I didn’t want to believe it! Surely humankind has learned the lessons of society and moved on up the ladder of Maslow’s Theory of Hierarchy! These are some of my thoughts as I’m reading a book entitled “African Genesis” written in 1967 by Robert Ardrey, a playwright and self-taught botanist.

However, I watch the nightly news and the almost year-long battle for Syria, and I become distraught and dejected.

Ardrey’s descriptions come to the reader in the form of obscure poetry. “The struggle towards truth has proceeded, but as an underground intellectual movement, seeking light under darkest cover.” But, then comes a piece of illumination. “The problem of man’s original nature imposes itself upon any human solution.”

Ardrey patiently exposes the myth that man’s big brain is what led Australopithecus up (down?) the evolutionary chain to today’s self-aware humans. Rather, he carefully records his own observations and those of many other renowned, yet unrecognized, scientists as they study our animal friends while they live out their lives in their own natural habitat in Africa, untroubled by the intrusion of homo sapiens. And what they observe flies in the face of Freud and his fascination with the role of sex in our lives. What they observe flies in the face of Darwin’s “the law of the battle.” What they observe flies in the face of Vico, an 18th century Italian monk who uttered a simple statement that powered political revolutionaries: “Society is the work of man.”

And all expose the myth of the uniqueness of our kind. Furthermore these truly revolutionary thinkers propose that we are still yet a product of our animal compulsions.

I want to cry, “NO,” but I know that I would be reinforcing a lie.

Ardrey spends beautifully phrased chapters teaching the reader about those animal compulsions. We learn about the absolute rule of territory. The colorfully plumaged male bird sings not for a suitable female mate, but to warn off any possible intruders to his territory. Territory assures a food supply, spacing of individuals within an area, sorting the fit from the misfit, etc. We learn about the absolute rule of dominance. Thirty male mice, in a revealing experiment, were put in cages, three to a cage. Within four days, dominance had been established and violence had ceased. When the mice were essentially starved, the dominant mice were left alive a tragic result of the rule of evolution. We learn about the rule of society and an order imposed on the individual within that society.

Ardrey writes, “Every organized animal society has its system of dominance…there exists within that society some kind of status order in which individuals are ranked. It is an order founded on fear.”

This instinct for status may well be what keeps our military budget outspending the top 10 countries each year by an immoral amount. Does this mean I must give up my quest for a world without nuclear weapons? “No,” I cry again with renewed passion.

The great apes are moving toward extinction because of human folly and because of their choice in some distant past that led them to come down out of the trees but still with their tiny and frail legs which hampers their continuous search for food. Homo sapiens have foolishly chosen to create a weapon that can wipe out all of our kind and all of every animal, insect and ocean life. We have also chosen foolishly to continue our addiction to a fuel source that is polluting our air far beyond the safe level of .350 ppm in the atmosphere.

However, I cling to the fact that we do indeed have the biggest brains of any other animal, that we, indeed, have the information that can and must lead us to choose an energy source that can reduce those levels of atmospheric pollution; and that we, indeed, have a chance to change course before it is too late.

It would be just too sad to close out our existence before we even know how the book ends! Let’s plan on overturning Ardrey’s philosophy: “The problem of man’s original nature imposes itself upon any human solution.”

Sally Breen lives in Windham near Highland Lake. She welcomes your thoughts.