Behavior: A Wet Scenario

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Darwin was a male chauvinist; modern theories of evolution are speculative and sexist, and treat women as mere "satellites" of men. That, simply stated, is the opinion of Author Elaine Morgan. Armed with a vivid imagination and a healthy supply of female chauvinism, she has developed a theory that is even more speculative and sexist than those she decries. In The Descent of Woman (Stein & Day; $7.95), Author Morgan proposes that many of mankind's current physical and behavioral characteristics developed during a period when prehominid apes spent much of their time on sandy shores and in neck-high waters. Led by females, she says, the apes abandoned the dying forests, found life on the open plains too threatening and took to the ocean, where they lived for ten million years before resuming a land-based way of life.

Fighting Canines. Elaine Morgan's scientific credentials do not quite measure up to those of, say, Charles Darwin. A 51-year-old mother of three children who lives in Mountain Ash, Wales, she earned an Oxford degree in English and gleaned most of her information about science "from reading books." Two men in particular inspired her. The first was Amateur Ethologist Robert Ardrey, the failed but imaginative playwright whose views she now rejects. The second was Oxford Zoologist Sir Alister Hardy, an authority on plankton who thought up a nonsexist version of aquatic evolution about a dozen years ago.

The flight of man's ancestors to the sea became inevitable, Morgan says, when "torrid heat waves began to scorch the African continent," killing off the trees and drying up the food supply. At the time, things were even tougher for the female than for the male: "She had a greedy and hectoring mate," she lacked his "fighting canines" (teeth, not dogs) to fend off enemies, "she was hampered by a clinging infant," and when chased by a carnivorous cat, she "found there was no tree she could run up to escape." She "loathed getting her feet wet," but "when your homeland's turning into an inferno, the seaside's not at all a bad place to be."

It was in the sea, Morgan states, that the prehominid female began to walk on two feet instead of four to keep her head above water. It was also there that she—and not, as some theorists would have it, the male—became the first to use implements purposefully. Envying the male's dagger-like fangs that he could use to crunch through shells, she picked up a pebble and managed to crack a shell with it. "She tried it again, and it worked every time. So she became a tool user, and the male watched her and imitated her."