Questioning Who We Are

When I was a kid I enjoyed Desmond Morris' book The Naked Ape. It explained everything, but as I learned later, these wonderful "explanations" were really "just so" stories. In the early 1980s I ran into the aquatic ape theory as propounded by Elaine Morgan (and orginated by Alister Hardy). It made a lot of sense, but it never got academic traction.

Here is a nice video of her in her eighties giving a talk on the aquatic ape theory at a July 2009 TED conference. She got a standing ovation. That must have been heart warming for her:



She is right to point out that Thomas S. Kuhn, in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, nailed how radical theories are treated in science: they are swept under the carpet. It is a shame. The oddity of our species demands an explanation. As she points out, the common theories of mid-20th century, the theories touted by Desmond Morris, are bankrupt.