Volume 34, Number 11 · June 25, 1987
Animals and Us
By Stephen Jay Gould
In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human–Animal Relationships
by James Serpell
Basil Blackwell, 215 pp., $19.95
Adam's Task: Calling Animals by Name
by Vicki Hearne
Knopf, 274 pp., $17.95
Muir Among the Animals: The Wildlife Writings of John Muir
edited by Lisa Mighetto
Sierra Club Books, 196 pp., $17.95
The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior
by Jane Goodall
Harvard University Press (Belknap Press), 673 pp., $35.00
In Man's Place in Nature (1863), the first popular attempt to clothe our own species in Darwin's heresy, Thomas Henry Huxley singled out Edward Tyson's study of 1699 as 'the first account of a manlike ape which has any pretentions to a scientific accuracy and completeness.' In his Anatomy of a Pygmie (actually a chimpanzee), Tyson identified an African ape as intermediate between monkeys and humans, but closer to us than to them. Tyson has become a hero of cardboard history for this supposedly courageous act of permitting the facts of nature to proclaim an unpleasant truth previously suppressed by anthropocentric bias—our continuity with other animals.
Review, 6370 words
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