Word: apes
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...shelves of the Cabot Science Library sit a license plate, several action figures, ape skulls, and a television screen looping a cartoon video of Felix the Cat. The objects are part of an exhibition—the culmination of months’ work by the students of Professor Janet Browne’s History of Science 238: “Rethinking the Darwinian Revolution.” To celebrate the year of Charles R. Darwin’s 200th birthday, the course’s eight students conducted research and constructed a display on the English naturalist. Each of them...
...Holmes is a tall, blond, personally assertive science journalist. Temple Grandin is an eminent scholar of animal behavior who also happens to be autistic. These humans have written two books that look very different but are, in their warm-blooded, four-chambered hearts, very similar. In The Well-Dressed Ape (Random House; 351 pages), Holmes attempts to produce a thorough description of Homo sapiens using the kind of language we ordinarily reserve for animals. In Animals Make Us Human (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 342 pages), Grandin does the opposite: she describes animals in terms we usually associate with human beings. Both...
...premise of The Well-Dressed Ape is that everybody knows human beings are really animals but nobody cops to it linguistically. Just talking about ourselves the way we talk about animals is a step toward self-knowledge. "We Homo sapiens," Holmes writes, "so eager to describe the rest of the world, have been chary about committing our own species to paper." Holmes describes us quite wonderfully, and she's a tireless compiler of biological trivia. She scours the extremes of the earth for anomalous and specially adapted humans, like the Tierra del Fuegians, who (before they died out) wore...
...life lessons learnt during a UC campaign might be less beneficial than candidates—successful or not— think. I looked on earlier this year as the competition toughened for my classmates, and as some first-year UC campaigns came to ape their Washington counterparts. Candidates, concerned with distinguishing themselves from a large pool, seemed to lose focus on what was important or relevant to the position they sought. Instead, they resorted to provocative slogans and ploys that served more to distract than to inform...
...Eight years on, the ape activists are not yet at the breach. But “Animal Law” is a biannual course at HLS, offering Harvard’s attorneys-to-be a chance to question how the law views animals. Some animal lawyers now hope that the course and others like it could help challenge one of the oldest assumptions of our legal system: the property status of animals...