Significant Others: The Ape-human Continuum and the Quest for Human Nature - Hardcover

Stanford, Craig

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465081711 ISBN 13: 9780465081714

Publisher: Basic Books, 2001

Synopsis

What the family connection between apes and humans really means. In Significant Others, the co-director of the world-famous Jane Goodall Research Center uses our recent knowledge of great ape behavior to examine (and puncture) many myths about humans-about infanticide, mating practices, the origins of human cognition, the human diet, language, and many other subjects. Evolutionary scientists know that the dividing line between humans and other animals has grown increasingly blurry-it's even become a clich to note that we share 99 percent of our genes with chimpanzees. Yet this knowledge, while superficially accepted, has not really been absorbed by many fields, especially the social sciences. At the same time, the knowledge that all humans are genetically and cognitively modern, no matter how "primitive" we may find them, has left the apes the only true "savages." Thus if we want to learn about human nature and how we came to be as we are, we have to look to the apes to tell us. This is a sweeping, fresh, controversial book on what the science of primates can tell us about our own natures.

About this title

Review

Engaging, enlightening and eloquent, Significant Others tells of our closest cousins and the scientists who study them. Author Craig B Stanford is co-director of the Jane Goodall Research Centre and knows as much as anyone about great ape field research. His prose combines a vivid, almost poetic descriptive sensibility with a refreshingly deadpan rationality too often missing from writings on endangered or threatened species. Covering a wide range of topics from tool use to evolutionary psychology to the controversy over language in non-humans ("an intellectual turf game, poorly played"), Stanford still sticks unerringly to his thesis that field research of wild apes yields deep insights into human nature. His enthusiasm for the work shines in passages like this:

In a mountain meadow dripping with dew, we're following a group of gorillas on their daily rounds. It's a raw day and the clouds are hanging above and beneath us. The gorillas climb a steep, fern-coated hill to a saddle, and we all tumble over the crest into a huge salad bowl of a valley that is greener than green.

As if to ensure that such words won't provoke a glut of fieldworker wannabes, he is careful to mention the long hours, boredom and physical suffering he and his colleagues must endure to earn such rewards. The inevitable collision of science with politics is especially pronounced in war-ravaged central Africa, where most great ape work is conducted, and Stanford speaks plainly about life during wartime and his subjects' too-real threat of extinction. Significant Others gives the reader a fresh respect for apes as apes--not stunted people, not lab-dwelling curiosities, but uniquely wonderful in their own right... just like us. --Rob Lightner

About the Author

Craig Stanford is Co-Director of the Jane Goodall Primate Research centre, in Gombe, Uganda Director of the Bwindi-Impenetrable Great Ape Project, in Bwindi-Impenetrable National Park, Uganda and Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. He splits his time between Uganda and Los Angeles, California.

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0465081711
• ISBN 13: 9780465081714
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256