Significant Others: The Ape-Human Continuum And The Quest For Human Nature - Hardcover

Stanford, Craig B.

3.62

84 ratings by Goodreads

9780465081714: Significant Others: The Ape-Human Continuum And The Quest For Human Nature

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465081711 ISBN 13: 9780465081714

Publisher: Basic Books, 2001

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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.

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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 Center and knows as much as anyone about field research on the great ape. 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 nonhumans ("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 one:

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 beings in their own right. Just like us. --Rob Lightner

About the Author:

Craig B. Stanford is a renowned specialist in human origins and primate behavior who splits his time between Uganda and Los Angeles, California. He is Co-Director of the Jane Goodall Research Center, 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. His previous books include The Hunting Apes and Chimpanzee and Red Colobus.

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