1. Tuskless in Paradise

A society is a group of unequal beings organized to meet common needs.

In any sexually reproducing species, equality of individuals is a natural impossibility. Inequality must therefore be regarded as the first law of social materials, whether in human or other societies. Equality of opportunity must be regarded among vertebrate species as the second law. Insect societies may include genetically determined castes, but among backboned creatures this cannot be. Every vertebrate born, excepting only in a few rare species, is granted equal opportunity to display his genius or to make a fool out of himself.

While a society of equals -- whether baboons or jackdaws, lions or men -- is a natural impossibility, a just society is a realizable goal. Since the animal, unlike the human being, is seldom tempted by the pursuit of the impossible, his societies are seldom denied the realizable.

The just society, as I see it, is one in which sufficient order protects members, whatever their diverse endowments, and sufficient disorder provides every individual with full opportunity to develop his genetic endowment, whatever that may be. It is this balance of order and disorder, varying in rigor according to environmental hazard, that I think of as the social contract. And that it is a biological command will become evident, I believe, as we inquire among the species.

Violation of biological command has been the failure of social man. Vertebrates though we may be, we have ignored the law of equal opportunity since civilization's earliest hours. Sexually reproducing beings though we are, we pretend today that the law of inequality does not exist. And enlightened though we may be, while we pursue the unattainable we make impossible the realizable.

The propositions that I have put forward are not self-evident. Were they so, then there would be no need for me to write this book, or cause for anyone to read it. Neither do I put them forth as subjects for immediate acceptance or rejection, immediate digestion or expectation of instant nourishment. Indeed, like uncooked rice, they are quite indigestible. But in the course of this inquiry you and I will do a bit of cooking and see what comes of it. And so, to begin with, I suggest that we content ourselves with simply lighting our fire. Let us inspect the dream that has brought to the climactic years of the twentieth century the assurances and rewards of a madhouse.

The philosophy of the impossible has been the dominant motive in human affairs for the past two centuries. We have pursued the mastery of nature as if we ourselves were not a portion of that nature. We have boasted of our command over our physical environment while we ourselves have done our urgent best to destroy it. And we have pursued the image of human equality as citizens of earlier centuries pursued the Holy Grail.

The grand escapade of contemporary man can be denied neither excitement nor accomplishment. Out of our dream of equality we have lifted masses from subjection, moved larger masses into slavery. We have provided new heroes, new myths, new gallantries; new despots, new prisons, new atrocities. Substituting new gods for old, we have dedicated new altars, composed new anthems, arranged new rituals, pronounced new blessings, invoked new curses, erected new gallows for disbelievers." We have reduced sciences to cults, honest men to public liars. We have even reduced the eighteenth-century vision of human equality, glorious if false, to a more workable twentieth-century interpretation, mediocrity, inglorious if real.

Fundamental though the natural impossibility of equal beings must be to this inquiry, still it is not all. And if we are to glimpse a social contract leading neither to tyranny nor to chaos, then I prefer at first to consider it simply as a fraction of a larger delusion. The philosophy of the impossible rests on an article of faith, that man is sovereign. And the Greeks had a word for it: hubris.

To lift your head too high: it is to challenge the gods and risk a few thunderbolts assaulting your skull. The skeptical Greeks, never excessively infatuated with gods themselves, turned less to supernatural than to natural explanations of why the world is the way it is. Yet never, from the early times of the Ionian philosophers down through later excursions and controversies of the lively Greek mind, am I aware of presumptions that man could master nature. Even Protagoras' celebrated statement that man is the measure of all things seems to have been intended more in praise of the individual than in denial of forces larger than man.

As in Western thought various tides have swept this bay, assaulted that promontory, or, receding, have bared undistinguished flats, so we have turned now to gods, now to God, again to nature and its laws for satisfying answers. Our postures have varied from the compliance of slaves to the confidence of sailors. At our best we sought solutions of relevance to man; at our worst we avoided them. But never, till modern times, did men in any significant number presume a human sovereignty much larger than the human shadow. Never did we risk the Greek hubris, and a shattering knock on the head. "The conquest of outer space" for a most inquiring Greek would as a phrase have seemed as dangerous a possibility as it remains, in all fragility, a phrase of small reality today.

The big brag preceded the big bang as a human possibility. Any demonstration that the earth revolves about the sun, while offensive to authorities in charge, did not presume that we could reverse its course. Any proof of a natural law called gravity did not presuppose that man could make apples fall up; designers of supersonic planes, indeed, still take account of the apple. To the frontiersmen of science the discovery of natural laws meant no more than that we had explored certain forces governing the dispositions of man. But for many a hoi-polloi scientific settler who came after the frontier such discoveries meant something quite different. Man could master nature.

Eighteenth-century rationalism, while dispensing with the supernatural as a governing force, left a vacuum that not all the Encyclopedists could fill. And so an alliance between nineteenth-century optimism, looking to the perfectibility of man, and the early modern scientists (Darwin was not among them) rushed in. And the sovereign rule of materialism came about. Man, with the aid of science, could do anything. As materialist were the socialist philosophies as the capitalist. Uninhibited by laws natural or divine, we busied ourselves with the building of Paradise.

And no mean thing is this Paradise of the Impossible. Could animals dream, then our material heaven might well be the stuff that their dreams are made of. The small-brained hominid, dragging himself through the millions of years of our evolution, may well have longed for supermarkets. Yet he, I suspect, even facing the hostile African night, had a sense of certainty. And we have none.

A philosophy of the impossible is indeed no philosophy at all. And a paradise lacking a philosophy is one of uncertain future. Aimlessly we prowl our highways, teach or attend our classes, swallow our drugs or our television dinners, quarrel, fornicate, fear our children, sigh for the unfortunate and avoid their presence, envy the fortunate and court their approval, work to forget our meaningless lives, drink to forget our meaningless work, purchase Our pistols, deplore all wars, and praise the dignity of man.

It cannot be said that man, installed in his self-made heaven, has lost his dignity. The buffalo, small of brain, peering out of the African bush, commands dignity. Nor can it be said that if we have made mistakes we cannot learn. The amoeba can learn. Back in the 1920's an experiment was arranged in a darkened room whereby an intense beam of light barred the movement of amoebae. Among the brainless students there was one who never learned. On trial after trial it persisted in its efforts to cross the beam of light. But there was one who tried just five times and never moved in that direction again. Not only organisms lacking the least brain or nervous system could learn, but, significantly there was wide variation in their gifts.

We have our dignity, which is the dignity of living beings. If we have made errors, then -- since an amoeba can learn -- there must be among us those likewise gifted. But what is it we must learn? In another time we should have taken our troubles to the priest in a certainty of faith. But the faith is gone and the priests are missing. Man -- omniscient, omnipotent man -- has none to talk to but himself. Arid, worst of all, it is how we wanted it.

Who will save us? Who will inform us? We turn to science, our sole religion, our one maker of miracles. It is science that adjudicates the rivalries of nations, dictates economic triumphs, decrees disasters. It is science that with cosmic disregard for human fate adjusts the balance of military terror now this way, now that. It is science that saves lives here, destroys them there, perfects new means of postponing the grave, new means of making life unendurable. It is science that with perfect casting has assumed the role of the Unknown God. Yet were I the scientist -- not science but the breathing, aching scientist who suffers from indigestion and achieves the respect of all but his children -- and were I asked to save us, then I think I should put on a false mustache and other appropriate disguise, go out the back door, and vanish like some extinct bird over a former horizon.

Yet it is not quite so. For what God has granted, God may take away. And it lies within the power of that present god, the individual scientist, to withdraw from mankind the illusion of sovereignty that science, in partnership with obsolete philosophies, has created. But courage as much as competence must be the endowment of such a rebel god.

Natural law has been variously defined, as it has been variously abused. It might be described, in contrast with civil law, as the kind of law you discover only after you have broken it. Such is the predicament of contemporary Homo sapiens, who, looking about at his program of disaster, asks, "What did I do?" His refuge may lie in social paranoia such as that so favored by the young. It is somebody else's fault. But the mature must inquire more deeply. What did we do that was wrong? And there is coming about in our time a generation of scientists who, granted the courage, have the power to answer.

A natural law is one made not by state, not by religious authority, not by man at all, but one which human reason may investigate, recognize, and prove. "Natural law" has been invoked by many -- by kings, for example, to support their right to rule -- but without proof. The ease with which "natural law" has been enlisted to invest with sanctity many a position of the status quo has given the term a bad name in our time. Yet natural laws exist. And they lie beyond human power to veto or amend. Unlike other laws, they deal impartially with big-brained man or small-brained African buffalo. And it should be science that can identify them for us.

Yet, to the bewilderment of the layman, scientists, as we shall see, do not provide the same answers. There is nothing new about passionate divisions within an accepted religion. But these are troublesome times for the sciences. A generation of paleontologists -- Raymond Dart, Robert Broom, L. S. B. Leakey -- has demonstrated that man's evolution from some gentle, ancestral forest ape is not what it was thought to be in Darwin's time. A generation of ethologists, pioneered by Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, C. R. Carpenter, has shown the behavior of animals in a state of nature to be not at all as we presumed. A generation of population geneticists -- Sewall Wright, J. B. S. Haldane, Sir Ronald Fisher -- has altered beyond recognition our former concepts of heredity. A generation of biologists, among them Sir Julian Huxley, George Gaylord Simpson, Ernst Mayr, has synthesized the advances of this century with older Darwinian theory to produce a new biology so revolutionary as to remain beyond the grasp even of some of its contributors.

Few members of the natural sciences, however, would today dispute the evolutionary continuity of man and the natural world, or uphold the proposition that for man exists one fate, for nature another. Difficult it may be to part with the convictions of two centuries, and for some it is impossible. Yet part with them we must, for while the conviction of human sovereignty has led us to dare and aspire, it has led us likewise into the Age of Anxiety. We build paradises in which we have no faith.

When we renounce our hubris; when we see ourselves as a portion of something far older, far larger than are we; when we discover nature as our partner, not our slave, and laws applying to us as applying to all: then we shall find our faith returning. We have rational faculties of enormous order. We have powers granted never before to living beings. But we shall free those powers to effect human solutions of justice and permanence only when we renounce our arrogance over nature and accept the philosophy of the possible.

Since we are inspecting man as a portion of nature, the capacity for lying should not be skipped. A few students of human language have implied that only through the complexity of our communication has the telling of lies become possible. I seize on the happy opportunity to announce that lying is a natural process. Man has enough to answer for; he need not answer for this.

Some of the most outrageous liars in the natural world are found among species of orchid. To gain perspective on what might be called natural square deals as opposed to natural larceny, we may recall that plants evolved before birds and flying insects, and depended on wind or water to scatter their pollen. It was an inefficient system, and a colorless one, too, in this time before flowers. But then came the insects and sensuality became possible. The scents we enjoy, the colors we delight in, evolved as signals to attract this insect that bird. Partnerships were established -- what zoologists call symbiosis -- so that the fuchsia, for example, offered the hummingbird nectar in exchange for hauling fuchsia pollen around. Everyone got a fair shake. But there must always be liars.

There are species of orchids that have puzzled naturalists since the days of Darwin. They seemed to offer no inducement as their part of the deal, yet still insects did their job. At last, in 1928, a woman named Edith Coleman solved the problem in her study of an Australian orchid named Cryptosylia. The scent, a perfect imitation of the smell of the female of a species of fly, acted as an aphrodisiac on the male. He was drawn to the flower. There he encountered as part of the orchid's structure a perfect imitation of the female's abdomen. It was all too much for him, and in his efforts to copulate with the orchid he got himself nicely dusted with pollen. I am aware of no more immoderate fraud in the natural world.

Fraud, however, is normal in nature. There are deep-sea fish prowling dark depths with lanterns on their snouts. Smaller fish are attracted by the light and promptly eaten. There is a poisonous Ceylon snake resembling the viper with a brightly colored tail-tip which can be wriggled like a worm; lizards have been observed biting the tail and immediately being struck by the fangs at the other end of the living trap. Snakes, indeed, seem to deserve their long-established reputation for the fascination which they exert on their prey. A Madagascar snake called Langaha nasuta has a weird structure on its head resembling a finger, which it slowly moves as it approaches its victim. The victim normally stares too long. A South American snake, Oxybelis, has achieved total mastery of the unacceptable. It is a tree snake, and except for a vivid neck, its body resembles a vine. The top is olive, the underside cream, and on its side is a black, horizontal line. The tongue has precisely the same color scheme, and when fully extended from its slender snout seems a part of the body. Prepared now to be fascinating, Oxybelis begins to expand and contract its vivid neck, achieving in the process resemblance to nothing on this earth. Reliable observers have reported lizards hesitating, approaching -- the only word is anthropomorphic -- perplexed. And struck.

Not all the wonders of natural fraud are the property of villains, however. Many a lie is told on behalf of the potential victim. The tropical fish called Chactodon, for example, has spots resembling eyes on either side of its tail. It swims slowly backwards, apparently head-on. But if a predator strikes at it, the fish is off at high speed in the proper direction. All camouflage, indeed, is deception. That both fish and seabirds tend to have white undersides to provide camouflage against the sky from an underwater point of view has been long assumed. The proposition was demonstrated during World War II when British planes on antisubmarine patrol improved their records by painting the planes' undersides white. It is further confirmed by a mixed-up creature, the Nile catfish, who through some unhappy mutation got his white on top and the dark beneath. He compensates successfully by swimming upside down.

In terms of duplicity, the Ceylon shrike has perfected a lie of utmost complexity. The bird's full name is the Ceylon black-backed pied shrike, and its ways of nesting were described almost thirty years ago by W. W. A. Phillips in the ornithologists' journal, Ibis. As a site for their nest the parents choose that most conspicuous position, the bare open fork of a branch: Here they build a tiny cup of fiber, plastered all about its outside wall with lichens bound by cobwebs. At a distance of a very few feet the two-inch nest cannot be distinguished from a knot in the branch. This, however, is only the foundation for prevarication.

In the Ceylon shrike one finds a perfect evolutionary union of body, culture, and behavior. The parents are black and white. The young are a mottled color blending precisely with the appearance of the lichen-plastered nest. But it is the behavior of the young that leaves the observer in awe. There are usually three, and when the parents leave the nest the young sit facing the center, immobile, their beaks raised at a sharp angle and almost touching in the center. The tableau presents the most exquisite imitation of old splinters at a break in the branch, and the young will not stir until the parents return. What the family has achieved, and what must puzzle the evolutionist, is a social lie in which each member plays its part.

The natural history of prevarication is, indeed, without end. Human communication, like most of our capacities, has merely provided superb elaboration on an old, old theme. Through our use of words we delude each other with grave conviction; we have our way, as the Ceylon shrike has his. In one sense only is our capacity unique and entirely our own. Man, so far as I know, is the only animal capable of lying to himself.

That we lie successfully to each other is natural; that we successfully lie to ourselves is a natural wonder. And that the three sciences central to human understanding -- psychology, anthropology, and sociology -- successfully and continually lie to themselves, lie to each other, lie to their students, and lie to the public at large, must constitute a paramount wonder of a scientific century. Were their condition generally known, they would be classified as public drunks.

In another age we might amuse ourselves with the miraculous contradictions inherent in even the most educated of human beings. But this is not such an age. Our century plays out its dark charades. The human outcome approaches like a thundering, unlighted munitions train. In unease we go to bed at night, in unease we rise in the morning. The newspaper carries an item that "science says," and we feel a reassurance. Our children go off to school, and we praise God for education, our last, best hope. They, if the world lasts long enough, will be better able to handle the mess than were we when we arranged it. But will they? Or will they be more successfully brainwashed? We proceed to the office with a calm reassured by the scientific mystique. And the question must of course remain: whose blame is more profound, that of the scientist who lies to himself, or of the responsible citizen who fails to inquire?

I deal harshly with the central sciences of human understanding, and I shall deal still more harshly as this inquiry progresses. Theirs is the responsibility for reconciling man and man, and of providing humanity at large with the accommodations so singularly lacking. Yet the indictment must be placed not just against the few but against all of the scientific community; a temple psychology of sorts invests it. I have spoken of science as our only religion offering an avenue of faith. But scientist is reluctant to speak out against scientist. Temple psychology, as in any religion, prevails. Like a priest conducting his mass in Latin, he presents his conclusions in a jargon that the most intelligent layman cannot translate and thus most unhappily cannot question. Like a participant in some tribal ritual, the scientist conceals his personal identity behind the stylized mask of his trade. The novice priest, taking his hard-earned Ph.D., accepts with his degree the mysteries of the temple. He will be moved by controversy, but he will address only his fellows. He will perfect the dialect of his discipline, frequently unintelligible even to members of the next discipline and certainly to the layman. He will maintain the mystique of infallibility or suffer excommunication: he will get no faculty appointment.

I believe that the publication of James D. Watson's The Double Helix in 1968 offers excellent confirmation of how seldom are temple vows broken. Had Watson not received the Nobel Prize for his part in the definition of the DNA molecule, I doubt that the book would have been published. His own university press refused it. When the book at last appeared, the uproar was such as to make it an immediate best seller. But I find myself unconvinced that a book about the DNA discovery would in itself have produced such a sensation. What Watson, however, with such admirable clarity and courage, had done was to tell the inside story, to describe the fallibilities, the jealousies, the overwhelming humanity of the scientist. It was a story seldom told.

Molecular biology lies far from the humanistic sciences that I indict. Yet all scientists must accept the responsibility for hiding from public view, so that scientific infallibility may be preserved, the picture that so many know so well. It is the picture of cultural anthropology, behaviorist psychology, and environmentalist sociology like three drunken friends leaning against a lamppost in the enchantment of euphoria, all convinced that they are holding up the eternal light when in truth they hold up nothing but each other.

Each is no more than a school of science, a division of the discipline each dominates. All hold to a central assumption that the human brain owes little or nothing to evolutionary experience. The sociologist since the days of Durkheim denies biological influence on our social arrangements, and in a bastard paraphrase of Protagoras maintains that the proper study of sociology is sociology. The behaviorist maintains that all of human behavior is predicated by the conditioned reflex, that the baby born comes into this world a tabula rasa, with neither genetic prejudice nor inborn identity, and will act as did Pavlov's salivating dogs in predictable response to association of punishment or reward. Man is clay; no more. Harvard's B. F. Skinner, with his reinforcement theory, is today the czar of such psychology. Cultural anthropology, the third of the sciences, maintains that man is a product solely of his culture. Why the young of our time revolt against the culture that presumably created them is a question for which our anthropologists provide no direct answer.

Yet these three sciences of human understanding dictate the education of your children and mine, since they dictate who will receive a Ph.D. and become our children's teacher. A true establishment exists, a mutual-aid society like the three drunks under the lamppost. B. F. Skinner may turn his attack on Europe's greatest student of animal behavior: "Konrad Lorenz' On Aggression could be seriously misleading if it diverts our attention from manipulable variables in the current environment to phylogenetic contingencies which, in their sheer remoteness, encourage a nothing-can-be-done-about-it attitude." For the reader unable to cut through the jargon, I give my word that the psychologist Skinner is defending environmentalist sociology. Our distinguished cultural anthropologist, Ashley Montagu, in an attack on one of my own books, makes the remarkable statement: "The notable thing about human behavior is that it is learned. Everything a human being does as such he has had to learn from other human beings." Professor Montagu is coming to the aid of Professor Skinner.

In its qualities of reciprocal reinforcement, the mutual-aid society seems all but invulnerable. Dissenters exist. Harry F. Harlow, professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin, may demonstrate beyond argument that exploration, the innate drive to learn, comes in every baby born as well as every animal package. Yet the learning theory of reward and punishment carries on. Zoologists at the University of California at Los Angeles may demonstrate beyond argument that without reward or threat of punishment, little wild rodents will learn in such measure as to dazzle the human being. Skinner prevails. Jerry Hirsch, psychologist at the University of Illinois, will attack Skinner's conclusions concerning laboratory rats as the consequence of using inbred domesticated animals for experiments irrelevant to the human being. Skinnerism replies with one of the most remarkable comments in supposedly scientific literature: "We are primarily interested in the most domesticated of all animals -- man." Yet throughout all the natural sciences the definition of a domesticated animal is one that is the product of controlled breeding, which man -- aside from a few temporary and unsuccessful efforts in the periods of slavery -- is not.

This is not science. Then what is it, when the layman reads, "Science says"? Or his child, persuaded, learns as science teaches? It is the inheritance today of the nineteenth-century devotions of Bishop Wilberforce throughout his debates with Darwin's disciple, T. H. Huxley. It is the defense of man, the unique being, carried through a myriad of rationalizations. It is anti-evolutionism, minus divine special creation.

The rationalizations vary. There is the appeal to culture, such as was made in 1960 by Marshall Sahlins, one of the younger leaders of cultural anthropology. Choosing as his text Sir Solly Zuckerman's conclusion published in 1932, itself based entirely on the behavior of captive baboons in the London Zoo, that primate society is founded on sexual attraction, Sahlins demonstrated that human society is not. In a notable issue of the Scientific American (September 1960) he presented as Scripture:

There is a quantum difference, at points a complete opposition, between even the most rudimentary human society and the most advanced subhuman primate one. The discontinuity implies that the emergence of human society required some suppression, rather than a direct expression, of man's primate nature. Human social life is culturally, not biologically, determined.

Sahlins' Scripture lasted just one year. In 1961 S. L. Washburn and Irven De Vore published in the same Scientific American their now-classic study of baboons in the wild. Washburn is professor of anthropology at Berkeley, and though on rare occasion I may argue with him, I regard him as our greatest anthropologist. De Vore was his student and today is a professor at Harvard. For ten months they had watched baboon troops in East Africa. "Our data offers little support for the theory that sexuality provides the primary bond of the primate troop." They quote Sahlins on the sexual magnet. "Our observations lead us to assign to sexuality a much lesser, even at times a contrary, role."

Throughout the 1960's massive studies of primate societies, to which we shall continually be turning in this investigation, offered confirmation of the Washburn-De Vore conclusion. J. J. Petter's studies of various lemur species in Madagascar showed short sexual seasons, yet tight all-year societies. The same was found true of Japanese and rhesus monkeys. George Schaller's mountain gorillas, in bands as large as twenty-seven under the absolute control of a single dominant male, showed low sexual activity. In 466 hours of observation Schaller watched copulation twice, both times on the part of subordinate males in the presence of the bored leader. By 1965 Jane B. Lancaster and Richard B. Lee could survey fourteen primate populations in a state of nature and conclude, "It is clear that constant sexual attraction cannot be the basis for persistent social groupings of primates." The following year the Harlows wrote of "the demise of the sex theory."

And what in the meantime had happened to the discontinuity between human and animal societies, and to the corollary that "human social life is culturally, not biologically, determined"? Nothing. Sociology and cultural anthropology carried on as if nothing at all had happened. And with equal poise they ignored the inroads of linguistics.

A rationalization comparable to that of Sahlins rests on language and the human capacity for verbal communication as evidence for cultural independence from our evolutionary background. But expanding studies of animal communication have reinforced the revolutionary conclusions of such students of linguistics as Noam Chomsky and Eric Lenneberg that a child's rapid learning of language could not be possible if biological patterns were not as much present as those motor patterns making possible walking. Even our unique capacities for speech are placed among the characters that have come to us through the evolutionary way.

Masses of hard evidence are today destroying the essential premise of the three central sciences of human understanding, that a discontinuity exists between human and other animals. I might until recent years have accepted a single human capacity as uniquely ours, shared with no creature below the rank of Homo. This is our recognition of death and our tendency for ritual. In African Genesis, while stating my suspicion that students who subscribe to animal limitation usually turn out wrong, I still accepted the prevailing opinion that no animal recognizes death. Then in later years I encountered, again and again, the Elephant Story. And I turned out wrong.

It is a remarkable fact that the four animals looming largest in human consciousness -- the lion, the wolf, the bear, and the elephant -- remain largely unstudied. George Schaller's three-year observation of the lion in East Africa, recently completed and to be published in the next year or so, should take its place as the most important and exciting study ever made of an animal species in the wild. But our information on the wolf is spotty, on the bear all but nonexistent, and on that unfathomable beast, the elephant, just sufficient to make one yearn for the time when somebody with superhuman strength and ingenuity comes to know him the way Tinbergen knows herring gulls.

Two scientists, Richard Laws of Cambridge and Irven Buss of Washington State University, are generally accepted as our ranking authorities on the vast gray giants. Both, however, are ecologists and have devoted their principal efforts to observation not of elephant behavior but of the elephant's disregard for niceties of relationship to his environment. But in 1963 I ran into Buss in western Uganda during the course of one of his tours of duty, and for the first time heard the Elephant Story. Built somewhat on the proportions of an elephant himself, Buss would command authority even were it not for his scientific reputation.

At the time, the American scientist was experimenting with means to map the movements of elephant herds. It is the capacity of the elephant, despite his size, to vanish into clear equatorial air that makes study so difficult. During a later season, accompanied by a photographic party, I encountered a herd of sixty in the bottom of Tanzania's Rift Valley. It was too late for picture-taking, and so we sat in the midst of the revolving mass, making ourselves as inconspicuous as possible, while we planned photography with the morning's first light. But by morning they were gone. During the night they had climbed the 2,000-foot wall of the valley and vanished onto the escarpment.

It was the kind of problem Buss faced. His tentative solution was to tranquilize a member of an elephant party, attach a radio transmitter to the creature, then follow the beeps with a light plane. Ingenious though the solution might seem, there were two difficulties. The use of a dart gun to inject a tranquilizer into a wild animal was a technique then new, and just how much drug to use on a creature so huge was still a matter of guesswork. And the second was the problem of social defense. We shall discover later in this inquiry that defense is normally the first function of any society, human or other animal. Elephants are among those who have perfected it. And one of Buss's first experiments was a disaster.

What we think of as an elephant herd is normally a family party of several mature cows and their offspring. Buss selected a young cow, her calf close at her side, as his target. But no sooner had the dart penetrated her hide than he realized that he had overestimated the dose. She collapsed like a punctured, withered balloon. He and his African helpers were equipped with antidote for such emergencies, but they could not approach. Confronted by the angry, trumpeting phalanx of defenders of the downed cow, they could only wait and hope. After an hour and forty-five minutes she died.

It was not Buss who first recognized her death. It was her elephant family. In an instant they ceased their defense, moved aimlessly about. Only after that instant did Buss realize what had happened. But it was not the end of the Elephant Story. The oldest cow, perhaps the grandmother of the lot, moved the party away into the edge of the forest. The little calf still lingered by its dead mother. The old one returned, played with it a bit with her trunk, then coaxed it off to join the waiting group. Now the old one returned again. She broke down branches, pulled up grass, and covered the forequarters and the head of the departed. Then she returned to the family, and all, in elephant silence, vanished into the forest.

Recognition of death was inarguable. But was the ritual that followed simply the inexplicable response of a single, strange, inexplicable old female? I told the story at a drinking party on a ship bound from Naples to New York. A White Father -- a Canadian and a member of the order that from earliest times in Uganda has had its missions in far African corners -- was stunned. Seventeen years earlier, fresh from Montreal, he had been called by a runner to give the last rites to an African poacher trampled by an elephant in the bush. When he arrived, too late, the man was dead. But the corpse had been covered by grass and branches.

In his The Deer and the Tiger George Schaller describes an incident in India (and here we deal with a different elephant species) when he staked out a buffalo as bait for tigers. The mother tiger killed it, retired while her cubs ate. Then an elephant appeared while the last cub, frightened, made off. The elephant pulled down branches, covering the remains.

Perhaps the eeriest versions of the Elephant Story are told by George Adamson, the famous "George" of his wife's Elsa books. For a generation Adamson was senior game warden of Kenya's enormous NFD, the Northern Federated District, inhabited by a few diverse tribesmen and a shocking collection of animals. I have no friend who knows more about animals in their natural ways, or whose varied experiences are recalled with such objectivity. Adamson recalls, for example, a native woman on the long walk home who collapsed beside the road, exhausted. She woke in terror to find herself surrounded by elephants feeling her with their delicate trunks. While frozen she lay, they covered her with branches.

The most haunting of Adamson's recollections, however, concerns an elephant he shot in the NFD's little administrative capital, Isiola. A distraught woman neighbor called him to report that an elephant was in her rose garden, demolishing it on the way to the fruit trees. It was part of Adamson's job; so he sighed, got his gun, arrived and killed the beast. The gunfall of meat was turned over to the locals, and the remainder of the carcass, after human satiation, was loaded onto a lorry to be dumped some miles from town. There hyenas would clear up the rubbish. This they did. But some days later elephants appeared in the demolished rose garden. One carried the shoulder bone of the deceased. The shoulder bone was deposited precisely where Adamson had killed it.

Ten years ago all such stories would have been dismissed as hunters' anecdotes. They can no longer be so dismissed. Nor can those defenders of the last stand of the philosophy of human uniqueness ignore indefinitely the mysterious legacies that lie within us.

The educated, concerned reader may wonder why, a century after Darwin's Descent of Man, other educated, concerned citizens should so resist the human implications of evolution. There must be many reasons, although among them I do not believe that today religious offense is significant. In the academic community, perhaps, one finds frequently those professionals who do not care to admit that they were educated too soon or that they have failed to keep up on their homework concerning contemporary advances in biology. And particularly among those who regard themselves as intellectuals, and who regard the life of the mind as all, there must be not a few who understandably look with distaste and humiliation on conclusions that the mind is not all. Yet I have come to believe that the principal resistance comes from those who through the years have discarded an honorable liberalism in favor of an unrelated, dishoriorable dogma, and who conceal beneath a many-colored cloak of humanitarianism the darker, danker garb of self-righteousness.

I know of no more revealing passage from what passes for science than one drawn from Sol Tax's introduction to Horizons of Anthropology, a group of essays by some of our younger and more vigorous students. Tax himself is a professor at the University of Chicago, editor of our most readable journal, Current Anthropology, and a dominant, quite formidable figure in the field. He writes what is far more a political creed than a scientific estimate, and hubris attracts distant thunderbolts:

Whether we are archaeologists or linguists, students of the arts or of geography, whether we study the behavior of baboons or the refinements of the human mind, we all call ourselves anthropologists. It will become evident also that we all carry within us the liberal tradition of the first ancestors. Humankind is one: we value all peoples and all cultures; we abhor any kind of prejudice against peoples, and the use of power for the domination of one nation by another. We believe in the self-determination of free peoples. We particularly abhor the misuse by bigots or politicians of any of our knowledge. As scientists we never know all the truth; we must grope and probe and ever learn; but we know infinitely more than the glib racists -- whether in the United States or South Africa. We are equalitarians, not because we can prove absolute equality, but because we know absolutely that whatever differences there may be among large populations have no significance for the policies of nations. This comes from our knowledge as anthropologists: but it also pleases us as citizens of the world.

These are not the words of a free mind, nor do they express a proper discipline for a free science. That the first sentence of this chapter will press all the predictable buttons in Professor Tax, provoke all the loaded, stereotyped phrases of invective so characteristic of animal communication, is regrettable. My regrets, however, are bearable. In an era when a sense of catastrophe invests much of humankind, then anthropology, the science of man, must have more to offer than self-congratulations.

That not all of Tax's colleagues agree with him is evident even within the book to which he writes his introduction. The most severe reproach to his school of scientific thought, however, was delivered several years later by Julian H. Steward of the University of Illinois, like Tax a cultural anthropologist of high authority but with more profound intimations as to anthropology's obligations. In a letter to the journal Science, Steward wrote:

To those who claim that the social scientist cannot separate his science from his human compassion, I answer that he can and he must. . . . It should be the task of the social scientist to develop a methodology that will permit predictive hypotheses rather than to make moral exhortations.

The obligations of the sciences of human understanding to human welfare and reconciliation are such that without them their disciplines would have no reason to exist. Such an obligation dictates both humility and objectivity. It will not do to be pleased with oneself as a citizen of the world when the world is in trouble.

The demand for hypotheses of predictive value inspires this work, as it has inspired my previous investigations. If accepted doctrines of human sovereignty, uniqueness, perfectibility had provided such hypotheses, then we should be all right. But I find it difficult to believe that this century would have left quite such an irreproachable record of massacre and terror, of high intentions frustrated and low intentions consummated, had we been guided by other than error; just as I cannot believe that this century's legacy to the next should include quite so many problems without answers. We have given the philosophy of the impossible its try. Is it permissible to suggest that we turn to another?

That a hypothesis derived from study of man's evolutionary nature may have predictive value receives a certain confirmation from the lamented Vietnam war. In The Territorial Imperative I inspected the history and the nature of a biological force called territory, first diagnosed in bird life by the British amateur ornithologist Eliot Howard. Today we can predict that in many species other than birds the male will defend his territory -- his exclusive bit of the world's space -- against all intrusion with a high probability of success even though the intruder be the stronger. A corollary to the proposition I termed the amity-enmity complex, the likelihood that a group of defenders of a territory will be drawn together, united, and their efforts compounded by the intruding enemy. I suggested that man is a territorial species, and that we defend our homes or our homelands for biological reasons, not because we choose but because we must.

I was writing early in 1966, when escalation of American power in Vietnam was less than a year old and American optimism was still a native resource. Applying the territorial principle, I published my conclusion that the war was unwinnable. A powerful intruder, uninhibited by world censure, may with a single blow annihilate a territorial defender. But an effort to escape moral obloquy through gradual escalation of force gives the weakest defender opportunity to escalate his own quite incalculable biological resources. Incapable of playing the Hitler, we played instead evolution's fool.

There is an ironic footnote to America's most profound humiliation. Any insight into man's evolutionary nature would have determined that the war must not take place. It was belief in man's rational nature -- acceptance of psychology's reinforcement theory that, confronted by sufficient punishment, tempted by sufficient reward, men will come to their senses -- that encouraged hope in our escalation policy. And in utmost humility we must add a footnote to our footnote. The final decision to escalate -- and that ultimate of follies, to bomb North Vietnam -- was made not by the much abused generals, but by a group of the most acute, most educated civilian minds of which my country could boast. And educated they were.

The Vietnam war was the most costly experiment ever designed to test a scientific theory accepted by the most educated of men. And the Vietnamese, in some wild, wild fashion, differed, as events were to demonstrate, from B. F. Skinner's domesticated rats. There is a jungle in the human heart that denies, as so frequently occurs in the jungle of animals, the thesis that might makes right. The territorial principle is a portion of that denial. While in many a minor fashion we may accept reinforcement theory, and the general principle that men confronted by choice will accept the more pleasurable, the less painful, still a breaking point between the reasonable and the unreasonable must be reached. There is too ancient wisdom in natural law to leave the survival of populations, the possession of a territory, to the vagaries of somebody's rein forcement theory. Far too immense is the balance of evolutionary forces to endure such a rational conclusion as that might makes right. And so a weary time in American history came about when we abandoned the question, When will the Vietnamese learn? Yet we still have not accepted the question, When shall we?

I have reviewed the American maladventure in Southeast Asia not for its substance but to probe the predictive values of hypotheses relating to our evolutionary legacies, in contrast to hypotheses predicated only on human uniqueness. Homo sapiens is not a rational being, and were he so, then history would require endless rewriting. But as we possess powers of reason denied other animals, so have we the power of reason to investigate our own irrationalities and their sources. And commanding them, we possess that ancient wisdom, Know thyself. It is hubris only that denies our powers.

The dusk of the twentieth century spreads: through our city streets, along our highways, into our factory parking lots. It enters our gardens, our hallways, our administrative offices of industry and state. Are these our children? They seem unfamiliar. Are these our parents? We do not know them. The dusk falls deeper, and it does not discriminate between rich and poor, educated and illiterate, Soviet, Chinese, Frenchman, American. The races themselves become indistinguishable, and we must peer most closely if we are to see each other at all. We must hold the printed word rather close to our eyes, and even then an unnatural shadoy obscures its meaning. Yet this dusk is a strange one, an abnormal one, for the sun, if we could see it, stands at noon.

The clock ticks. Never was there such a night as that which threatens. For it is a night of our own fabrication.

Man comes before the precipice. We are not unaware. The dark is starless. We wander, lost, and, like an old, old dog, fear is our one remaining companion. Which way is north, which south? Which way is the highland, which way the abyss? We do not know. We search for a light: there is none. We stretch out a hand: the night receives it. We proceed, since procession is of our nature. But which way? And how close is the precipice?

Three billion years of organic evolution lie behind us. It is a respectable age, almost a third as long as that of the universe itself. Three billion years of circumstance and chance, of infinite trial and infinite error, of forgotten failures and compounding successes, have arranged the being called man. The errors, the failures, we may forget with brief mourning. These were not of our ancestry. They were tried and found wanting, condemned to extinction. Shall it be told on the record of living beings that after three billion years the supreme experiment, man, was found wanting?

There is truly nothing new about extinction, excepting only the awareness. History, a great scientist once commented, is a charnelhouse of species. And perhaps the true uniqueness of man arises from his being the first tragic animal. We are the first, so far as we know, permitted self-estimate, permitted remembrance of things long past, permitted visions of things to come. We have been permitted pleasures transcending the joys of other animals, since we may savor ours in time's long contrasts. We have been granted, in full freedom, that exquisite perception revealing the moment that is now as the moment that has never been before. And will never come again.

It is the final freedom that we are granted knowledge of the precipice, even as we have been allowed to construct it ourselves.

In the early years of our wonderings there lived a tragic poet. And he unfolded the drama of a king, even then an old-time figure of remembrance, and it was a tale of such resonance as to be told and retold through the ages since. The king, it seems, had in all innocence offended the gods. And when the truth at last came to him, in horror he put out his own eyes.

Is this indeed an incalculable night through which we fumble our uncertain way? Or is it blindness self-inflicted, are we like Oedipus, have we put out our eyes? Did we in our innocence -- and innocence it was -- offend certain secret, omnipotent gods? Do we now in our terror of consequence refuse to look? As we constructed the precipice, have we constructed the dark as well?

It is not impossible.

Our foot slips. We fall, Homo sapiens, in perfect ignominy on our belly, we feel, reach, search for solid earth. And somewhere in the black, depthless void there is laughter. We rise a little, on hands and knees, peering into the impenetrable. The laughter falls away into derisive chuckles, but something out there is watching us. There is something that can see, while we cannot.

Oedipus, Oedipus, this cannot be night that surrounds you.