THe Third Chimpanzee: the evolution and future of the human animal

Harper Collins, New York, 1991

The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal, published in
1991, was the first of my six books written for the general public. I look bac
k on it today as the least tightly organized, but the most enjoyable, best writt
en, and most wide-ranging, of my books.

As it turned out, writing The Third Chimpanzee defined a crossroads in my life:

a shift from writing technical articles on narrow subjects, destined to be read
by just a handful of academic experts, to writing books on big subjects, aimed b
oth at experts and at the general public.

Like most children, while growing up I was fascinated by a much wider range of t
hings than an adult could pursue professionally as a career. However, when I gr
aduated college and chose a career of academic research, I discovered that schol
ars are expected to devote their lives to studying and writing about just one ti
ny slice, occasionally a few tiny slices, of life s broad palette. By 1976, I had
Buy The Third Chimpanzee
published papers only about two slices of the palette: fluid transport by the ga
llbladder, and New Guinea birds. A chance opportunity to write a popular magazi
ne article in 1976 did lead to invitations to write for more magazines, about su
bjects far afield: volcanoes, sex, wheels, tribal peoples, and other topics. Bu
t although these magazine articles gave me an excuse to spend some time re-explo
ring my childhood range of interests, I was still spending most of my time writi
ng about gallbladders and New Guinea birds for the few experts interested in tho
se subjects.

Then in 1985 came a phone call that changed my life. The director of the Fellows
' Program of the MacArthur Foundation phoned to say that I had just been awarded
a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for five years, with no strings attached. The
awards were made to me and to two dozen other people in the belief that we had
something unusual to contribute to the world, and that five years of freedom mig
ht encourage and permit us to contribute more effectively. Instead of being ela
ted by this unexpected good fortune, I found myself depressed for the only time
in my life. It took me a week to realize why. The award was in effect a stateme
nt: Jared, the MacArthur judges think that you could contribute more to the worl
d than an understanding of gallbladders and New Guinea birds; you haven't been l
iving up to your potential; what are you going to do about it?

My answer to myself unfolded gradually, spurred by another phone call, this ti

me from a scientist friend who had decided to make a full-time career out of wri
ting for the general public. I realized that I didn't have to give up gallbladde
rs, New Guinea birds, or my university teaching job,
but I could still put a lot more thought into writing for the public. The magazi
ne articles that I had written between 1976 and 1985, and the public's response
to them, had convinced me that I enjoyed writing for the public and that the pub
lic enjoyed my writing. I could contribute far more to the world by weaving toge
ther and explaining information drawn from geography, history, science, language
s, and music than I could by making new discoveries about narrow technical subje
cts. The birth of my twin sons in 1987 also made me appreciate that making furt
her such discoveries wasn t the most effective way for me to try to improve the co
nditions of the world in which my sons would be living out their lives.

But my background and my ongoing technical research weren't wasted, because they
gave me the scientific outlook and much of the technical background for weaving
together geography and those other subjects. To succeed, a book about science f
or the public has to please two audiences. First, it has to be interesting and u
nderstandable to the general public; my childhood range of interests, my mother'
s influence, and my school's training in how to write had equipped me to address
that first audience. Second, the book has to pass technical critical appraisal
by scientists expert in the book's various subjects. The only way that I could h
ope to satisfy that second audience was by discussing those subjects at length w
ith those experts, and by asking them to read and correct my drafts. I had alrea
dy found, in writing magazine articles, that most scientists whom I asked to hel
p me in understanding their work were pleased to do so, pleased to meet someone
else sharing their enthusiasm for their specialty, and generous with their time
and knowledge.

I began writing The Third Chimpanzee during the years of my MacArthur Fellowship
, completed the manuscript's draft just before the end of my fellowship term in
1990, and published it in 1991. The book deals with what struck me then as the
biggest and most fascinating question of science and history, which drew on the
widest range of my interests: how humans evolved from being just another big an
imal to acquiring language and music, becoming aware of history and geography, a
nd understanding birds and the stars.

The Third Chimpanzee begins with a major puzzle that emerged in the 1980 s from st
udies of DNA, the genetic material. We routinely draw a fundamental distinction
between humans and animals. Humans write, read, talk, and build telescopes and
bombs; no animal does any of those things. Although it s been clear since Darwin
that humans evolved from animals, and that our closest animal relatives are the
African great apes (the chimpanzees and gorillas), the enormous differences bet
ween us and (other) animals would have made it a reasonable guess that we shared
even with chimpanzees and gorillas only a small fraction of our DNA: 20%? 40%??
65%??? Then came the bombshell of DNA studies of the 1980 s: humans and chimpanz
ees share more than 98% of their DNA! Somewhere within the remaining 2% must re
side the small differences that have huge consequences, and that let us write, r
ead, talk, and build telescopes and bombs, while we confine our speechless and b
omb-less close relatives the chimpanzees and gorillas to cages and zoos. The fi
rst two chapters of The Third Chimpanzee suggest what those decisive small diffe
rences might be.

Obviously, at least some of those differences involve our brains, which are four
times larger than those of chimpanzees. Also frequently discussed is our uprig
ht posture, freeing up our hands for using tools. Less often discussed is our d
istinctive sexuality, which occupies the next five chapters of The Third Chimpan
zee. Adult humans are approximately as big as adult chimpanzees, and smaller th
an adult gorillas and orang-utans. Why, then, do male humans have a considerabl
y larger penis than any of those apes, and testes larger than those of gorillas
and orang-utans but smaller than those of chimpanzees? Does the extra length of
the human penis constitute wasted protoplasm that would have been more useful i
f it had been invested instead in a larger brain or a sixth finger? Most of us
don t pick our mates and sex partners by sober evaluation of an explicit checklist
of attributes. Instead, we come into a room, and within a few seconds we sense
who attracts us, even though we usually can t specify what attributes rang a bell
in us within those few seconds. What goes into those quick choices? Why do me
n and women differ in their interests in and motives for extramarital sex and ot
her behaviors related to sex and reproduction? The Third Chimpanzee began my ac
ademic exploration of human sexuality, which I expanded six years later in my bo
ok Why Is Sex Fun?

The Third Chimpanzee then focuses on several traits that apparently are uniquely
human and absent among animals: language, art, agriculture, and drug abuse. Ho
wever, the discoveries that we humans are genetically so similar to chimpanzees,
and that the human evolutionary line diverged from the chimpanzee line only abo
ut 6,000,000 years ago, suggests that our language, art, agriculture, and drug a
buse must have animal antecedents: where among animals can we recognize those an
tecedents? While no animal on our planet has evolved antecedents of our space p
robes and radio signals that we send out of our solar system, we know that there
are billions of billions of stars other than our sun, that many of the stars re
cently surveyed have planets orbiting them, and that some of those planets are l
ikely to offer to conditions suitable for the evolution of life. Why, then, hav
en t we already been contacted by the seemingly inevitable space probes, radio sig
nals, and intelligent beings that must have repeatedly arisen elsewhere in the u
niverse? Astronomers (Earthly human ones) in 1974 tried to establish a dialog w
ith those expected intelligent extraterrestrials, by sending radio signals descr
ibing what we Earthlings are like, and where our planet is located. I argue tha
t those astronomers made what could have been the most horrible, suicidally impr
udent mistake ever committed by any Earthlings if it were not for the reasons wh
y I m confident that we ll never make contact with intelligent extraterrestrials.

The next-to-the-last section of The Third Chimpanzee explores a theme that I exp
anded in my subsequent book Guns, Germs, and Steel: how some human groups have s
pread at the expense of other human groups. One of the chapters is about the mo
st debated question of historical linguistics: the question of whence, when, and
how speakers of Indo-European languages (the language family that includes Engl
ish, French, Russian, and Urdu) spread at the expense of other languages. Inclu
ded in this section of The Third Chimpanzee is also the grimmest chapter in any
of my books, on genocide. All of us old enough to have seen, in photos or first
hand, the liberated Nazi concentration camps in 1945 swore then, Never again! Des
pite that determination, since 1945 there have been at least two genocides that
produced body counts exceeding 1,000,000, and four more with counts exceeding 10
0,000. Why do people do it, and what can be done to stop it?

The last three chapters of The Third Chimpanzee are on a subject expanded 14 yea
rs later in my book Collapse: how we humans often inadvertently destroy the natu
ral resources on which we depend, and thereby threaten our own survival. Alread
y in 1991, ample information was available to tell the stories of the destructio
n of the moas and other large birds of New Zealand, of the elephant birds and la
rge mammals of Madagascar, and of the giant ground sloths and most of the other
large mammals of North and South America. Since I first released The Third Chim
panzee in 1991, scientists have accumulated exciting new discoveries in all area
s that the book discussed. A new edition released in 2006 adds a section summar
izing some of those exciting discoveries, which enrich without fundamentally ove
rturning our understanding that I originally presented.