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Pastimes : Current Events and General Interest Bits & Pieces

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To: Win Smith who started this subject	1/17/2003 6:06:34 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) of 603

Charles McGrath, Gone Ape nytimes.com [ the weekend NYT magazine is up early, so I'll post this amusing take on a recent science news I never quite got around to posting here ] In Morris's analysis, much of that behavior consisted of trying to deal with the cruel contradictions of pair-bonding and gorillalike hypersexuality. On one hand, we wanted to retain a single mate, so we became exquisitely and inventively sensual; we turned the female breasts into substitutes for the buttocks and figured out how to have frontal intercourse. (This is the epochal moment memorialized by Rae Dawn Chong and Everett McGill in ''Quest for Fire,'' the 1981 movie on which Morris served as a consultant.) On the other hand, we couldn't be going ape (sexually speaking) all the time, so we had to invent deodorant and the unspoken prohibition against looking people in the eye on the subway. Some of Morris's ideas now seem more than a little wacky. (He claimed, for example, that after orgasm the breast of the female naked ape increases in size by up to 25 percent.) But Morris gave rise eventually to E.O. Wilson and sociobiology, and no one doubts for a minute anymore that many of our social and behavioral traits are rooted in biological and evolutionary imperatives. We are a lot more animal than we used to think.

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