Toni Dockter: Filosophy with a Fuchsia Flair

[NOTE: This blog is dedicated to Twonky Zotz, mi chimpee amore.]

It’s back to school week, boys and girls! Today’s lesson is one I think y’all will enjoy. The topic involves Evolutionary Social Anthropology. Or maybe just common sense. So pay attention. And you in the back row—WAKE UP.

*-*

A couple days ago I mentioned tank tops (in the faux-pastor blog) as a joke—because of something I read in a book review. I learned this item of clothing could elicit a certain reaction in the primate world.

The book review was on Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives, by Thomas French (published in July 2010). Mr. French is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who spent six years researching animal behavior at Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa, FL. That’s a lot of animal watching!

The author tells a funny story about a chimpanzee named Herman. He says Herman “was attracted only to human females, preferably athletic blondes…he had a thing for shoulders, which explained his fetish for tank tops.”

I’m no Pulitzer Prize winner, but I don’t think it was the exposed shoulders that Chimp Herman had his eyes on. I think Herman was interested in the same thing that human males are interested in—for which a tank top provides easy access to.

According to the American Museum of Natural History, “humans and chimps share a surprising 98.8% of their DNA. I don’t the 1.2% difference between chimps and a human is the part where male chimps like shoulders and male humans prefer a different female body part..”

I think the 1.2% difference is more along the lines that chimps like to eat head lice. And in social situations, like to throw their fecal matter around.

After all, do male humans read Playboy for the shoulders? I think Mr. French needs to read Why We Suck, by Dr. Denis Leary.* It’s a celebration of the human species: A Feel Good Guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy, and Stupid.

I agree with Dr. Leary’s anatomical drawing of the male human brain** (page 184).

Results of human male brain physiology study by Dr. Denis Leary.

Nowhere is there a mention of shoulders.

And why should Mr. French apply Dr. Leary’s scientific theory to his own animal studies?

Have you ever met a guy who wasn’t in one way or another a chimp?

+*+Denis Leary received an honorary doctorate from Emerson College in Boston, MA, his alma mater.

+**+ In Dr. Leary’s anatomical drawing of the female brain, the large frontal lobe area is assigned to SHOES. Again, proof that Dr. Leary knows his species.