William Jordan
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5
Average rating: 5.0 of 5
Delightful 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.
A delightful book written by a naturalist, Wm Jordan, who uses observations in the animal world to contemplate people and their relationships. For example he notes that about 25% of gulls undergo divorce, by reason of biological incompatibility, and speculates that amongst the human animal that, too, might constitute justifiable grounds for divorce. Here are but two of the chapters: DRACULA STUMBLES INTO BED He is making observations on fruit bats that he saw in Australia. One had difficulty in reaching its perch, and hung precariously, awkwardly, till he finally re-positioned himself, and this reminded Jordan of the time as a teenager he'd climbed a large rock and gotten stuck half way up. After watching his desperate attempts to reposition himself he concludes that while he does not know what thoughts a bat might think, he feels how the bat feels. There is a kinship there despite the void across the species. PHYSIOLOGY LAB The last essay. He describes his college physiology lab. Twelve "virgin minds, that is to say empty and unformed." The task was to demonstrate a biochemical reaction that occurs in the liver. For that they need livers, and for that they have white rats, though Jordan calls them "liver cases". They have nicknamed their instructor OWL, and he shows them how to kill the rats. "The rats look up. We students look down. We have shared ancestry with these creatures,... until some 68 million years ago when our destinies split." He describes many experiments. They write up their final reports. They get their grades. They have discovered nothing new to science. But then that wasn't the purpose. The whole point of the class was merely to get good data, so that they will have good grades, so that they can get into medical school. They have just been repeating experiments done earlier by other scientists. The animals were "educational sacrifices". Then he ponders the mind-set this type of course inevitably induces in the students. That life of animals is expendable. But it is a dangerous notion. If it gets carried away, what is to stop a scientist from extending it to humans? The Nazi's did experiments on cold tolerance during WWII. They were vitally interested in the subject, since their soldiers were freezing to death on the Russian Front. Their experimental animals were humans in such places as Dachau. The Germans developed, as a result, the best treatment of frostbite and hypothermia, and we use it to this day. Of course we all abhor the Nazi's as the epitome of evil. We'd never do it? Oh really? Think of the Tuskeegee syphilis experiments. American scientists once cut holes in the cheeks of retarded kids, inserted glass tubes and performed shock experiments to see if Pavlov conditioning in humans works the same as it does in dogs. Or how about our marching of soldiers into the site of a newly exploded atomic bomb in the 50's as "training"? New York University scientists once injected hepatitis virus into retarded children in the 1970's. The CIA tested pathologic microbes on unsuspecting people of SF and NYC. There have been more than 50 such "experiments" documented in the USA this century. How do we explain this? The author suggests that the true demon isn't politics or nationality. It lives in the human mind and it is called, of all things, reason. "Homo sapiens is not a rational creature, he is a rationalizing one". We rationalize the things we do. And so there is danger in our college physiology classes, for it teaches a new generation how to rationalize. Perhaps all is well, but the courses ought to recognize they are handling a dangerous thing, and they ought also to teach the students this, so that they keep it in check. The author's last sentence in the book: "Say a small prayer for the souls of us all."
Editorial Review:
The idea that there is some common cause in the workings of the human and animal mind is often ridiculed and dismissed as anthropomorphism. But, asks William Jordan, what if the intellectual establishment has it backwards? What if, instead of attributing human motives to animals, we paid more attention to the animal motives in humans? Divorce Among the Gulls is a startling exploration of this notion. Jordan combines a storyteller's imagination and wit with a scientist's uncompromising attention to fact. Whether in a meditation on the extraordinary lives of insects beneath a canopy of alfalfa or in an explanation of the battle between male and female seagulls over which will incubate their eggs, Jordan eagerly throws open the door to his topsy-turvy view of the universe. Throughout, he evokes a sense of the fundamental kinship that yokes us all, human and animal, to the natural world. Divorce Among the Gulls is a thought-provoking and gracefully written essay.
