Man, Apes & Hooton

There are still a few fundamentalists left who repudiate the doctrine that men and apes evolved from a common primate stock. Harvard's Earnest Albert Hooton thinks the shoe should be on the other foot. "Any respectable ape," he writes, ''would repudiate the imputation of a common ancestry with man." Much publicized, highly controversial Anthropologist Hooton has a high regard for gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, etc.; an increasingly low regard for the social and biological status of man. Last week the dismal state of humanity lifted his talent for caustic castigation to new heights.

His new book, Why Men Behave Like Apes and Vice Versa (Princeton University Press; $3), grew out of several lectures on the organic basis of behavior which he delivered at Princeton last spring. The learned author, pleased by his Princeton audience, declared in his preface: "It did not dwindle perceptibly from lecture to lecture; it did not cough, shuffle or fidget, and it included no old ladies who arose and walked out noisily and indignantly."

Much has Hooton said on the evolutionary decay of modern man, on the biological factor in crime, but this is his fullest survey to date of the biology- &-behavior problem in general. He trades hard punches with social scientists, or at least with extreme behaviorists among them who seem to think that one human being would behave as well as another if their environments were equal. Hooton's contention: since feeblemindedness can be inherited, why not feeble morality? A favorite phrase of his is "moral imbecile."

For evidence, he goes to the great apes, nearest kin to man. They show -- and inherit -- wide differences of personality. Gorillas like to thump their chests. Both gorillas and chimpanzees do crude dances and rhythmic poundings, but orangs and gibbons do not. By people who have studied them closely, gibbons are usually described as shy, gentle, amiable, affectionate. Gorillas are reserved, deliberate, discreet. Chimpanzees are lively, responsive, emotionally unstable. These temperamental differences are obviously not due to variations in the natural habitat, for animals born in captivity manifest them. Moreover, at this stage, differences between individual members of the same species are noticeable.

All this may seem elementary, but when Hooton steps over the threshold to humanity he finds that tender-minded idealists suddenly throw the biological basis of behavior right out the window. They cannot deny that bodily differences are inherited, so they simply put body and mind in separate compartments. "This," says Hooton, "is the human declaration of independence. It has produced a social schizophrenia which is making a madhouse of civilization."

Hooton thinks it significant that certain physically very distinct races--e.g., the Eskimos, the Bushmen of Africa, the Australian aborigines--have developed very distinct cultures. The Negritos, a pygmy branch of the Negro race, occupy scattered areas in Africa, New Guinea, Indo-Malaya, the Philippines. Wherever they are, their culture is always more primitive than that of full-sized Negroes. It is now known that two famed fossil oldtimers, the Peking man and the Java "ape-man." were much alike physically. The one in China, the other in Java made the same sort of crude choppers and scrapers. Hooton's own researches on criminals disclose, he claims, a biological factor--for example, that murderers, when examined and tabulated in large groups, are constitutionally and racially different from sex offenders and thieves (TIME, Jan. 30, 1939) and that criminals as a class are physically inferior to the general population.

Hooton admits the importance of environment, but he wants the environmentalists to stop ignoring hereditary differentiation. He wants man to be studied as a total organism, with converging attacks from anthropological, medical, sociological and psychological angles. It will cost money, require a long time and a realistic approach. But he is convinced it must be done if man is not to sink into an evolutionary quagmire from which he will not escape.

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