REVIEW ARTICLES

Robert Ardrey. African genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man. The Fontana Library ed. (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1961. Pp. 416.)

------. The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations. A Laurel ed. (New York: Dell, 1966. Pp. 355.)

------The Social Contract: A Personal Inquiry into the Evolutionary Sources of Order and Disorder. The Fontana Library ed. (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1970. Pp. 405.)

Reviewed by REYNALDO SILVESTRE*

The Discipline of Sociobiology

Political science focuses on the political structures and political relationships of human society. On this level alone, political science would be purely analytic and descriptive. To be able to add to political science the dimension of a tool in the formu Iat ion of political policy, the capacity to predict must be included. The development of this predictive capacity must necessarily involve all the other disciplines that focus upon the varied but interrelated aspects of social complexity. The discipline of economics, as history has forcefully revealed, cannot be excluded from political analysis, and the discipline of sociology is crucial to a comprehensive under­ standing of the suitability of various forms of government for various national cultures. With the objective of contributing to the enhancement of political science's predictive capacity, the comparatively new dis­ cipline of sociobiology is hereby presented. In the absence of a sufficiently detailed and comprehensively organized alternative, this presentation will draw exclusively upon the three interrelated books of Robert Ardrey: African Genesis, The Territorial Imperative, and The Social Contract. The bases of these works have been drawn, in turn, from a plethora of experi­ ments and studies on animals and animal behavior. The subjects range from amoebas and planarian worm, up to fishes, reptiles, birds, and chimpanzees. Some concentration is noted on emphasis

*Presidential Center for Special Studies. 87 88/Philippine Political Science Journal December 1980

on animals which may be classified as vertebrate, mammalian, and primate. While the bases cited appear characterized by integrity and logic, and while Ardrey's conclusions appear characterized by the same integrity and logic in the main, we are constrained by the lack of extensive scholarly discussion to avoid any suggestion of conclu­ siveness. Rather, this presentation is made with the view that we have in these works not definitive theses, but matter for serious reflection and pursuit. Taken chronologically, we start this presentation with African Genesis.

The Nature of Man

The underlying thesis of this and the two other works cited is that certain basic aspects of human behavior and animal behavior are integrally interlinked. To understand one is to understand the other. Thus, to Ardrey, Our ancestry is firmly rooted in the animal world, and to its subtle, antique ways our hearts are yet pledged. Children of all animal kind, we inherited many a social nicety as well as the predator's way ... Man is a fraction of the animal world. We are not so unique as we should like to believe. And if man in a time of need seeks deeper knowledge concerning himself, then he must explore those animal horizons from which we have made our quick little march (pp. 7-8). Having stated this basic thesis, Ardrey now prefigures the broad outlines of his conclusions. The human drive to acquire possession is the simple expression of an animal instinct many hundreds of times older than the human race itself. We do not know that the roots of nationalism are dug firmly into the social territoriality of almost every species in our related primate family. We do not know that the status-seekers are responding to animal instincts equally characteristic of baboons, jackdaws, rock cod, and men. Responsible though we may be for the fate of summit con­ ferences, disarmament agreements, juvenile delinquents and new African states, we do not know that the first man was an armed killer, or that evolutionary survival from his mutant instant depended upon the use, the development, and the contest of weapons ( pp. 10-11). The thrust of this passage is a deliberate attempt to connect the experimental results of sociobiology with the fields of human psychology and politics. We shall comment on the validity of this and other propositions of Ardrey in the last portion of this paper.