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The Human Environment
Berkeley, California April 23, 1962
Environment, at first glance, seems an easy concept: it covers the setting, the surroundings, everything outside of an organism. Here am I, and here is the world in which I live, the one sharply divided from the other by my skin. I may move among many environments - from Ann Arbor to Berkeley, from the woods to a lecture hall or a living room - but always there is I, and a world outside. Or is there? Difficulties arise as soon as one starts to describe or analyze the environment, and one finds oneself completely confused by this apparently simple situation; one wonders whether the word has any meaning or usefulness at all. This, of course, is a frequent consequence of definition - you can lose the meaning of almost any word if you try to define it clearly and precisely. Yet the defining process can be useful if it isn't taken too seriously. With environment, there are some simple problems of limits. I pick up an apple and start to eat it - at what point does the apple stop being part of the environment and begin being part of me? Perhaps as soon as it gets inside my mouth; perhaps not until digestion has been completed. A green apple resulting in a stomach-ache might still be considered an environmental effect. Certainly a tapeworm in my intestine would be considered part of my environment rather than part of me - though, as a friend suggested, anyone with intestinal worms is freely entitled to use the editorial "we." But the limit problems are not very serious. I find the problems of interaction much more confusing. I interpret my environment through my sense organs - yet as the perception psychologists can so easily show, what I perceive is a consequence of my conditioning and my sensory system, as well as of the nature of the world out there. I am in a sense creating some aspects, at least, of the shapes, colors, sounds, smells that I perceive. I wouldn't want to go as far in this as Bishop Berkeley - as a scientist, I believe in external reality and in the possibility of making sense out of it. But perception clearly intervenes between me and the environment. Organism and environment become blurred in another way: the physical environment is in part, at least, created by the organism. We now believe that the early atmosphere of the earth was very different from the atmosphere we know today: that, specifically, free oxygen and carbon dioxide, so necessary for living process, are also the product of the living process. At another level, the type of forest growing in a given region is at least partly determined by the nature of the soil; but the nature of the soil, in turn, is partly governed by the kind of vegetation growing on it. Organism and environment, then, are not contrasting or mutually exclusive terms; they are interacting systems. The distinction is valid only as long as we remember this. The long controversy over "nature versus nurture" in shaping human personality illustrates this. There is no "versus": every individual is the product of a certain genetic potentiality finding expression in a particular environment or series of environments. The environmentalists and the genetic determinists were both wrong - as is so often the case with controversy. The distinction of organism and environment may be misleading, but nevertheless useful. We are trying, essentially, to separate factors arising internally within the system - genetic composition, for instance - from factors arising outside of the system. This is clearest and easiest when we are dealing with individual organisms, more difficult when we are concerned with populations or species, and most difficult in the case of biological communities. In community study, we have the convenient word "ecosystem" which covers both the organisms and their setting. A pond, a forest, a coral reef, becomes much more understandable if we look at it, not as a collection of organisms occurring in a particular environment, but as populations interacting with each other and with the environment - as ecosystems. I wonder whether it would be similarly useful to have special words for the interactions between populations and environment, and individuals and environment. But our concern here is not with general issues, but with the specific case of the human species.
From the point of view of animal classification, the human species can be dealt with easily enough. It clearly belongs to the mammalian order of primates. Men, chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans are quite similar and, along with the gibbons, are generally classed together in a suborder, the Anthropoidea. Man differs from the others by being relatively hairless, by having lobed, protruding ears, a prominent nose, everted lips, and flat feet - no longer much good for grasping. This, of course, is related to the upright, bipedal locomotion, which also involves other changes, including the balance of the skull on the spinal column. The legs are longer than the arms, and the brain is curiously enlarged - four times as big as that of a chimpanzee. These anatomical characteristics are not very radical - a Martian zoologist, with nothing but pickled specimens to study, would probably put all of the anthropoids in a single family. But our classifications are made by men who have a high opinion of themselves as compared with their ape relatives, so Homo sapiens is put in a separate family, the Hominidae, and the apes in another, the Pongidae. The anatomical excuse is the big brain, but the real and important human peculiarities, of course, are not anatomical, but behavioral. There is no use here in reviewing again the long search for the essence of humanness - for criteria clearly separating men from not-men. I think it was Carlyle - hardly in the direct line of social-science development - who first suggested that man should be distinguished as the tool-making animal. A common definition for man today is that he is an animal that makes tools according to a predetermined design - thus distinguishing him from the other scattered cases of animal tool-using. But for most anthropologists, the essence of humanness lies not so much directly in the tool making and using, as indirectly in the symbol systems that make tool using significant. The essence of humanness lies in the whole vast complex of ideas, traditions, behavior, techniques that are transmitted by teaching and learning with symbols - the complex we call culture. Culture is a cause of considerable misunderstanding between biological and social scientists. Many anthropologists insist that culture is uniquely human - that it differs qualitatively from anything found among other animals. On the other hand, many biologists consider that there is nothing really unique about human culture - that it is simply an enormous development of behavioral traits transmitted extrasomatically and found in many animals, especially vertebrates. This disagreement can be bitter, as I know, because I often get caught between the firing lines. As is so often the case, the difference is probably mostly a matter of definition. It seems to be easier and clearer to adopt the anthropological point of view and restrict the word culture to the human phenomenon. If we want a collective word for learned behavior among apes, monkeys, dolphins or bears, we could call it "protoculture" or a similar term. I have been using "man" as equivalent to hominid, something different from the other primates. There is no problem with living animals, because all existing hominids are quite clearly a single biological species. But many fossil hominids have been found, differing in varying degrees from the species we know, and we have the problem of deciding at what point they should be called men. The earlier and more different types have been called ape-men or man-apes. I don't like these terms because they bring to mind something intermediate between a man and a gorilla or chimpanzee. Yet, it is increasingly clear that the hominid and pongid lines have had independent evolutionary histories for a long time, and that the intermediate stages, the common ancestors, are somewhere back in the Miocene. Even Leakey's Zinjanthropus was a tool-maker and, consequently, in this sense human even though his brain size is not impressive. The danger in the word ape-man lies in the assumption - most dangerous if tacit - that behavior would be intermediate between ape and man. But to generalize from the behavior of living apes to fossil hominids seems to me risky and possibly misleading in reaching an understanding of the origins of our behavior. Ape behavior has also been evolving since the Miocene. This is not to deny that we can learn a lot from the apes - but we should be cautious. By human environment, then, I mean hominid environment - the environment of a tool-making animal, an animal with culture. This would include the environment of those African Australopithecines about which we have been learning so much. Raymond Dart's evidence that they were tool makers seems to me convincing. They already, then, had culture - which means that they had problems rather unlike those of other animals.
Is culture an aspect of man or of the environment? This is an academic question, but has its usefulness. If we make any study of human societies and their different ways of dealing with the world around them, we find ourselves at once involved with cultural factors. It is hard, in fact, to find any aspect of the human animal that can be studied without taking culture into account. Anthropologists - or perhaps better, ethnologists - tend to treat culture as an integral part of the man. If we look at how Bantu, Polynesians, or Western Europeans cope with their environment, we are concerned essentially with cultural traits. We look at cultural adaptations, or maladaptations, study the development and diffusion of cultural traits, and the like. We can, and many anthropologists do, take human nature as a constant that can be ignored; culture becomes a thing-in-itself, the essence of human activity. When we adopt the point of view of psychology, we tend to deal with cultural traits as part of the environment. We become interested in individuals and classes of individuals or personalities, and we inquire into the ways in which they are taught to accept their culture, or the ways in which they are frustrated by it and the forms that rebellion may take. Biologists, I suspect, move back and forth, sometimes without knowing it. If we want to study heat stress, we tend to deal with a naked man on a treadmill under controlled climatic conditions - we try to eliminate culture, though probably cultural conditioning as well as plain habituation affects the results. On the other hand, when we investigate comfort zones, we assume that people are wearing clothes - our kind of clothes. The clothing problem dramatizes the whole culture-environment situation. Are my clothes a part of my environment in this room, or are they part of me? I tend, I am sure, to be a different person, depending on the clothes I am wearing. Golding, in his perceptive novel, The Lord of the Flies, about a group of young boys wrecked on a tropical island, shows how the pig-hunters could become desperately fierce after they had got themselves all painted up - and war paint is an aspect of clothing.
Ecologists have a number of ways of trying to analyze environments so that various factors can be studied and compared. No system is very satisfactory, which I think is one of the reasons why the progress of ecological knowledge is not spectacular. Most commonly, we try to sort out categories, talking about the biological environment, the chemical environment, the climatic environment and so forth. From the point of view of animal behavior, I like to look at the problem in a different way. We have first the matter of total environment, of the complete setting in which an organism occurs, including elements that presumably have no effect whatsoever. Ordinarily, for instance, in describing an environment, we ignore the whole electromagnetic spectrum except for the wave lengths we call light. Yet, if we take a radio or a Geiger counter into a forest, we find that there are all sorts of phenomena there that should be included in any description of the total reality. I don't know whether we can ever hope to have a complete description of this physical world - but it is all there, to make up the total environment, and unsuspected parts of it may be having effects. Our chief interest as ecologists, of course, is in the effective environment, in the factors that do affect whatever organisms we are studying. Part of this effective environment operates because it is intercepted by sense organs, forming the perceptual environment. We tend, I think, to confuse our own perceptual environment with total reality. Yet it is obvious enough, when we stop to think about it, that each kind of animal lives in a particular sort of a perceptual world, all its own. A dog, ecstatically sniffing the breezes in the car by my side, is living in a world that I can only vaguely appreciate. I have spent many years of my life trying to understand the perceptual environment of mosquitoes, without much success. Yet behavior turns on perception, and we cannot hope to understand behavior without knowing the stimuli to which the organism is reacting. When we turn to the human environment, this sort of an analysis proves inadequate. I lived for a while on a Micronesian atoll where it seemed to me that the people had learned to cope with their environment as effectively as any society I know. They were efficient fishermen and gardeners and, I suspect, had been living in equilibrium with their resources for something like two thousand years. But the environment of the atoll included not only sea and land, animals and plants, but a host of spirits that lurked everywhere - mostly innocuous or even kindly, but always likely to become malevolent if not properly treated. These spirits were a very real part of the Ifalukian environment - as much of a threat as sharks or moray eels. More so, because the spirits could make a typhoon, something far more destructive than any shark activity. The anthropologist Peter Murdock calls this the supernatural environment. But when I think about it, this sounds a little condescending. I can see that these spirits of Ifaluk are something the people themselves have created - they are merely ideas. Merely? How overwhelmingly important ideas are in the environment of every man. I may not be worried about spirits in the bushes, but my behavior at every point is governed by ideas of some sort. Supernatural is too restrictive, too limited. Let's call it the conceptual environment.
With conceptual environment, obviously, I have simply invented another phrase for the anthropologist's culture, or perhaps even for the psychologist's superego. But I first thought of this phrasing a few months ago, and I have been turning it around in my mind ever since and have been talking about it, whenever I get a chance, with whoever will listen. It may not say anything new, but I find it curiously comforting as a label. Culture is too abstract for my ecological purposes; the human animal creating the culture is too easily lost. And superego, if that is an equivalent, is too imbedded in the lingo of the clinicians for me to use. Somehow the interactions between man and his setting seem clearer to me when I think in terms of the conceptual environment. I see better how all of our relations with each other and the world around us are shaped by ideas; by ideas that we ourselves have made. The ideas often seem maladaptive. Our very survival is threatened by the consequences of some of our ideas. But if we made them, can't we change them? All we need are some good ideas, and if we are half as clever as we like to think we are, this should be possible. It is through his ideas that man has shifted from being just one more species in a biological community into becoming a sort of geological force, altering the whole surface of the planet and affecting in one way or another the lives of all other organisms.
Ecologists divide the biosphere into a series of major subdivisions which they call biomes - desert, tundra, rain forest, grassland, and the like. I have never particularly like the word biome, and it seems to me more reasonable to talk about different types of landscapes. If we do this, we need to add another landscape - the man-altered landscape - which is increasingly coming to dominate the land surface of the globe. This man-altered landscape is of course varied, including orchards, fields, cities, cut-over forests and industrial wastes. The classification of these subdivisions can become a fascinating game, especially for the phrasemaker. I particularly like two words I picked up from workers at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station - "derelict woodland" for the growth that now covers the abandoned New England farms; and "suburban forest" for the residential strip that covers so much of the eastern seaboard from Boston to Washington. There is great variety in this man-altered landscape - rice paddies, apple orchards, highway rights-of-way, coffee plantations, pastures and abandoned fields. But deserts and forests also show great variety in different parts of the world. The different sorts of communities are classed together as a single biome or landscape type because of common adaptive problems of the animal and plant inhabitants. The adaptive problem in desert is to dryness, in tundra to cold; and in the man-altered landscape the common adaptive problem of organisms is that of developing some way of getting along with man. The man-altered landscape is now the environment in which most members of the human species live. We have again the interaction problem - the environment is both a consequence of human activity and a determinant of that activity. And always between man and the landscape there is the mediating haze of the conceptual world. How did we get into this position?
I suspect that the protohominids - our pre-human ancestors - were social carnivores. The carnivorous habit is rare among living primates. Most apes and monkeys are vegetarians or general scroungers - eating whatever they can get by way of insects, birds' eggs and the like. None could really be called predatory - which is one of the reasons I am suspicious of behavioral comparisons between men and apes. Man can digest a variety of raw meat, from oysters to beefsteak; but without cooking, his vegetable diet is limited, which is indirect evidence of a long meat-eating evolution. And then we have the direct evidence of predation from the animal bones found associated with even the earliest of the hominid fossils. The protohominids must have long been social, because as individuals they hardly had the physical equipment for catching and killing any except the smallest and weakest of other animals. Social man can be a menace to anything from a grasshopper to an elephant or mammoth: but solitary man is liable to become the helpless victim of any passing lion or crocodile. It seems to me likely, then, that these protohominids played a role in the biological community more similar to that of a wolf pack than to anything else we know today. This theory was developed long ago by the British psychologist, Carveth Read, to explain the curious sympathy and understanding between men and dogs - they have evolved from similar backgrounds. The protohominids must have started diverging long ago from the wolf pattern with the development of tools and weapons. Richard Ardey in a recent book has proposed that man should be called the "weapon-making animal" because his tool-making has long emphasized instruments for killing food-or colleagues. But these hominids were hardly greatly different from any of the other animals that the ecologists call "higher-order consumers" until they hit upon the control of fire. I suppose we shall never know with any certainty how man learned to use fire. We are coming to realize that grass fires and forest fires have been around for a long time, in the geological sense. But a wild fire is a terrifying thing - how did man stay around long enough to catch and tame it? I have come to wonder whether it may not have all started in the supernatural sector of that conceptual environment. Man often does practical things for impractical reasons - and fire and spirit are inextricably intertwined ideas. Think of the power and glory of the man who first kept a little fire and fed it and watched over it. He wouldn't need to use it for anything - just having it would be fascination enough. The comfort and usefulness would come later, with increasing skill in manipulation. But the spirit would always be there - we can still see it in the dancing flames of the hearth. But with fire man started to become an agent of ecological change. He could - and undoubtedly did - set fires in forests and grasslands, so that the sporadic burning of the geological past became commonplace. Man had started altering the landscape. I think the next great change in man's relations with nature' is best covered by the label Neolithic Revolution. This revolution is ordinarily defined by a shift in the technique of tool-making; but along with this came the beginnings of agriculture, of pottery, of village life. With the domestication of plants" and animals, man started to become an agent of evolutionary change as well as of ecological change. The changes that have occurred in both plant and animal cultigens over a period of at most some ten thousand years are startling. Corn or maize shows dramatically die changes that have occurred in many such organisms. Maize has become an obligate cultigen - it could not last for a generation without man to husk the ears, plant the seeds, and keep away competing weeds. But there is no use in talking about this in Berkeley, where Carl Sauer has coni tributed so greatly to our understanding of the domestication process. With the clearing and planting of the Neolithic era, man started making open habitats, something otherwise confined to sandbars, landslides, or occasional forest openings created by falling trees. A considerable variety of animals and plants found new opportunities in this open habitat - thistles, robins, rats. Such opportunists were able to get along with man nicely, whether he wanted them or not. Other organisms - those I call the irreconcilables - started the retreat toward extinction. They cannot survive in the man-altered landscape. Neolithic village man was still greatly influenced by the local landscape. The nature of his crops and herds depended on climate and soil. The next step, if we keep using the Gordon Childe vocabulary, was the Urban Revolution, affecting the transport and storage of materials, especially food such as the grains. Thus the city could develop, with classes of men independent of the chores of food producing - free to start the elaboration of that conceptual environment which so increasingly governs our behavior. Irrigation changed deserts, and drainage changed swamps into fields. Urban man got farther and farther from prehuman nature. If we continue to mark this development by revolutionary stages, we have the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century, giving man new and vast command over energy and new materials. And I think C. P. Snow is right in recognizing also a Scientific Revolution, starting in Germany and becoming general in Western culture around 1900, through which science and technology became firmly wedded - with our nuclear age only one of the numerous consequences.
And so we find that we are a pretty clever sort of animal. We can make very loud and destructive bangs - we have caught a bit of the power of the sun. We can shoot artificial satellites off into space and dash around at supersonic speeds. We have come to look at our planet as a resource for our species, which is funny when you think that the planet has been around for about five billion years, and Homo sapiens for perhaps one hundred thousand. We have acquired an arrogance about ourselves that I find frightening. We have come to feel that we are so far apart from the rest of nature that we have but to command. Yet, that old aphorism of Francis Bacon still applies - you cannot command nature except by obeying her. The laws of gravitation still operate within the material world of discrete objects. If you want to jump from an airplane and keep on living, you must use a parachute so that air resistance can counter gravitation. Our engineers haven't rescinded any physical laws: they have learned more and more about them, and learned to work with them. But the engineers, I am afraid, are careless about the ecological laws. If we want to survive, I suspect we had better learn more about them, and learn to work with them. The folly of ignoring them is shown by the salted deserts that were once the fields of Babylon. Or most recently by the fabulous British groundnut scheme in Africa. I sometimes sound as though I advocated going back to the Neolithic era and to a peaceful village life with man and nature in harmony. Certainly Neolithic life can be very pleasant, at least as it has survived on some Pacific islands. But if I went back to the Neolithic age, I would want to carry my physician with me, and a small library - maybe even a phonograph, and I would be sorry not to get any mail. I can't go back because I can't shed my conceptual environment. The answer to the problem is not to go back to the past, but to find better adjustments to the present. Actually, there isn't any past worth going back to. Periclean Athens or Elizabethan England sometimes sound exciting - but you would need to belong to the right class. The lot of a slave in Athens does not sound enviable. There is plenty of mental and physical misery in the world today; but relatively less, I suspect, than at any past time. And despite all of the fuss about organization men and conformity, there is a greater diversity, a wider choice of role for the individual - at least in the Western world - than ever before. Diversity, it seems to me, is in itself a good. The conformity of modern suburbia, depressing as it is, is nothing compared with the conformity of the Neolithic villager or the medieval serf or knight. But we are still a long way from Utopia, and our diversity needs to be carefully nurtured and prized if it is to survive and grow. It is interesting in this respect that our appreciation of nature seems to be closely related to our increasing urbanization and industrialization. I wonder whether our increasing separation from the rest of the natural world isn't leaving us with a subconscious unease, a dimly felt need to get out into the woods, fields, mountains and deserts. The statistics on visitors to national parks would seem to support this, despite the behavior of the same people with beer cans along the highways. I wonder, even, whether the tropical aquarium and the philodendrons in a New York apartment don't reflect a need to have something alive around besides people, cats and pigeons. But maybe, of course, the aquarium is simply the equivalent of another picture on the wall. I have had a student from the slums of Chicago argue that he didn't see why people wanted to have a lot of messy trees around - he looked forward to that brave, new future world of cement and glass with perfect equanimity. And so we have our man-altered landscape. Even when we have a bit of wilderness, it is left deliberately - man controlled. A Russian, Vernadsky, noted some years ago that the biosphere was giving way to the noösphere, to a world dominated by the human mind. This seems to me too simple, and I would prefer to think of the man-altered landscape not as a noösphere, but as a noösystem: an interacting complex like the ecosystem, but with a multiplying series of additional transactions involving that curious conceptual environment of the human species. Whether we can guide or influence the developing noösystem in ways to promote what we can agree to be the good of mankind or of the rest of nature remains an open question. I think we can act reasonably and rationally as individuals, but I sometimes wonder whether this faculty carries over to groups and organizations, especially when one looks at the actions of the organizations that we call national states. Maybe we are trapped by some kind of inexorable laws of cultural development that can lead only to limbo. The late Alan Gregg pointed out that human population growth within the ecosystem was closely analogous to the growth of malignant tumor cells within an organism: that man was acting like a cancer on the biosphere. The multiplication of human numbers certainly seems wild and uncontrolled. The present annual increase in human numbers on the planet is about 48 million individuals. Four million a month - the equivalent of the population of Chicago. And whatever one thinks of Chicago, a new one every month seems a little excessive. We seem to be doing all right at the moment; but if you could ask cancer cells, I suspect they would think they were doing fine. But when the organism dies, so do they; and for our own, selfish, practical, utilitarian reasons, I think we should be careful about how we influence the rest of the ecosystem. There are practical reasons why we should be careful with our environment. There are ethical reasons - through what mandate did we get exclusive title to this planet? There are esthetic reasons - I can't agree with my friend from Chicago and look forward to a world of cement and glass and tanks of algal soup. People can be interesting - I find them fascinating - but so are squirrels, and foxes and mosquitoes, And however fascinating people may be, many of their activities and products are just plain ugly, by whatever standards. As John Pairman Brown has noted in a recent book, The Displaced Person's Almanac, "We've converted our rivers into sewers and our forests into funnybooks; this is our boon from the Gods, everything we touch turns to garbage." Need it be? I find some grounds for hope - and they go back to that conceptual environment that governs so many of our activities. We made it. Surely, then, we can alter it and patch - it somehow develop a noösystem that is more just, more practical, and more beautiful than the one we have. At least it is our duty to try - without trying we are surely doomed. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The concept of environment is generally discussed in ecological textbooks; Odum (1959) and Clarke (1954) are good examples. My ideas on the subject have been developed at some length in Bates (1960). Anthropology textbooks generally devote some space to the problem of defining "man," which of course can become complicated in connection with such related terms as "hominid," "protohominid," and the particular species, Homo sapiens ("Modem Man"), that we know today. I have tried to review this briefly in a recent little book, Bates (1961). Man as a tool-maker is the subject of a book by an eminent authority: Oakley (1949). The problem of what is "human" has been explored imaginatively in a novel by "Vercors" (jean Bruller, 1953) which turns on the discovery Of some living "ape-men" in a remote part of the world. The reference to Leakey (1960) will provide an introduction to his ideas about Zinjanthropus; the volume on The Evolution of Man in which this paper occurs includes numerous other relevant discussions. The review by Kluckhohn and Kroeber (1952) provides an introduction to the complexities of culture - as does any anthropological textbook. Again a novelist (Golding, 1954) has provided a penetrating (if discouraging) analysis of essential "human nature." The Micronesian culture mentioned in the discussion of Analysis of the Environment has been discussed by Bates and Abbott (1958). The possible ecology of the protohominids has been reviewed by Bartholomew and Birdsell (1953). My vocabulary for stages in cultural history comes from Childe (1936). The decay in the once fertile lands of the Tigris-Euphrates and the failure of the African groundnut scheme have been described by Calder (m61) in a book that might be characterized as an ecological approach to human history. Vernadsky's concept of the noosphere is treated by Chardin (1956) in a paper included in a big book (Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth) that contains a great deal of material relevant to the present discussion. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BARTHOLOMEW, G. A., and J. B. BIRDSELL. 1953. "Ecology and the Protohominids." in American Anthropologist, vol. 55, pp. 481-498. BATES, MARSTON. 1960. The Forest and the Sea. New York; Random House. (Also available as a Mentor paperback.) 1961. Man in Nature. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. - and DONALD ABBOTT. 1958. Coral Island. New York: Scribners. BROWN, JOHN PAIRMAN. 1962. The Displaced Person's Almanac. Boston: Beacon Press. BRULLER, JEAN ("Vercors"). 1953. You shall know them. Boston: Little, Brown. CALDER, RITCHIE. 1961. After the Seventh Day. New York: Simon & Schuster. CHARDIN, PIERRE TEILHARD, DE. 1956. "The Antiquity and World Expansion of Human Culture." in Wm. Thomas, ed., Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. CHILDE, GORDON. 1936. Man Makes Himself. London: Watts & Co. (Also available as a Mentor paperback.) CLARKE, G. L. 1954. Elements of Ecology. New York: Wiley. DART, RAYMOND, with DENNIS CRAIG. 1959. Adventures with the Missing Link. New York: Harpers. (Also available in paperback: Viking Explorer series.) GOLDING, WILLIAM 1954. Lord of the Flies. New York: Coward-McCann. (Also available in paperback: Capricorn Books.) KLUCKHOHN, CLYDE, and A. L. KROEBER. 1952. "Culture: a Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions." Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, vol. 47, no. 1. LEAKEY, L. S. B. 1960. "The Origin of the Genus Homo." in Sol Tax, ed., Evolution after Darwin, vol. 2, The Evolution of Man. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. OAKLEY, KENNETH P. 1949. Man the Tool-maker. London: British Museum (N.H.). ODUM, E. P. 1959. Fundamentals of Ecology. Philadelphia: Saunders. READ, CARVETH. 1920. The Origin of Man and his Superstitions. Cambridge: The Uni- versity Press. SAUER, CARL O. 1952. Agricultural Origins and Dispersals. New York: American Geographical Society. SNOW, C. P. 1959. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. New York:' Cambridge University Press. WHITE, LESLIE. 1949. The Science of Culture. New York: Farrar,
Strauss. (Also available as an Evergreen paperback.) Introducing: Marston Bates
Born in his present home state of Michigan in 1906, he was raised in Florida and graduated in biology from the University of Florida in 1927. He began his research career on the staff of the Servicio Tecnico de Cooperacion Agricola, an adjunct of the United Fruit Company, in 1928, and was appointed director two years later. In 1931 he entered Harvard University to continue his studies in zoology, receiving the M.A. in 1933 and the Ph.D. in 1934. Appointed a research assistant at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology in 1935, Dr. Bates was granted a leave of absence to join a Rockefeller Foundation project investigating mosquito biology in Albania. This proved to be a field of study to which he would make major contributions. In 1937 he resigned from die Harvard Museum to accept appointment to the international health division of the Rockefeller Foundation. Upon completion of his work in Albania in 1939, he was sent to Egypt for malaria research. The outbreak of World War II forced the abandonment of this project, and he was assigned to direct a laboratory for yellow-fever research in Colombia. This program involved working with the local physicians in a program of diagnosis and treatment, study of the forests and swamps as breeding areas, and testing of insects suspected of transmitting the disease. In 1948 Dr. Bates returned to the United States for postdoctoral studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. In 1949 he resumed his duties with the Rockefeller Foundation, undertaking an analysis of demographic problems from a biological standpoint. In 1952 he accepted appointment as professor of zoology at the University of Michigan, where he has continued his studies and writing. During the summer of 1953 he worked on the Atoll Research Project of the Office of Naval Research and the Pacific Science Board. Since 1952 he has been a member of the divisional committee for biology and medicine of the National Science Foundation. He has also served the Cranbrook Institute of Science, the Guggenheim Foundation, and a number of scientific societies. Dr. Bates has long believed that "scientists can and ought to write in a way capable of reaching a wide and influential audience." He has exemplified this admirably in his own career. His first published book, The Natural History of Mosquitoes, appeared in 1949. This was followed in 1950 by The Nature of Natural History, which was acclaimed by laymen as well as by scientists. A broad, non-technical study of tropical life, Where Winter Never Comes, was published in 1952. The study of population and demographic problems initiated under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation led to the publication of The Prevalence of People in 1955. This book is an outstanding example of Dr. Bates' ability to present a complex subject in an accurate, penetrating, yet informal style. In 196o Dr. Bates published a fascinating ecological study, The Forest and the Sea, and in 1961, Man in Nature. He is also co-author of Cord Island; portrait of an atoll (1958) and co-editor of The Darwin Reader (1957). In his research, in his writings, and in his far-ranging interests, Dr. Bates has consistently observed the phenomena of nature and interpreted them
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