Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Not sure what your "why" is referring to. It's a book, illustrated in an article. The thesis of the book, if I understand it correctly, is that an analogy may be drawn between contemporary male businessmen and silverbacks in ape colonies.
I saw it briefly in passing but could not remember where. It was a number of years ago.
Could one of these books and book covers be the book which you mention?
I wish one of these could be the book but unfortunately they're not.
Some people are a bit offended by the suggestion that humans are animals, thinking this notion contradicts their religious or spiritual beliefs. I definitely feel a kinship with animals and feel that genetic history. I was practicing one of the Bach unaccompanied violin sonatas, standing on my boyfriend's back porch, and had this sort of flash of insight that I was this tall, white, female primate sawing away on this little wooden box. It was pretty funny.
Referencing several other threads in this forum, there is a line by the Michael Corleone character in the first Godfather movie, something like 'There are things going on between men and women for thousands of years. . ' (he was fighting with Kay), and really, the civilization process of the past few millennium is only a shallow veneer. We still have those impulses, barely held in check: the desire to kill our enemies, take the people we want to love (if you're male), all of it. Those violent and primitive impulses are still there, we just chose not to act on them, most of us, most of the time.
Last edited by KaraZetterberg153; 06-03-2018 at 02:32 PM..
Well, I've never bought the religious assertion that humans have these precious souls that are so very superior and different from what animates another living thing, that stay distinct after we die whether one asserts that they go to an afterlife or linger as a ghost. I think that's just a response to the fear of our consciousness vanishing upon death. Hard to imagine a world without your own self in it, since the only way we experience the world is by perceiving it as we live life. I think there is some kind of energy that is a universal and perhaps scientifically quantifiable thing, like light or electrical or magnetic fields, that makes the difference between alive, and not alive.
In this way, I feel that humans are animals. Nothing more or less. But as giraffes specialized in being tall, and cheetahs adapted great speed, we have specialized in being intelligent, in the ways that we are. We've developed elaborate institutions, rules, laws, and dogma, to coerce people in general, even the less intelligent, to control their more savage urges, because we as a species thrive the best and generate the most constructive output when we cooperate, innovate, and use our big, complex brains. Rather than a "might makes right" population where everyone is just fighting to survive, eat, and breed, and no one has time to innovate, which limits us quite a lot.
But no matter the philosophical or ideological questions regarding whether a man (or a woman) is driven by the most primitive of impulses or not, we are capable of so much more, and we are influenced by so much more. I will never accept that a person has no free will or agency to decide their actions to an extent that they cannot be expected to be responsible for them. Despite being basically animals, we did not evolve to compete with other species successfully in any other manner besides intelligence. To disregard the importance of it, is to fail as a human, in my opinion.
Jane Goodall may have skewed much of of "observations" through inserting herself (and other human influence) into the animals' natural society and environment. By anthropomorphizing her "subjects", she already belied some of her "objective", observation-based conclusions.
Exactly, she arrived in Africa with her professors confirmation bias and proceeded to play God of the chimps
, interfering anytime she was offended by natural chimp behavior.
They have no qualms murdering each other.
So her findings are not science.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
