Chimps and Chumps

IN recent decades the average Homo sapiens’ understanding of other species has grown impressively. For example, Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoon simply would not have been funny before PBS started showing us countless documentaries on penguins, pandas, and polar bears. Interest in apes and monkeys, especially, has reached an unprecedented level, as seen in the opening of the $43 million Congo Gorilla Forest at the Bronx Zoo. Even Tarzan movies are now primatologically correct. As recently as 1984, the pretentious Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes could put extras in generic ape suits—half-chimpanzee, half-gorilla—and receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Makeup. Disney’s new Tarzan animated feature, however, is quite realistic in its depiction of gorillas (except for the parts about them talking and raising human babies; evidence for this remains strictly anecdotal).

All this is to be encouraged. As the motto of Faber College in Animal House reminds us, Knowledge Is Good. The rub, though, is in figuring out how to use this knowledge; specifically, how to apply lessons learned from animals to human beings.

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Steve Sailer

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IN recent decades the average Homo sapiens’ understanding of other species has grown impressively. For example, Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoon simply would not have been funny before PBS started showing us countless documentaries on penguins, pandas, and polar bears. Interest in apes and monkeys, especially, has reached an unprecedented level, as seen in the opening of the $43 million Congo Gorilla Forest at the Bronx Zoo. Even Tarzan movies are now primatologically correct. As recently as 1984, the pretentious Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes could put extras in generic ape suits—half-chimpanzee, half-gorilla—and receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Makeup. Disney’s new Tarzan animated feature, however, is quite realistic in its depiction of gorillas (except for the parts about them talking and raising human babies; evidence for this remains strictly anecdotal).

All this is to be encouraged. As the motto of Faber College in Animal House reminds us, Knowledge Is Good. The rub, though, is in figuring out how to use this knowledge; specifically, how to apply lessons learned from animals to human beings.