In Search of My Inner, Aquatic Ape: Part I

I read science blogs in order to keep science relevant for my students and my students relevant for me. Recently, I came across a story about Elaine Morgan, an avuncular, self-trained evolutionary biologist, hitherto feminist. I think Ms. Morgan would appreciate being referred to as avuncular. If an uncle can be described as avuncular, then, by analogy, I will permit myself to describe an aunt as avauntular – a kindly sister of your mom or dad, who could always produce a hard candy for you out of thin air and would discreetly slip a crumpled two-dollar bill into your palm before parting with your company.

As best as I can tell (the crucial document I read was a Wikipedia page in Spanish), Max Westenhöfer was a German biologist who, in 1942, published a work entitled "Der Eigenweg des Menschen", which translates as the “The Road to Man”. Admittedly, there wasn’t much clear or rational thinking coming out of Germany in 1942, so perhaps it’s appropriate that something called the “Aquatic Ape Hypothesis” (AAH) originated in those times and places. At the time, the prevailing thinking surrounding the evolution of man involved some arboreal ape-like creature getting down from his or her perch in a tree for the first time: Man descends the tree and stands up - perhaps to pick up a piece of fermenting fruit and/or to fashion a tool and bludgeon his neighour – and then ascends treeward. Or maybe he lives in a cave? In either case, the only pre-1942 detail that is relevant to this yarn is this: Man’s abode was terrestrial. Westenhöfer’s great contribution to the murk of evolutionary biology was to posit that Man’s precursor got out of the tree and slipped into the water, losing his hair in the process. Or, Man never was in the tree in the first place: Man was aquatic. The idea had, mostly, collapsed under its foundation on bad logic, though it somehow gained traction in circles where it was not subject to scientific scrutiny. Let me affirm here that pseudo-science has bestowed no greater boon upon human thought than falsifiablilty as luxury, not necessity - some ideas are just so clever that they needn't suffer the indignities testing and wishing them true is sufficient justification for their propagation. Sometime between Democritus and Pasteur, science ceased being speculative art and evolved into the operative, intellectual pursuit of answers to answerable questions.

Script-writer Elaine Morgan latched onto the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, bringing it to some prominence, primarily because it questioned the primacy of males in the prevailing paleoanthropological view. Morgan championed the theory as an explanation for the outward dissimilarities between the Apes and Man. I think it’s fairly well known by now, the profound inner similarities between Man and the apes – humans and chimps 96% of their genetic code. It should be noted that the genetic code is massive: of the three billion pieces of genetic stuff in our bodies there are about forty million differences between when compared with chimps. There’s a heap of the devil in the detail of this tale, detail that needn’t be fleshed out to tell my story. Following my own analysis of the AAH, one question was left looming in the corner: if we are aquatic mammals, why are we such clumsy swimmers compared to whales, dolphins, seals and otters? To answer this for myself, I took some time to get in touch with my inner aquatic ape.