HP-Time.com

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Animal Origins

Sir: I am amused though puzzled by your review of Eugene Marais' The Soul of the Ape [Sept. 26]. I am aware of no more highly informed reporting of the new evolutionary interpretations of human behavior than the articles appearing in your BEHAVIOR section. Yet in the back of the magazine, one finds a reviewer deploring it all, suggesting that Marais speculates too much about the animal origins of the human unconscious (when that is what the book is about), and finally stating that Marais "came to grief over the noninheritance of acquired characteristics," a concept that never enters the work.

I find it difficult to believe that any TIME staffer could know this little about what is going on in the natural sciences. Whom did you bring in, a cultural anthropologist?

ROBERT ARDREY Rome

Mother Symbol

Sir: Vicki Budinger is marrying Tiny Tim [Sept. 26]? How exciting! She must see him as a mother symbol.

LESLIE GOODMAN-MALAMUTH Manhattan Beach, Calif.