Bad Neighbors

MEN AND APES by Ramona and Desmond Morris. 271 pages. McGraw-Hill. $7.95.

The ape is man's nearest neighbor on the tree of life, but neither has found the neighborhood entirely respectable. For man, that hairy presence stands just too close for comfort; outside the chimp cage at the zoo, the human observer begins to wonder uneasily who is amusing whom. In this illustrated primer of primate lore by Desmond Morris, curator of mammals at the London Zoo, and his wife Ramona, the sympathy of the authors is placed solidly behind the bars.

The book's impatient thesis is that man ignorantly keeps trying to make a monkey out of the poor beast. "Apes," the Morrises write, "have been eaten, worshipped, hunted, hated, loved, mocked, feared, persecuted, protected, shot into space, featured on television, infected with syphilis and trained to collect flowers."

Indeed, man's capacity for misunderstanding his neighbor seems inexhaustible. Take sex. Thomas Jefferson believed that apes raped black women as one way to climb a notch on the social scale. Even today, people like to think that apes possess a savage and unrestrained libido. Actually, they are scarcely interested in sex at all. In 466 hours of directly observing gorillas in the wild, Anthropologist George Schaller witnessed only two copulations and one unsuccessful try. Furthermore, gorilla swains are sadly underendowed by human standards: the erect male organ measures a scant 2 in.

In some quarters the legend persists that apes are humans who abdicated society to live a carefree jungle life. This delightful fiction, the authors say, explains why apes do not speak; they would then be instantly recognized as sapient and forcibly returned to civilized responsibility.

The Morrises acknowledge sadly that simian acuity makes an ideal subject for laboratory experiment, but they rather disapprove of the whole business. In one case, two rhesus monkeys were strapped into adjoining cubicles and subjected to electric shock. One of them, designated the Executive Monkey, could stop the shocks by pulling a lever, which he was required to do for hours on end. The other soon learned that his control was a dummy lever, and lost all interest in it.

After 23 days, the second monkey was as placid and healthy as ever, but the decision maker died--of ulcers. The Morrises charitably refrain from pointing out the obvious moral, which is not that man's nearest neighbor is smart enough to get ulcers, but that the ape's nearest neighbor is dumb enough to inflict them.

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