The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee

J.Diamond

February 3 - 11, 2004

The Humans spe ies has been singularly su esful, but its su ess has been marred
by two features that threatens to destroy it. One is its prospensity for geno ide, the
other for its devastation of its environement. As to the former, the author does on ate
geno ide, as represented by extermination of inno ent aboriginess and the re ent horror
of the Holo aust, with war. His argument that geno ide threaten our survival, does not
hold water, at least if you take it in a purely physi al sense as survival of our spe ies.
(On the other hand if you take it in the moral sense, the ase is mu h more for eful).
His argument that our degeneration of the environment ultimately impoverishes us, is a
well-known lithany of spe ies redu tion, whi h nevertheless alarm us. Diamonds laim that
AIDs, drugabuse, an er, everyday worries, has no ee t on our survival, is of ourse true.
Our blind faith in material progress leads us to the brink, and the for es that ompel it,
seem outside our ontrol. Su h lithanies are usually very bleak and oa hed in a language
of unrelieved pessimism, although Diamond sees a ray of hhope in the susrprising interest
of the Indonesian government to stall the degradation of its share of New Guinea. Clearly
su h optimism is in the nature of ,last straws, hopeful as they may be, surely they are just
temporary setba ks of the general deluge.
Those are the okn lusions to whi h the books aims, its ompelling interest lies in the
delination of what makes us humans ti k, a subje t that inevitably engages us with its
intrinsi interest, and to whi h breezy prose and a fa etuous approa h fails to signig antly
dent. The book is written in 1990, and thus fteen years or so later, inevitably dated, by
the omission of re ent events, nevertheless the basi pi ture was lear by 1990, and has in
fa t been lear for more than a generation before that.
The rst basi fa t that has to be as ertained, is that humans and Chimpanzees are
far more related to ea h other than they ae to any other animals. In fa t they share 98.4
% of their geneti material, a gure that by itself means very little, orresponding to a
dating of the ladi splitting to about seven million years ago. (This is on the basis that
mu h geneti hange is uniform, has it has little bearing on survival. True the geneti
lo k is not onned to DNA alibration, more a urate is the testing of the hange sof
mole ules, like that of hemaglobin) In this way humans and himps are more related than
many spe ies, like dogs and foxes, that we think of almost identi al. Thus the title of the
book.
But humans and himps do dier signi antly, although many of the supposedly
dividing hara teristi s,,like the apa ity for language, tool-use and emotions, have turned
out to be spe ious. That dieren e an be put down to the existen e of a developing ulture.
One may spe ulate as to the basis for su h a ultural dieren e. the signi ant dieren e in
brain-size is one, and the ere t posture (that nowadays is understood to have predated the
in rease in brain) is another, freeing hands for manipulation, is another obvious dieren e.
The point is that ultural development is a rather re ent phenomenon taking pla e only

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some 50'000 years ago with the rise of the Cro-Magno man. The Neanderthals, so lose
to us (the ontroversy whether they belong to a dierent spe ies, or would have been able
to ross-fertilize with man, as donkeys and horses do, remains open), never breahed the
ultural satge, thus their lives show now regional dieren es, nor any histori al hange.
So what made ulture possible? The obvious answer is language. The apa ity for
language is supposed to be geneti ally hard-wired in us (at least a ording to Chomsky and
his followers) and it is in fa t sobering to re e t that all extant languages, although diering
in the wealth of vo abulary, are basi ally equally sophisti ated. (The sophisti ation of
human language is essentially its apa ity for self-referen e, in the sense of serving as its own
meta-language, and its related propspensity for metaphores.) All humans are sophisti ated
users of language, but not all humans are literate. The development of en oded langauge,
and thus the transmission of written do uments, serving as a an independant memory-
bank, greatly a elerated the propagation and development of ulture, is a relatively re ent
invention, made possible (and ne essary?) by the rise of agri ulture. The developement of
agri ulture provides the rst essential leap in the history of mankind (the next would be
the industrial revolution). For individuals it was a denite set-ba ks. Health degenerated
(studies show that traditional hunter gathers were far more healthy and lived longer lives)
partly be ause of o asional famines, but maybe essentially be ause of less varied food-
sour es and over rwoding and its on ominatnt diseases. In fa t agri ulture is not an
inevitable development, until re ently the larger part of the Earth were peopled with
hunters. It did however lead to a stratied so iety and to the rise of leisure (whi h in
many ases were just wasted but in a few ases put to trans endent use). The eventual
rise of te hnology and its marriage to industrial produ tion has produ ed a world in whi h
a small segment of the ultural diversity of mankind has spread and monoplized to the
extent that the world has no longer any spa e for traditional ways of lives.
New Guinea, where the author has spent mu h time in his hobby as a bird-wat her,
provided up to the middle of the 20th entury a living fossil of traditioanl ultures. New
Guinea, within a very modest geographi al extension, did nevertheless provide a signi ant
part of ultural diversity, as represented by the great variety of languages spoken (in fa t
making up a sizeable fra tion of the over-all variety of languages in the world). But alas, the
life of traditonal people, do not survive rst onta ts. Culture hanges, by their very nature,
but if the gradient is too big, the inter hange tendsto be ome one-sided and ultimately
orrupting. The lost Eden of tradiotional ways have by now disappeared. Still one should
be wary of sentimentalizing the past and the supposed harmony in whi h traditional people
lived with nature. It is true that the their destru tion of spe ies rival the a hievemnets we
have a omplished, but at a very mu h lower rate, du to sparse populations and primitive
te hnology. Still it is do umented that the great fauna of previously uninhabited islands
like New Zealand and Madagas ar were obliterated within genartions of olonization. And
the spe ta ular megafauna of the Ameri as, unto uhed by humans up to the last I e Age,
were hunted to extin tion.
The author shows a healthy s epti ism as regards the possibility of extra-terretstial
life, and espe ially extra-terrestial intelligen e, and above all question why su h onta ts
would be desirable, regerdless of their feasinility. After all an en ounter of a more ad-
van ed ivilization, rather than bringing benets, would most ertainly result in our own

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extin tion. Thus the experiment of intelligent life, in the sense of ultural life, on earth,
must be seen as an isolated in eidene, thus making its tragedy so mu h more poignant.
We really in a sense were introdu ed to a Garden of Eden, but now there are no more
frontiers left. Cyni ally speaking, the only thing that ould make things start over again,
would be mass-exterminations of humans on an unprede ented s ale, and although we all
look ba k upon our lost youths, and in theory would be willing to do anything to have it
ba k again, in pra ti e it would entail obliyterations, for whi h we would never have the
stoma h.
Thus the hopeful note on whi h the author ends his book rings false. Clearly nothing
he has explained and related show any hope for avoiding disaster, ex ept for disaster itself,
that might possible set ba k the lo k.

February 13, 2004