Discussion of Session V: Communal Behavior and the Environment

Abstract

The special theme of this session, the extension of insights and concepts from the realm of animal studies to the world of man, has elsewhere elicited some criticism as a simplistic overreaction to anthropomorphism. “Scarcely had ethologists finished shaking their fingers at sentimentalists who spoke of animals as though they were men,” writes one critic, “when they themselves set to work to prove that men were animals. Zoomorphism became rife.” [2] And zoomorphologists tend to cast a bleak eye on man; whenever humans are shown to differ from animals, the results are viewed as ecologically deplorable. Thus man, unlike animals, has no built-in mechanism to prevent his population from rising to the level of starvation, as Wynne-Edwards has just reminded us; and man’s degradation of the environment is not corrigible by ordinary ecological constraints.