Animal Studies, Primates, and Human Beings

Many anthropologists find the use of primate studies as a way of understanding human development to be a flawed approach. Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewentin, for instance, question the validity of sociobiology and see it as a case of circular reasoning: "In making this point, Gould and Lewontin see sociobiologists devising their scenarios to create highly simplistic, perfectly adaptive situations--a condtioin rarely (if ever) found in nature" (Turnbaugh, Jurmain, Nelson, and Kilgore, 1996, 196). However, such criticism relates more to how the questions are framed and answered than to the basic question of how valuable primate studies can be in helping our understanding of human behavior and culture. The criticism noted above does show the danger of allowing affective thinking to intrude, for Gould and Lewontin are in part stating that some researchers shape their questions to get the answers they believe to be true. Many researchers, though, have used primate studies as a way of providing information on primate behavior which casts some light on the behavior of the highest of the primates, man.

Daniel Povinelli, director of the New Iberia Research Center in southwestern Louisiana, has undertaken work on the question of how apes think about themselves, an issue that casts light on how the fact of human self-awareness might have developed in the past. Researchers on animal behavior have long asked whether certain nonhuma