Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

by Carl Sagan

  45. Zuckerman, op. cit., pp. 315, 316.

  46. Nishida, “A Quarter Century of Research,” p. 12.

  47. So could souls have provided consciousness back then? A deity responsible on a case-by-case basis for precision injection of souls into this immense host of tiny creatures over the full range of geological time would be a very fussy as well as a very inefficient creator. Why not design it right from the beginning, and let life run by itself? Would the god responsible for the subtle, elegant, and universally applicable laws of physics do such slapdash, error-ridden, journeyman work in biology—requiring hands-on attention to every pathetic little microbe when they already know perfectly well how to reproduce themselves and vast stores of information? Instead, all the god has to do is to encode directly into the DNA of a few ancestors whatever information souls are required to know. Souls and consciousness could then pass, on their own, from generation to generation, freeing the god for other matters, perhaps some of greater urgency. But if the information in the DNA has come to be through the patient evolutionary process, why is a god needed to explain the injection of data, genes, or souls in the first place?

  48. A. I. Hallowell, “Culture, Personality and Society,” in Anthropology Today, A. L. Kroeber, editor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 597–620; Hallowell, “Self, Society and Culture in Phylogenetic Perspective,” in Evolution After Darwin, Volume 2, S. Tax, editor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 309–371. The contention that only humans are self-aware can be found in many philosophical and scientific disquisitions, e.g., Karl R. Popper and John C. Eccles, The Self and Its Brain (New York: Springer, 1977).

  49. G. G. Gallup, Jr., “Self-Recognition in Primates: A Comparative Approach to the Bidirectional Properties of Consciousness,” American Psychologist 32 (1977), pp. 329–338.

  50. A common literary and iconographic theme in medieval Europe beginning in the thirteenth century is an alleged propensity for apes to admire themselves in mirrors. Cf. H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: University of London, 1952), pp. 212 et seq.

  51. Montaigne, The Essays of Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Book II, Essay XII, “Apology for Raimond de Sebonde,” translated by Charles Cotton, edited by W Carew Hazlitt, Volume 25 of Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), p. 227. In a nearby passage, Montaigne quotes the Roman epigramist Juvenal: “What stronger lion ever took the life from a weaker?” But, as we’ve mentioned, lions routinely kill all the cubs on taking over a pride. This saves the male the trouble of caring for young not his, and helps bring the females back into heat.

  52. E.g., R. L. Trivers, Social Evolution (Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin/Cummings, 1985), especially the chapter “Deceit and Self-Deception”; Joan Lockard and Delroy Paulhus, editors, Self-Deception: An Adaptive Mechanism? (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1989).

  53. C. G. Beer, “Study of Vertebrate Communication—Its Cognitive Implications,” in D. R. Griffin, editor, Animal Mind-Human Mind (Report of the Dahlem Workshop on Animal Mind-Human Mind, Berlin, March 22–27, 1981) (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1982), p. 264; E. W. Menzel, “A Group of Young Chimpanzees in a One-acre Field,” in A. M. Schrier and F. Stollnitz, editors, Behavior of Nonhuman Primates (New York: Academic Press, 1974).

  54. Stuart Hampshire, Thought and Action (London: Chatto and Windus, 1959).

  55. T. H. Huxley, Evidence as to Mans Place in Nature (London: Williams and Norgate, 1863), p. 132.

  56. Letter of February 5, 1649, in Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, Great Treasury of Western Thought: A Compendium of Important Statements on Man and His Institutions by the Great Thinkers in Western History (New York and London: R. R. Bowker Company, 1977), p. 12.

  57. See, for example, Eugene Linden, Silent Partners: The Legacy of the Ape Language Experiments (New York: Times Books, 1986); Roger Fouts, “Capacities for Language in the Great Apes,” in Proceedings, Ninth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (The Hague: Mouton, 1973).

  58. For example, “Man is the only animal … that can use symbols” (Max Black, The Labyrinth of Language [New York: Praeger, 1968]); “Animals cannot have language … If they had it, they would … no longer be animals. They would be human beings” (K. Goldstein, “The Nature of Language,” in Language: An Enquiry into Its Meaning and Function [New York: Harper, 1957]); “There seems to be no substance to the view that human language is simply a more complex instance of something to be found elsewhere in the animal world” (Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972]). These examples are taken from Donald R. Griffin’s The Question of Animal Awareness, revised edition (New York: Rockefeller University Press, 1981). Only occasionally is a contrary note sounded (e.g., A. I. Hallowell, Philosophical Theology, Vol. 2 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937], p. 94.)

  59. Derek Bickerton, Language and Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), especially pp. 8, 15–16.

  60. Bickerton, op. cit., proposes that the early speech of children is a “protolanguage” fundamentally different from fully developed human languages, that this protolanguage may be accessible to apes, and that it was used by our ancestors in the transition from apes to humans.

  Chapter 20

  THE ANIMAL WITHIN

  1. (New York: Doubleday, 1958), p. 345.

  2. In the wild there are occasional female chimps who reject males under all circumstances and at great cost. They of course produce no children. Might this correlation be noticed? Might there be, occasionally, a chimp that ponders the possible connection between sex and babies? How sure can we be that this might not be so?

  3. Bolingbroke (1809), quoted in Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 196.

  4. Ambrose Bierce, “Reverence,” in The Enlarged Devil’s Dictionary, Ernest Jerome Hopkins, editor (Garden City, NY: Double-day, 1967), p. 247.

  5. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley, editors (New York: New York University Press, 1965), “Song of Myself,” stanza 32, lines 684–691, p. 60.

  6. The Essays of Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, translated by Charles Cotton, edited by W. Carew Hazlitt, Volume 25 of Great Books of the Western World, Robert Maynard Hutchins, editor in chief (Chicago: William Benton/Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952, 1977), Book III, Essay I, “Of Profit and Honesty,” p. 381.

  7. C. Boesch and H. Boesch, “Possible Causes of Sex Differences in the Use of Natural Hammers by Wild Chimpanzees,” Journal of Human Evolution 13 (1984), pp. 415–440, and references given there.

  8. See, e.g., John Alcock, “The Evolution of the Use of Tools by Feeding Animals,” Evolution 26 (1972), pp. 464–473; K. R. L. Hall and G. B. Schaller, “Tool-using Behavior of the Californian Sea Otter,” Journal of Mammalogy 45 (1964), pp. 287–298; A. H. Chisholm, “The Use by Birds of Tools’ or ‘Instruments,’ ” Ibis 96 (1954), pp. 380–383; J. van Lawick-Goodall and H. van Lawick, “Use of Tools by Egyptian Vultures,” Nature 12 (1966), pp. 1468–1469.

  9. Anthony J. Podlecki, The Political Background of Aeschylean Tragedy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), pp. 1, 7, 155.

  10. Mortimer J. Adler, The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1967), p. 121.

  11. Geza Teleki, “Chimpanzee Subsistence Technology: Materials and Skills,” Journal of Human Evolution 3 (6) (November 1974), pp. 575–594; our quotes are from pp. 585–588 and p. 593.

  12. Michael Tomasello, “Cultural Transmission in the Tool Use and Communicatory Signalling of Chimpanzees?” in “Language” and Intelligence in Monkeys and Apes, Sue Taylor Parker and Kathleen Gibson, editors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

  13. Teleki, op. cit.

  14. C. Jones and J. Sabater Pi, “Sticks Used by Chimpanzees in Rio Muni, West Africa,” Nature 223 (1969), pp. 100–101; Y. Sugiyama,
“The Brush-stick of Chimpanzees Found in Southwest Cameroon and Their Cultural Characteristics,” Primates 26 (1985), pp. 361–374; W. McGrew and M. Rogers, “Chimpanzees, Tools and Termites: New Record from Gabon,” American Journal of Primatology 5 (1983), pp. 171–174.

  15. Teleki, op. cit.

  16. E.g., Kenneth P. Oakley, Man the Tool-Maker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).

  17. E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Jeannine Murphy, Rose Sevcik, S. Williams, K. Brakke and Duane M. Rumbaugh, “Language Comprehension in Ape and Child,” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, in press, 1993; Duane M. Rumbaugh, private communication, 1992.

  18. Susan Essock-Vitale and Robert M. Seyfarth, “Intelligence and Social Cognition,” Chapter 37 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), pp. 456, 457; Wolfgang Kohler, The Mentality of Apes, second edition (New York: Viking, 1959) (originally published in 1925), p. 38.

  19. Richard Wrangham, quoted by Ann Gibbons, “Chimps: More Diverse than a Barrel of Monkeys,” Science 255 (1992), pp. 287, 288.

  20. H. J. Jerison, Evolution of the Brain and Intelligence (New York: Academic Press, 1973); Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (New York: Random House, 1977), Chapter 2; William S. Cleveland, The Elements of Graphing Data (Monterey, CA: Wadsworth, 1985). Cleveland notes that “Happily, modern man is at the top.”

  21. R. E. Passingham, “Changes in the Size and Organization of the Brain in Man and His Ancestors,” Brain and Behavioral Evolution 11 (1980), pp. 73–90.

  22. Ibid.

  23. E.g., Sagan, op. cit. (note 20).

  24. Gordon Thomas Frost, “Tool Behavior and the Origins of Laterality,” Journal of Human Evolution 9 (1980), pp. 447–459.

  25. E.g., Mortimer J. Adler, op. cit. (note 10), p. 120.

  26. F. Nottebohm, “Neural Asymmetries in the Vocal Control of the Canary,” in Lateralization in the Nervous System, S. R. Harnad and R. W. Doty, editors (New York: Academic, 1977).

  27. E.g., W. D. Hopkins and R. D. Morris, “Laterality for Visual-Spatial Processing in Two Language-Trained Chimpanzees,” Behavioral Neuroscience 103 (1989), pp. 227–234.

  28. Thomas Henry Huxley, Evidence as to Mans Place in Nature (London and Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate, 1863), pp. 109, 110.

  29. Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, in Volume IX of The Works of Aristotle, translated into English under the editorship of W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), Book X, “Pleasure; Happiness,” 7, 1178a5.

  30. Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth, Bernard DeVoto, editor (New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1962), “The Damned Human Race,” V, “The Lowest Animal,” p. 227.

  31. E.g., Carl Sagan and Richard Turco, A Path Where No Man Thought: Nuclear Winter and the End of the Arms Race (New York: Random House, 1990).

  32. Henry D. Thoreau, Waiden, edited by J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), “Higher Laws,” p. 219.

  33. Plato, The Republic, translated by Benjamin Jowett (New York: The Modern Library, 1941), IX, 571, p. 330.

  34. J. Hughlings Jackson, Evolution and Dissolution of the Nervous System (London: John Bale, 1888), p. 38.

  35. Paul D. MacLean, The Triune Brain in Evolution: Role in Paleocerebral Functions (New York and London: Plenum Press, 1990).

  36. Romans 7:18 (King James translation).

  37. So far as we know, the testosterone defense has not yet been tried in a court of law.

  38. Buddhist Scriptures, Edward Conze, editor (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1959), p. 112; The Saundarananda of Ashvaghosha, E. H. Johnston, editor and translator (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1928, 1975), Canto XV, “Emptying the Mind,” p. 86 of English translation, verse 53.

  Chapter 21

  SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS

  1. Attributed to Empedocles by Hippolytus, in Refutation of All Heresies, I, iii, 2, in Jonathan Barnes, editor, Early Greek Philosophy (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 196.

  Epilogue

  1. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Volume I of Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, translated by Father Laurence Shapcote, edited and translation revised by Anton C. Pegis (New York: Random House, 1945), Part I, VIII, “The Divine Government,” Question 103, Article 2, p. 952.

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Excerpts from The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior by Jane Goodall. Copyright © 1986 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College; excerpts from The New Synthesis by Edward O. Wilson. Copyright © 1975 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted by permission of The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

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  THE AUTHORS

  CARL SAGAN served as the David Duncan Professor of Astronomy and Space Sciences and Director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University. He played a leading role in the Mariner, Viking, Voyager, and Galileo spacecraft expeditions to the planets for which he received the NASA Medals for Exceptional Scientific Achievement and (twice) for Distinguished Public Service.

  His Emmy and Peabody Award-winning television series, Cosmos, became the most widely watched series in the history of American public television The accompanying book, also called Cosmos, is one of the best-selling science books ever published in the English language. Dr. Sagan received the Pulitzer Prize, the Oersted Medal, and many other awards—including twenty honorary degrees from American colleges and universities—for his contributions to science, literature, education, and the preservation of the environment.