Hormones and Behavior 21 (1987), pp. 310–330.

  Chapter 13

  THE OCEAN OF BECOMING

  1. Edward Conze, editor, Buddhist Scriptures (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1959), p. 241.

  2. The initial rate of increase of the new mutation in the population is very slow. The thousand-generation estimate, courtesy of the population geneticist James F. Crow, is what it takes to go from gene frequencies of 0.001 (almost nobody) to 0.9 (almost everybody).

  3. Sewall Wright, Evolution and the Genetics of Populations: A Treatise in Four Volumes, Volume 4, Variability Within and Among Natural Populations (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978); Wright, Evolution: Selected Papers, edited by William B. Provine (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986); Wright, “Surfaces of Selective Value Revisited,” The American Naturalist 131 (January 1988), pp. 115–123; William B. Provine, Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); J. F. Crow, W. R. Engels, and C. Denniston, “Phase Three of Wright’s Shifting-Balance Theory,” Evolution 44 (1990), pp. 233–247. Also, Roger Lewin, “The Uncertain Perils of an Invisible Landscape,” Science 240 (1988), pp. 1405, 1406.

  4. Carl Sagan, “Croesus and Cassandra: Policy Responses to Global Change,” American Journal of Physics 58 (1990), pp. 721–730.

  5. Plutarch, “Antony,” The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, translated by John Dryden and revised by Arthur Hugh Clough (New York: The Modern Library, 1932), p. 1119.

  6. Stewart Henry Perowne, “Cleopatra,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th Edition (1974), Macropaedia, Volume 4, p. 712.

  7. Graham Bell, Sex and Death in Protozoa: The History of an Obsession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 65–66.

  8. K. Ralls, J. D. Ballou, and A. Templeton, “Estimates of Lethal Equivalents and Cost of Inbreeding in Mammals,” Conservation Biology 2 (1988), pp. 185–193; P. H. Harvey and A. F. Read, “Copulation Genetics: When Incest Is Not Best,” Nature 336 (1988), pp. 514–515.

  9. James L. Gould and Carol Grant Gould, Sexual Selection (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1989), p. 64.

  10. Anne E. Pusey and Craig Packer, “Dispersal and Philopatry,” Chapter 21 of Barbara B. Smuts, Dorothy L. Cheney, Robert M. Seyfarth, Richard W. Wrangham, and Thomas T. Struhsaker, editors, Primate Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 263.

  11. P. H. Harvey and K. Ralls, “Do Animals Avoid Incest?” Nature 320 (1986), pp. 575, 576; D. Charlesworth and B. Charlesworth, “Inbreeding Depression and Its Evolutionary Consequences,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 18 (1987), pp. 237–268. The latter reference contains a good summary of the means by which the incest taboo is enforced in plants.

  12. John Paul Scott and John L. Fuller, Genetics and the Social Behavior of the Dog (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 406, 407.

  13. William J. Schull and James V. Neel, The Effects of Inbreeding on Japanese Children (New York: Harper and Row, 1965).

  14. Morton S. Adams and James V. Neel, “Children of Incest,” Pediatrics 40 (1967), pp. 55–62.

  15. Theodosius Dobzhansky was a leading twentieth-century geneticist. He gives this example in his Mankind Evolving (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), p. 281.

  16. Over long enough intervals, isolation—even in large populations—generates diversity. When, for example, the Pangaea supercontinent broke up, the populations on adjacent land masses were no longer able (or at least not much able) to interbreed, and gene combinations established on one continent would by no means automatically be transferred to another; no longer did outbreeding link up the gene pools of widely separated populations. The unique biology of such isolated regions as Australia, New Zealand, Madagascar, or the Galapagos Islands is due to tectonic or other kinds of geographical isolation.

  17. George Gaylord Simpson, Tempo and Mode in Evolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), p. 119.

  18. We recognize with Wright that we are close to postulating group selection here. But any argument for optimum gene frequencies in a population must, it seems to us, do so.

  19. John Tyler Bonner, The Evolution of Culture in Animals (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980): “We can see the seeds, the origins, of everything we know about our culture in the distant past. This means that every aspect of our culture can benefit from some understanding of the biology from which it sprang” (p. 186).

  Chapter 14

  GANGLAND

  1. (London and Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate, 1863), p. 59.

  Chapter 15

  MORTIFYING REFLECTIONS

  1. Translated by E. Gurney Salter (London: J. M. Dent and Co., 1904), Chapter VIII, p. 85.

  2. Book III, Chapter 30 (added as a footnote to the edition of 1781); translated by Arthur O. Lovejoy in The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 235.

  3. For Hanno’s expedition, see Jacques Ramin, “The Periplus of Hanno,” British Archaeological Reports, Supplementary Series 3 (Oxford: 1976). For scholarly debate on which kind of primates Hanno and his men slaughtered, see William Coffmann McDermott, The Ape in Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1938), pp. 51–55.

  4. Aristotle, History of Animals, Book II, 8–9, 502a-502b, in The Works of Aristotle, Great Books edition, Volume II, translated into English under the editorship of W. D. Ross (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952) (originally published by Oxford University Press), pp. 24, 25.

  5. H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: University of London, 1952).

  6. Paul H. Barrett et al, editors, Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–1844 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 539.

  7. Thomas N. Savage and Jeffries Wyman, “Observations on the External Characters and Habits of the Troglodytes niger, by Thomas N. Savage, M.D., a
nd on its Organization, by Jeffries Wyman, M.D.,” Boston Journal of Natural History, Volume IV, 1843–4; quoted in Thomas Henry Huxley, Mans Place in Nature and Other Anthropological Essays (London and New York: Macmillan, 1901).

  8. Quoted in Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), p. 66.

  9. William Congreve, The Way of the World, edited by Brian Gibbons (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), pp. 37, 42, 44.

  10. Letter of July 10, 1695; in William Congreve, Letters and Documents, John C. Hodges, editor (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964), p. 178.

  11. Jeremy Collier, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, edited by Benjamin Hellinger (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987) (originally published in London in 1698), p. 13.

  12. G. L. Prestige, The Life of Charles Gore: A Great Englishman (London: William Heinemann, 1935), pp. 431, 432.

  13. Aelian, quoted by McDermott, op. cit., p. 76.

  14. The Linnaean Society of London was named after Linnaeus. It was in this Society’s journal that the world first learned, from the pens of Darwin and Wallace, about natural selection.

  15. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 235.

  16. Letter to J. G. Gmelin, February 14, 1747, quoted in George Seldes, The Great Thoughts (New York: Ballantine, 1985), p. 247.