10. The Risen Ape

The years passed by the millions, as indistinguishable one from another as stones on a shingle shore, or scattered, flat-topped thorn trees on a sun-struck, shimmering savanna. Two branches of our early ramapithecine family had emerged. India's sluggish streams and tropical forests vanished. In the high East African wonderland, where green pastures had crowned sinuous hills, and rich forest galleries had crowded the valleys below, the rains came less regularly or not at all. We held on. Through a thousand generations environmental change might have come unnoted, so slow was it. Then, noted or unnoted, some ten or twelve million years ago came the hellish Pliocene. The world dried up and none knows why. But Eden was gone.

Now the years passed by like a procession of mourners in slow single file. The Indian branch of the human experiment failed, became extinct. Perhaps -- just perhaps -- they had not accepted the meat-eating way and with the vanishment of forest and fruit they expired. We cannot know. Our African line persisted, and this we know or you and I should not be here. We accepted the grassland and its copious population of prey. Inadequate, even ridiculous though we may have seemed in the eyes of the natural predators, still we existed, we survived, we outlasted the drought.

No contemporary mind can visualize such a time of trial. This little group vanished into dust; that little group persevered. What was the distinction? Social order, I suggest. We entered the African Pliocene as ramapithecines, without even, for all we know, satisfactory bipedal carriage. We emerged many million years later as the anatomically developed austral-opithecine, but with a brain still little larger than the ape's. We were men, up to the neck. But I do not believe that anatomical improvement was the major instrument of our survival; it was rather our social capacity to act as one.

Order far surmounted disorder in the social contract of such times. Sir Julian Huxley once described man as "by far the most variable of wild species known," and I believe that he was correct. The hominid may not, however, have known quite such genetic diversity. Mating must have been confined to a few neighboring societies. Inbreeding of small populations within an unchanging environment over eternally long periods would have tended to reduce variability of individuals. Still, as we know, a random diversity would always have occurred, and it is this diversity that social order would have discouraged. A harsh, predictable environment, demanding today's answer for tomorrow's trial, placed small selective value on the deviant, on the innovator. And society became nature's implement in shaping the genetic diversity of its members to a common sort. The weak, the mentally deficient, were eliminated by infanticide; the hominid could not afford them. The rebellious, if any existed, were driven away to solitude and death. Can one bring to mind today's dissenting youth in a time when the wetness of a waterhole meant the difference between death and life?

A nation of men at war, fighting for survival, will tighten its social contract, renounce individual demands, exist as a single group. Hominid societies throughout the entire Pliocene consisted of tiny biological nations fighting to survive. And the quality of the group, not the distinction of the individual, was the criterion for survival. Cooperation, obedience, dependability, predictability were the qualities of individual merit promoting group existence. Selection, in a word, was for the mediocre.

I find no other persuasive explanation for the failure of the hominid line, through such an expanse of evolutionary time, to do anything much but survive. Our essential demand for social order virtually eliminated that necessary disorder giving room to individual assertion. When the Pliocene at last ended, and the rains of the Pleistocene came, we find habilis at the bottom of the Olduvai Gorge. He now had stone tools and weapons, it is true. But 12,500,000 years had elapsed since Fort Ternan, and the way of life seemed not otherwise much different. And now a greater mystery was to appear, a compound mystery of a sort.

Why did the great human brain so suddenly appear, and why did its appearance leave so little mark on our lives? Much later than the original habilis in Olduvai's book of prehistory the Leakeys found another example of the being, with a brain a shade smaller. It was a million years old. Yet from 350,000 years ago we have the Hungarian with his skull caved in and a brain as large as our own. What happened in little over a half-million years that had not happened before? And why did the appearance of this magnificent new organ present so little change to the human way?

We were now true men. We made somewhat better weapons with a 1,400-cc. brain than had habilis with his 650 cc. But his had been adequate. We gained control of fire in Europe and Asia, though not for a long while in Africa. We hunted much the same animals, perhaps killed one another more frequently. As time passes, there is growing evidence for ritual in Neanderthal burials. But if we may guess that the brain had accomplished its expansion by 500,000 years ago, then it was a long time indeed before it produced any miracles.

I should like to present an hypothesis: Not until the invention of the bow and arrow was the individual freed from the social order commanded by the cooperative hunting band. In human history it was the long-distance weapon that made possible the invention of the individual. Our ancient prison of conformity was broken open. The risen ape soared.

The story of the bow and arrow is little known. Perhaps anthropology's insistence on regarding the weapon as just another tool has obscured its significance. One must find it remarkable, for example, that just a few years ago, at Chicago's giant symposium Man the Hunter, there was presented n paper, no discussion, not even so far as I can discover a mention of what the coming of the long-distance weapon may have meant to our history.

For what evidence I may present I am indebted to my friend Kenneth Oakley and his irreplaceable works Man the Tool- Maker and Frameworks for Dating Fossil Man. The bow and arrow was invented in the area of the Atlas Mountains in North Africa at a time when the Sahara was as hospitable to game as is the African savanna today. In this lost green hunting paradise some twenty-five or thirty thousand years ago there still remained a Neanderthal people who created a culture known as the Aterian.

Europe, just across the Mediterranean, was at this time something other than a paradise, since it lay deep-frozen in the grip of Wiirm, the last great Pleistocene glacier. There Neanderthal had been everywhere replaced by men of our modern sort. Some of us, indeed, were already beginning to scratch and daub on the walls of caves, preparing for the Magdalenian fulfillment of our first true art. And just across the way, in the green Sahara, the last of the Neanderthals was preparing his legacy to the world: death at a distance.

The invention was simple. No one ever before had chipped stone weapons with a base that could be neatly fastened to a shaft. The French, who have given much study to the Aterians, speak of such artifacts as pieces pedonculees. In English they are usually called "tanged," and in appearance they resemble the familiar arrowhead of the American Indian. Some were large and, fastened to a shaft, created a throwing spear far more effective than any that could have been made previously. Most were small, however, and could only have been heads for arrows.

We do not know how far these Neanderthal hunters ranged, but Spanish students have found the tanged points in the deposit of Parpallo, near Valencia. Later on in Spain the bow and arrow made its first appearance in rock paintings. By then, overcome by deficiencies that we do not entirely understand, Neanderthal was probably gone, but his legacy remained. Commonly the paintings show men stalking game. But one from a rock-shelter at Castell6n shows men wildly fighting.

In Oakley's opinion, the bow and arrow did not spread far or widely replace the spear until after the retreat of the Wurra ice sheet. That retreat occurred abruptly, just eleven thousand years ago. In another thousand years we were beginning our domestication of foodstuffs in the Middle East. Modern man was on his way.

The invention of the bow and arrow, I believe, had as much significance to prehistoric man as the invention of the nuclear weapon to modern man. Our relation to the environment was irrevocably altered. We had lived until then, even after the big brain, as one animal species among others. We were superior predators, superior in our wit, in our social capacity, in communication, in the ability to store information through social tradition. But we hunted in a fashion little different from that of the wolf or the lion. Our weapons were simple substitutes for the fangs and the claws of the natural predator. That prey animals should have feared us more than they feared our competitors seems doubtful; that predators feared us at all seems unreasonable. But when the bow and arrow and the far-thrown spear made death at a distance a new fact in the life of the animal, men for the first time stood apart. We became beings of mystery in animal eyes, beings of dread in animal memory. It was a new world.

It was a new world for men, as well. Now the lone hunter could strike down game with small risk to himself. Soon perhaps, like Pygmy or Bushman, he was using arrows tipped with poison. The hunting band was no longer compulsory. No longer had we the desperate need for one another, whether to achieve success in the hunt or safety when we were the hunted. And so today few hunting peoples resort to the old-time band. Their groups are smaller. Colin Turnbull describes the Mbuti Pygmies who live in the Congo's Ituri forest and follow two hunting traditions. There are the archers who with their poisoned arrows hunt in twos or threes and live in small groups. And there are the net hunters who must have many hands to wield the single net, who live communally in larger groups, and who must somehow get along together. Theirs is the old-time way, but it is rare.

With the bow and arrow, I propose, the individual was born as a human possibility. Perhaps the family as we have known it came also into existence, since in the time of the hunting band, if the family existed at all, its significance as a social unit could only have been one of far lesser order. But now one or two men could support wives and children without dependence on the band. And while we still of necessity lived in social groups, an entirely new contract came into being. Natural selection, for so long intolerant of the deviant, could now encourage diversity, search for values other than conformity and mediocrity, and favor social groups which within their contract held a structure of disorder.

I do not know that there is a relation between hunting and the agricultural revolutions. But it would be the new kind of man, capable of innovation, who would have been capable of the farming invention. And it would explain a coincidence which has never been satisfactorily penetrated: why domestication of food supply, after all the long wait, took place independently and quite nearly simultaneously in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the Americas. The bow and arrow, so far as we know, preceded it everywhere.

We need not take speculation so far. What seems evident is that the big brain was of little more value than the small so long as our limited, hand-held weapons perpetuated cooperative hunting. Order was all, and the capacity to conform the supreme selective value. With the invention of the individual and the creation of a new social contract, the brain was released from its social chains. Humanity exploded.

Why the brain itself exploded so many hundreds of thou- . ;| sands of years earlier is of course another question.

Why did the brain enlarge? There is a surmise so wild that none with a reputation to lose dares publish it. Yet it is a story so good that to deny it to readers becomes a criminal act. And so, since I lose my reputation anyway as regularly as oak trees lose their leaves, I present it here as the Ardrey Theory of Man the Cosmic Accident. I do so, however, with the strict understanding that I do not believe a word of it.

Seven hundred thousand years ago the earth suffered a violent encounter with a celestial object perhaps a thousand feet in diameter. And this is no invention of mine. The object, probably a small asteroid, entered our atmosphere at an unknown point, but seems to have exploded somewhere west of Australia. Fragments, glassified by the intense heat, are found scattered from Japan to Madagascar. Geologists call them tek-tites, and the area of their dispersal is about four thousand by six thousand miles. Simultaneously the earth's poles reversed. Before 700,000 years ago a compass would have pointed south. Since then it has pointed north.

Earlier reversals of the earth's magnetic field have occurred at random intervals as far back as geologists can trace. Why they have occurred we do not know; since study and speculation concerning them has absorbed the sciences only in the past few years, it becomes a wonder that we know anything at all. Cores drilled from the sea bottom, however, reveal that during the course of a reversal the earth lacks for about five thousand years any magnetic field at all. And it is that field which provides protection from incoming cosmic rays.

In 1963, an early date in our new studies, the chairman of Canada's defense research board, Robert Uffen, presented the hypothesis that these periods of reversal when life was exposed to cosmic blast could have been times of rapid mutation, appearance of new species, extinction of old. Many such unexplained periods exist in the evolutionary record. No satisfactory explanation has ever been advanced for the sudden die-off of reptiles at the end of the Cretaceous. In the mid-Miocene, coincident with the hominid emergence, there was a sharp, world-wide change of species affecting even such long-time citizens as mollusks and reef corals.

Insufficient time has elapsed for discovery, study and correlation of ancient reversals and times of biological change. Uffen's hypothesis remains a startling idea. But a group of geologists at Columbia University's Lamont Observatory, headed by J. D. Hays and N. D. Opdyke, have taken the idea far beyond the parlors of fancy. Their specialty has been the study of those microscopic creatures known as radiolarians whose mortal remains keep drifting down to the bottom of the sea. From deep-sea cores drawn up from the Antarctic bottom they have obtained a biological record of the last five million years. And four distinct faunal zones separated by marked shifts of radiolarian species correlate with magnetic reversals. Since the last reversal, 700,000 years ago, one deals largely with recent species. The 700,000-year marker is distinct.

Opposition to the reversal hypothesis on the part of physicists has been considerable. Absence of the magnetic field would not, in the opinion of some, have brought on a spectacular increase in cosmic rays; in the opinion of others, cosmic rays do not have that significant an influence on rates of mutation. The recent successful adventures of our astronauts beyond the protection of the earth's magnetic field would seem to confirm the physicists, though the subjects were few and they did not stay out there for five thousand years. But the cosmic-ray issue is not critical to the Ardrey Theory of Man the Cosmic Accident.

What happened 700,000 years ago, weirdly recalling Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision, was our collision, beyond contradiction, with something big. That a reversal took place simultaneously may have been a coincidence, though the improbability is sky-scraping. Beyond argument is the collision itself, when it took place, and the heat generated.

The best-recorded historical event to offer comparison was a meteorite that landed in Siberia's Tunguska forest one early morning in 1908. It was perhaps the size of a bathroom or two. It too exploded with the friction of our atmosphere, flattening and burning the forest over an area twenty-five miles in diameter, and killing reindeer even at the area's periphery. It has been estimated that the energy released was the equivalent of that which blew up the volcanic island of Krakatoa in 1883. All over the destroyed Siberian forest the same little taktites were found. But Glass and Heezen, of the Lamont group, calculate that our visitor of 700,000 years ago weighed a quarter-billion tons and distributed its fragments, not over a twenty-five mile area of Siberian forest, but over some twenty-five million square miles of the earth's surface.

We regard contemplation of the consequences of a nuclear war as thinking about the unthinkable. Yet as unthinkable was the cataclysm that: occurred somewhere over the Indian Ocean. If the energy released by the Siberian disaster may be compared to Krakatoa, then what must have been the energy released by the explosion of the quarter-billion-ton monster? And what must have been the rise in world temperature as a consequence of such trial by fire?

A quarter of a century ago Raymond Cowles investigated the effect of abnormal temperatures on the male germ cell. Cold temporarily suppresses the formation of sperm, and that is probably why in sudden cold the scrotum shrinks, pressing the testicles within the protection of body heat. But abnormal heat -- tested in such a variety of creatures as fruit flies, sparrows, and man -- has a twofold effect. It reduces male fecundity, but likewise increases variation. And Haldane, in his Causes of Evolution, cites evidence that while heat tends to kill most ova, it induces high mutation rates in the remainder. A proliferation of variants in the male sperm and a plethora of mutation in the female egg: disregarding the effects of radiation, would these have been the consequences of a day of fire 700,000 years ago?

Was the human brain an accident? I have said that I do not believe a word of it, and there are mighty objections. Any such radical transformation of the emerging hominid should have induced radical changes in other animal species. Aside from the Lamont group's record of what happened simultaneously to their Antarctic radiolarians, we have no world-wide observations. The matter has, however, been one of long fascination in Kenya. Suddenly, at approximately the same time, giganticism overwhelmed many animal species. In Nairobi's Coryndon Museum you may look with awe at the fossil remains of giraffe legs that reduce contemporary giraffes to the scale of ostriches. Or you may look at the remains of ostriches that make our contemporary friends look like storks. You may linger before Bularchus arok, with a hornspread as wide as a two-lane highway, and compare him with the modern ox. You may gaze upon Pelorovis oldowayensis and compare him to the merino ram. His horn-spread is quadruple. And he comes from the Olduvai site called BK II, precisely the period of human reference. If you have the time, you may even consider a large tusk of the period, once classified as elephant. It has turned out to be the tusk of an extinct wart hog.

All of this comes from East Africa, the long-standing scene of human evolution. For many years -- ever since in 1957 Leakey first showed me his collection of animal grotesques -- I have played with the notion that some local circumstance -- vulcan-ism, for example -- may have in some wild way contributed to the sudden giganticism of the human brain. But there seemed no adequate explanation, since volcanoes in East Africa have been belching regularly for as long as our ancestors were around. Now today we have an explanation, wild though it may be. We have even East Africa, its nearness to the Indian Ocean and the celestial conflagration, its high altitude which would have afforded minimum atmospheric shield against heat. And while there is the chance that Homo sapiens suffered his transformation in Europe or elsewhere, still that oldest of Hungarians, Verteszollos man, had weapons of definite African style. So did that oldest of Englishmen, just a shade more recently arrived, Swanscombe man.

It is a problem too complex to settle with evidence available at present. Yet the date of the cosmic cataclysm, falling almost precisely halfway between the last we know of the small-brained hominid and the first we know of big-brained man, must remain, like the ghost within the castle walls, unseen and unprovable, knocking now and then to disturb our sleep. Were we an accident? The knocking carries a peculiar awe if we view the more logical explanations for man.

What might be called the functional explanation for the human brain satisfied me, as it has satisfied most students, until Leakey's demonstration of meat-eating at the ramapithecine Fort Ternan site. Why, for fifteen million years, was the hunting way probable, the demands of cooperative hunting for a better brain logical, and why did nothing happen till a million years ago? And then why did it happen in an evolutionary quick-step? Functional necessity we may grant, a selective advantage for those hunting groups or populations possessing a better brain. Randomness of mutation we may grant, and the necessity to wait until change came our way. But we waited a fearsome long time. And when at last the brain happened, why did it happen with the suddenness of a high wind and an empty garbage can in the middle of the night clattering noisily down a long flight of wooden steps?

I am disenchanted with the functional approach. That we needed better coordination of hand and mind in the making of weapons and tools, that we needed greater areas of memory storage the better to proceed along our hunting way, that, above all, we needed neural centers for communication which the small-brained hominid could not offer -- all may be granted. But that little happened when we got the big brain defies functional logic. The humiliating truth must be considered: the arrival of that giant organ to which we attribute human ascendancy had no more effect on our way of life than a fair raise of pay at the office.

If those miraculous mutations which combined to present us with the brain that is ours provided striking selective advantage, then with singular modesty they failed to display the worth of their wares for a good half-million years. I have presented my hypothesis that until natural selection could turn to the individual, then the big brain was a cheap resource. And we face an evolutionary problem of the cart before the horse; or the Rolls-Royce before the invention of petrol.

The big brain must remind us of the gift of a shining Rolls-Royce in the heart of the Pleistocene. We admired it, I am sure. We enjoyed its shiny look and its deep upholstery. We pushed it around a bit, marveling that it could move, sat in it, wondered what on earth it was for. Yet not until the invention of that fuel known as the individual could we with shock recognize what a Rolls-Royce was for.

Why the big brain? It defies all theory of natural selection, which suggests that those beings of superior endowment will by immediate demonstration of their superiority survive in greater number than their inferior predecessors. The Pleistocene exhibits no such record. There is pre-adaptation, the idea that change may come for which no value will be apparent until a later date. But for a change so enormous, it is about as unsystematic an evolutionary concept as the Ardrey Theory of Man the Cosmic Accident. And there is a far more reputable scientific concept of evolutionary advance stemming from the work of that genius geneticist, Sewall Wright. He saw widely separated interbreeding populations, such as we had in the Pliocene, as each developing a gene pool of excellent local adaptation. If with some environmental change these populations, long separated, came into breeding contact, then genetic explosion could result. Such was precisely the situation when Pleistocene rains brought mobility and contact to imprisoned Pliocene human populations. In Wright's terms, anything could happen.

If you want to bet sensible money, bet it on Wright. If you want to bet crazy money on the field horse, on that bastard heir of unknown genes, bet it on the Ardrey Theory of Man the Cosmic Accident. I say I do not believe it. Yet it demonstrates just about as much sense as do we.

Arthur Koestler has gloomily proposed that there must be something wrong with the human brain. Hastily I rise to second the motion, as must virtually any audience that reads the morning papers. The risen ape too frequently shows signs of confusion as to which way he is headed, up or down. As Konrad Lorenz once commented, Homo sapiens still remains the halfway house between the ape and the human being. But I am not quite so gloomy as Koestler. Perhaps this is because I am not a Hungarian with an ancestor who, after half a million years of hoping for the best, must by now be a most disappointed fossil. I am instead a nouveau barbarian sprung from Scottish ancestors who until a century and a half ago delighted in nothing so much as killing one another and in this short lapse of time have at least made a certain civilized advance. If what has happened to the Scots can happen in New Guinea, then even Papuans have hope.

Koestler too, with his acute perceptions, has seen that, whatever the evolutionary causes, man received his brain too fast. "Evolution proceeds by trial and error, so we ought not be surprised if it turned out that there is some construction fault in the circuitry that we carry inside our skulls that would explain the unholy mess we have made of our history." An error in circuitry should not be surprising. How many millions of years did it take us to perfect the erect posture? Yet the imperfect sacroiliac remains for many a human curse. For how many millions of years have we scampered about on two feet? Yet fallen arches remain a most immediate human temptation; I suspect my own of falling in dismay with my first step. We are evolutionary experiments, and the wonder to me is not that we have done so badly but that we have done so well.

It has been the work of Paul MacLean that has advanced more than that of any other specialist our understanding of just what went wrong in the brain explosion of the mid-Pleistocene. MacLean is a neurophysiologist, and, like John Calhoun, is with our National Institute of Mental Health, where he is director of limbic research. "Limbic" refers not to the neocortex, the scene within our skulls where the explosion took place, but to the more ancient sub-brain in which not too much happened. Perhaps a fundamental error is our tendency to regard the brain as a single organ like the heart or liver. MacLean takes the evolutionary view that the human brain has gone through three stages of advance which give us what amounts to three brains.

The oldest and most central portion is what he calls the reptilian brain, containing the brainstem and certain basic ganglia. It is this brain that once programmed certain settled ways of meeting situations. "In other words," writes MacLean, "it seems to play a primary role in instinctually determined functions such as establishing territory, finding shelter, hunting, homing, mating, breeding, forming social hierarchies, selecting leaders, and the like." Precedent is the guiding force. "It would be satisfying to know to what extent the reptilian counterpart of man's brain determines his obeisance to precedent in ceremonial rituals, legal actions, political persuasions and religious convictions."

It is our failure to understand that the human brain is not all lively, rational cortex that makes it possible for many to reject the animal within us. Evolution proceeded beyond the time of the reptile, for the defect of the oldest brain was its clumsiness when confronted with novel situations. But frugal nature, as MacLean says, threw nothing away. The reptilian brain remained within us, buried by new cortical accommodations, yet still retaining, like a storeroom full of memory's old gear, patterns ready at a moment's notice to enforce or disrupt human behavior.

The evolving mammal brought to the natural world not just babies, fur, a central heating system, and new dental arrangements, but what MacLean calls a "thinking cap" as well. It was a lobe of primitive cortex surrounding in a ring the original reptilian brain. It is found in all mammals. Perhaps a hundred million years ancient in its origins, it had ample evolutionary time to perfect its connections with older reptilian installations. The two animal brains, well integrated, constitute what in man is called the limbic system.

The addition of the primitive mammalian cortex meant keener capacities to learn, to adapt old ways to new environmental challenges, to feel and express wider and more sensitive ranges of emotion. The sense of smell, so important to all mammals other than the advanced primates, became intimately integrated with sexual activities, identification, various acts of self-preservation ranging from fear to feeding. The hypothalamus, a reptilian legacy serving as a kind of emotional switchboard and mediator, developed neural connections with the limbic cortex so strong that some nerve bundles are as thick as a lead pencil. No such striking connections exist with the neocortex. Some pathways are so fine that the nerves have never been traced.

We have not had time. The mammal has had a hundred million years or more to perfect by evolutionary trial and error the integration of the two old animal brains. The neocortex, the third of the animal brains, appeared as a distinctive feature of monkeys and apes, and this was what was slowly expanding until the time of habilis and the other australopithecines. And it was in this new structure, not the old limbic system, that the human explosion took.place. We have had a mere half-million years to perfect its connections with our cerebral inheritance from the animal.

As if the neurophysiological problem were not enough, Mac-Lean points to another. The new brain speaks in a language that the old brain does not understand. With the gargantuan neuronal resources of the human neocortex, extensions of foresight and memory, symbolic language, conceptual thought and self-awareness become possible. But the animal brain does not know the language. Through moods and emotions the old brain can communicate with the new. But only with the greatest difficulty can we talk back, for it is precisely the equivalent of talking to animals. And that is why, for example, we may understand perfectly the cause of a psychosomatic affliction and just as perfectly be unable to do anything about it. We "act against our best judgment," "let our worst impulses get the better of us," plead that "somehow or other we could not control ourselves."

It has been the surgery of Dr. Paul MacLean that has laid open the ancient animal still investing us. And like all good surgery, having exposed the defect, it prepares the cure. Animals, as we all know, can at least to a degree be tamed.

For those who persist in denying the evolutionary influences on human behavior, there is truly little hope. The animal within us, whose existence is denied, whose ways are ignored, on whose presence if suspected is secretly hated or feared, remains a wild animal. 'But the animal who is accepted, whose ways become known to us, to whom we speak in his language rather than ours, may become a tame animal. So Hediger's lion-tamer, with most intimate understanding of lion ways, exerts control over his formidable companion.

We can no more deny the animal within us than we can deny the wolf in the fold. Yet the wolf is tamable, if not too trustworthy. And granted a few thousands of generations of affection^ ate, understanding relationship -- who knows?' -- the wolf may become a dog.

It is truly a hope of Utopian dimension, and in any case offers small comfort for man and his anxieties, today and tomorrow. We remain the wild species that Huxley described. What understanding and taming of the animal within us we can achieve is an acquired characteristic, and cannot be transmitted to our descendants. With every generation born, we must begin anew. But if we deny the wolf, then we shall have nowhere even to begin.

As we review the effects of twentieth-century evolutionary thought on our earlier and still cherished social philosophies, I find one upset the most remarkable. In the eighteenth century we could not conceive of social orders prevailing in nature. Whether we took the view of Rousseau -- that of original man strolling alone and at peace through the forest -- or the still earlier view of Hobbes -- that in primal times it was everyman against everyman -- we conceived of the individual as the ancient reality, and society as the human invention. Yet the broadest and most indisputable conclusion must be that society, for almost all, and for always, has been nature's cradle. Social order -- with its rules and regulations, its alphas and omegas, its territories and its hierarchies, its competitions and xenophobias -- has been the evolutionary way. And if I am correct, then it is the individual as we know him that has been the human invention.

Could we a mere fifteen thousand years ago have described man as the risen ape? Well, yes, for there were those grand achievements of painting being executed at that very time on the wails of such caves as Lascaux. And while the chimpanzee's talents are of no mean order, as Desmond Morris has shown us, still no chimp could have given us the bulls of Lascaux. And there were those Neanderthals vanishing forever in the green Sahara but leaving us their legacy of death at a distance. Assassins would become possible, and Shakespeares. But one cannot say that much had happened yet. The ape had risen, but not very far.

Man indeed was born yesterday. Social order is contained in our animal past and is ingrained in the patterns of our animal sub-brains. The individual is the creature of the human future, and we still do not know quite what to do about him. Arthur Koestler, with another of his flashing insights, has written:

What I am trying to suggest is that the aggressive, self-assertive tendencies in the emotional life of the individual are less dangerous to the species than his transcending or integrative tendencies. Most civilizations have been quite successful in taming individual aggressiveness and teaching the young how to sublimate their self-assertive impulses. But we have tragically failed to achieve a similar sublimation and canalization of the self-transcending emotions. The number of victims of individual crimes committed in any period of history is insignificant compared to the masses cheerfully sacrificed ad majorem gloriam, in blind devotion to the true religion, dynasty, or political system.

It is a statement of dazzling heresy, for Koestler is denying ultimate evil as rising from the greed and selfishness of the individual, and looking to those qualities which we regard as self-sacrificing, dedicated, rooted in social action, as the consuming forces that we have never controlled. The heresy must be inspected with the same thoughtfulness that propounded it.* For if the social mechanisms are a portion of our animal legacy, then we may understand why they are so difficult to control. And if the individual is malleable, it is because he is a human invention. When we speak to him in the language of the neocortex, it is a language he understands.

We may think of the mob. What incites it but animal language? Shouts, rhythms, loaded words, gestures to rival the upraised tail, the hot symbol of a cross, a swastika, a dummy hanged in effigy. A mob transcends its leaders, becomes a single wild happy thing satisfying identity, stimulation, the following response, xenophobia, australopithecine joys of the hunt and the kill, a thing that through delirious social self-approval discards all neocortical inhibition. To describe a mob as subhuman is incorrect; it simply ceases to behave like individuals. To regard it as a storm of disorder is equally incorrect, for a mob is as orderly a human phenomenon as one will ever encounter: let a single voice of rational dissent be raised within it, and observe what happens to the dissenter.

The mob may with all propriety be described as a monster, since whether its object is to lynch a Negro, destroy a college building, or in the name of Jesus Christ to kill other Christians, its essence is reptilian. And while Koestler recalls the social crimes of human history, whereas in this inquiry my attention is directed to the civil violence of present and future history, still we describe the same phenomenon: those obscenities uncontrollable by individual reason released by the sub-brains' ancient resources of social response.

We tamper with the individual at utmost peril, for it Is he, not the mob, who can learn. It is he, the post-neocortical inhabitant of our skulls, who possesses the foresight to make alliances when alliances are to his interest, to make compromises when compromises offer practical advantage, to inhibit the violent action when violence in the end will only destroy him -- who, though tempted to assault society, will still ask how he will survive without it. The reptilian mob possesses no such capacity.

The individual may and must grapple with the an;mal within him. As Anthony Storr has written, "Although we may recoil in horror when we read in newspaper or history book of the atrocities committed by man upon man, we know in our hearts that each one of us harbors within him those same savage impulses which lead to murder, to torture and war." The individual with his post-neocortical self-awareness can know it, accept it, guard against it. The reptilian mob cannot.

The individual, with his post-neocortical creation, speaks the languages of men. He may not accept reason, but he can listen to it. A word may carry a different concept for you than it does for me. Still we may debate it. I may speak Zulu, you Swedish, but we may hire an interpreter. And our logical processes will prove not that different. Parent and child, speaking from worlds of experience as far apart as stars in a galaxy, may still sit down together and discover solutions -- if the mob has not intruded. But the mob speaks no human language.

We repress the individual at our peril. We erect monolithic states in gigantic imitation of the hominid hunting band, direct selection, as in the ancient past, to the survival of the mediocre, but we do not have evolutionary time to make such selection a working proposition. And so no such state exists without police power to enforce conformity on the individual. Or we encourage organization, diminishing and ever diminishing the roles that individuals may play, the sovereignty that individuals may strive for, the dignity and the independence and the confidence that a man once felt as he grasped his bow and arrow.

It was the individual who created our civilizations. After millions of years of social repression the individual, released, released the great brain. There was an Egyptian long ago named Imhotep, and he was the world's first architect. He built our earliest remaining masonry construction, the step pyramid at Saqqara, and five thousand years later it yet dominates the sands. Individuals have given us not just pyramids but poems, philosophies, rebellions, the reading of stars and atoms, villains, heroes, vendors of death, vendors of dreams, Iagos, Othel-los, the nostalgic remembrances of a Proust, the dubious anticipations of a Plato, the confirmations of a Julius Caesar, the dark ambitions of a Hitler, the black doubts of a Dostoievsky, the high pragmatism of a Lincoln, the corrosive faith of a St. Paul. It is the individual who has brought us that dynamic mixed bag called human civilization. And how high will General Motors stand above the American sands five thousand years from now?

We shall make compromises. Society will recognize, as the social contract dictates, that the individual is the one and only source of human fulfillment. As government is the servant of the people, the organization will recognize itself as the servant of the individual, without whose genius organization would be a fishnet in interstellar space. We shall make elbow room, whatever the price, for individuality.

But the individual will make compromises, too, for he will renounce the mob. And he will grant that men are created unequal. That most unlikely of citizens, George Bernard Shaw, wrote in his preface to Androcles and the Lion: "Government is impossible without a religion." He referred to a common body of assumptions accepted by all, and as he referred to government, we may speak of its master, society. There exists no natural society of animals that does not accept certain rules and regulations, certain actions accepted by all that are done or not done. There exists no waterbuck lacking a territory who expects female responsiveness; and so he shrugs off sexual preoccupation. There exists no African buffalo lacking alpha status who presumes sexual attention on the part of the female; he accepts the la*v of his species. There exists no alpha baboon who, when the troop is challenged by the predator, will not accept the risk and like a medieval knight go forth to do battle. It is the way things are. There exists no male robin who will not work his wings off to feed his young; no Uganda kob who will not accept that the female on the next fellow's territory is the next fellow's; no African hunting dog that will not honor the obligation of regurgitating a portion of his splendid meal for those, male or female, who stayed home to guard the pups. There is no animal society without a religion, a set of assumptions unquestioned and accepted by all.

For reasons which I regard as comprehensible, we lack such religions. Perhaps since the time of Neanderthal, when we painted our corpses with red ocher, we accepted death as the ultimate union of man. In hope and in fear we created ritual as a reminder of social union. Throughout times of sorcery, oracles, priests, we accomplished social integrity through increasing fear, whether of witches, curses, the Devil himself, or, in later dispensations, faith in a personal God. Such devotions could only be temporary. The human neocortex with its powers of awareness and foresight, implemented as best as possible by- the individual, could not but recognize that the personal God I prayed to must be listening to others as well. Arab astronomers, in the time of Islam's ascendancy, must have privately wondered just how much time Allah had to devote to us, with so much else on His hands. From early days, within whatever parochial confines of divine dedication, there must always have lurked those dissenting, wandering merchants or star-bemused hermits. Then the rational inroads of the eighteenth century and the scientific uproar of the nineteenth left visions of heaven and hell, gods and demons as inadequate beings to unite us in faith or fear.

There had been the problem always that our gods had been geographical, territorial, tribal, intolerant of others. Malachi Martin in The Encounter brilliantly analyzes the crises of the great religions in their projection of dominance as a character of gods satisfying only their true believers. Never have we known a "religion" to approximate the religion of animals, a set of assumptions accepted without question by an entire species.

There were those of us, of course, who did our almighty best. From the eighteenth century onward we sought a neocortical, man-made faith. Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence proclaimed politically that men are created equal. As a rebel cry to unite the most moronic and most gifted of American colonials in revolution against their masters, it made a propaganda point. Whether anyone ever believed it -- and with doubt one must meditate on its sophisticated author -- I cannot say. But the natural, innate equality of men became in time the nearest approach to a universal religion that we have ever known. There was a drawback, of course. No one boasting even a minimum of human experience could accept in his heart a doctrine so ethereal except a mass of unequals or a handful of non-terrestrial intellectuals who would quickly shed their dedication if, by chance, power came their way.

Still we did our best. Nineteenth-century man, getting rich himself, compromised natural equality with materialism. When we all had gained enough, then innate equality would become apparent. A religion of material want was something less than the life of the spirit, but so long as virtually everyone was deprived, who could prove that it was not so? And in the meantime the rich got richer relieving the deprived of their deprivations. Had they not been so successful in at least a few societies, we should not today face a brand-new crisis. As peace catches up with war, so affluence catches up with want. And we find hatreds multiplied, inequalities laid more bare.

We are a species lacking a religion. We are members of societies lacking common bodies of assumption. We are philosophical bankrupts. We are ravaged by every mob that moves, every bandit that confronts our way. Guilt rapes us. What did we do that was wrong? For it must be our fault. Anxieties shred our concentrations. How will it be tomorrow? No philosophy, like the Dipper's great bowl, points to a luminous point in space and says this way is north. We are temporal beings in an overbearing universe. The more we know, the more painfully conscious we become of our personal insignificance, of our personal helplessness, of our welcome mortality. We turn to science, which as a species we have come to accept as the contemporary temple. And the priests disagree.

Yet science without question is the universally accepted temple. Science, for the immense majority of the human species, represents our Delphic shrine. We worship it. We consult its oracles. We presume miracles. When men walk on the moon, we bow. Whether or not the priests agree, Homo sapiens as a species turns to a single temple, and presumes answers which he does not receive.

A temple exists, acceptable to the broad majority of men and nations, commanding authority once monopolized by gods. Here is the meeting place from which a body of common assumptions might emerge. But too much cannot be expected of the scientist himself, for he is a specialist. If his concern is with the molecule, then his authority diminishes as he approaches the cell. If his concern is with the cell, then his authority diminishes as he approaches the body. If his concern is with the body, then he may be as confused as are we when he approaches mankind. And even though his concern may be with society, his ignorance may be quite impeccable concerning the cell.

What we lack is an evolutionary philosophy. For too long the philosopher has been the uninvited guest at our table. For too long in contemporary life the philosopher has remained a weird and somewhat embarrassing eccentric to whom we give Christmas baskets. And if we are a people lacking a philosophy, this must be a reason why. As our knowledge grows, so does our understanding diminish. We may have those among us who have mastered knowledge of the double helix. We have among us few who have arrived at an evolutionary understanding of man's dual nature. The specialist -- whether in the manufacture of motor cars or the manufacture of enzymes, whether in the probing of cosmic origins or in the probing of neuroses -- has reacted to the philosopher as any territorial proprietor must react to an intruder.

I am an observer of the sciences, and I cannot speak for th temple. But I may suggest that there is a union of the Visibl and the Invisible apparent in the evolutionary nature of man. There is that visible being, the man who sits down before yo" in need of a haircut, suffering at the moment perhaps from t many drinks last night, brilliant, ambitious, guiltily conscio that his ambitious preoccupations are providing his wife with somewhat deprived sex life, yet bewildered that he is so attracted by the secretary who, like a female baboom, keeps presenting; unsure that his ambitions will come to anything, yet determined that they will; continually wishing that he could live in the fragrant countryside where he grew up instead of in the disinfected city where he must live; it is a brief portrait of a man.

Yet what you are in the presence of is the geneticist's phenotype, the being with a genetic endowment who materializes before you with adaptations or maladaptations to his environment. He is not a static creature. He is a being with continual dynamic response to the foundations of his genetical endowment and the opportunities or hazards of his enviironment. He is the Visible. He is what you are having a drink with.

The evolutionist, like a drunk with eyes doubly focused, must see everyone in terms of the Visible and the Invisible. There is the man before you, the Visible, the phenotype. He is the substance. But there is the shadow beyond him, the union of egg and sperm, the accident of the night with its genetic proposal which has been expanded or forfeited perhaps just as accidentally in a lifetime of encounters with environment. It is a harsh sort of inspection that springs from the evolutionist's double vision.

Yet for all its harshness, a philosophy founded on science's demonstrables brings us around to the simplicities of all religions, human or animal. We see the Visible, but we may contemplate the Invisible, and the Invisible differs little from what we once called the soul. Through its unequal consequences the accident of the night divides us. Yet it unites us. We preserve all history, as randomly we dispense the future. We are born, we die as vulnerable individuals, but we carry within us that genetic union, our participation in a population's gene pool. The Invisible is our community and our eternity of interest. And as genetic endowment divides population from population, race from race, yet we need not look back too far in the history of our species to find that time when populations and races were one.

The Visible exists in three dimensions; the Invisible in four. Hatred at its worst is a repulsion between Visibles. Love at its most'consummate is a union of Invisibles. Mutual derogation is an acceptance of the instant as all. Mutual respect is an acknowledgment of history. That you and I are here at all is a testament to that dimension which I call the Invisible. That you and I may surrender to hubris represents, perhaps, a contemporary sorting on the part of natural selection among un-equals: those who can accept the four-dimensional nature of being and who will therefore survive; and those who cannot, and who will ultimately perish.

The evolutionary nature of man represents, as I see it, a subject for the new philosopher, the new theologian. A set of common assumptions, common dedications, common assurances, of rules and regulations, even considering the limitations of Homo sapiens, remains someday possible. As all of our parochial dedications have been eroded by the wash of the sciences, still a religion unassailable by the sciences exists as a goal worthy of contemporary ambition.

But we cannot lie to ourselves. It is the rule of the animal as it must be of men. We shall have our arguments through whatever eternity selection allots us. We shall conduct arrogant experiments with the social contract until biological command interferes. We shall indulge ourselves in such exhibitions of hubris as the intellectual or the mob may designate. In the end we shall submit. We shall accept the only evolutionary conciliation, the philosophy of the possible.

The life that we know, if we listen closely to its music, announces the evolutionary experience. Natural laws unknown to a Jean-Jacques Rousseau, despite his inquiring genius, enclose and yet enforce the human adventure. Natural laws -- the shape of the inarguable -- while subject today to scientific dispute and denial, must project with sufficient investigation an affirmation of the eternally Invisible, the shadings of time beyond recollection, the definitions of experience that neither you nor I may recollect, the gathered wisdom distilled from the affluent Miocene, compacted by the deprived Pliocene, challenged, frustrated, tempted, rejected by that harlot, the frivolous Pleistocene, until man came forth.

The rhythm of drums from across ancient lakes inspires our bodies. The chorales of ancient voices, swelling in mystery from beyond geological hills, invest our social being. Yet it is the trumpet -- the clean clear clarion announcement of individual entrance and ascendancy -- that proclaims the human being as we know him. Our heartbeat rises. The Invisible invests the Visible. We respond, and it is all we know. The bugle crash-ingly announces the morning; plaintively suggests that day is done; or tragically places its signature, with long withdrawal, on the document testifying to the death of a man.

Dreary will be the morning when you and I awake and leopards are gone; when starlings in hordes no longer chatter in the plane trees gossiping about the adventures of the day to come; when the lone tomcat fails to return from his night's excesses; when robins cease to cry out their belligerent challenges to the bushes beyond the lawn; when the skies lack larks and the shrubbery lacks sex-obsessed rabbits hopping after each other; when hawks cease their eternal, circling searching and the gullery by the rocks falls silent; when the diversity of species no longer illuminates the morning hour and the diversity of men has vanished like the last dawn-afflicted star: if this be the morning we must waken to, then may I, please God, have died in my sleep.

Yet it is the morning that, knowing or unknowing, we strive for: you, I, capitalists, socialists, yellow, white, brown. It is the morning that professors demand in common with policemen, that the philosophies of two centuries have praised, the morning of identicality, of the commonly induced conditioned reflex, the morning of egalitarian actuality, of the brave new world, of order beyond argument, of gray shadows beyond distinction, of uniform response to uniform stimulus, the morning of a tinkling bell and sheep proceeding to pasture. Let me never wake.

It is the morning we praise and we pray for in our industrial organizations, on our collective farms, in our churchly councils, in our processes of government, in our relations between states, in our righteous demands for world government, in our most seemly prayers that someday we shall all be the same. It is the morning that the young, whether they know it or not, rise against in protest. And it is a morning, may the skies of our origins be worshipped beyond measure, that will never come.

As life is larger than man, so is life wiser than are we. As evolution has made us possible, so will evolution sit in final judgment. As natural selection declared us in, so natural selection, should our hubris overcome us, will declare us out. But the stark gray morning will never come to be, for laws larger than you or me will, with impartial, imperishable accord, at some night-court in the course of man's darkness, condemn us as a species to extinction -- or more probably will enforce on us the laws of all flesh.