Science: Raucous Crying

Many a psychologist conducts his researches on animal intelligence by noting how rats run through a maze. If you were a psychologist, and got hold of a race of rats showing high susceptibility to constipation, fallen arches, varicose veins, stomach ulcers, hernia, sagging viscera, poor circulation, crooked and decaying teeth, spinal curvature, sacroiliac trouble, bad tonsils and audible adenoids, you would undoubtedly find this afflicted race much more stupid at maze running than normal, healthy rats. You would conclude that rats with the best biological endowment are the most intelligent rats, and that your afflicted, stupid rat race was headed toward an evolutionary dead end. But if you made the same observations and distinctions about human beings, you would make yourself unpopular.

For some years Harvard University’s anthropological Cassandra, Professor Earnest Albert Hooton, has incessantly trumpeted that mankind is on the biological skids, that man had better find out what to do about it and then do it before it is too late. That was his message in Apes, Men and Morons (TIME, Nov. 8, 1937), and that is still his message in Twilight of Man, published last week.* “Here,” says Dr. Hooton, “is more raucous crying in the wilderness. . . . Human behavior has continued to deteriorate.” Hooton feels that his is a voice in a wilderness because: 1) men like to think of themselves not as imperfect and unstable animal organisms but as vessels of godlike aspiration and achievement; and 2) no prophet is less heeded by the man-in-the-street than he who foretells disaster some centuries or millennia hence, i.e., long after the man-in-the-street is dead.

Hooton ‘s view of modern Germany: “[Germany] repeatedly threatens the ruin of Western civilization, because this nation is composed of organic blends which, for some unknown genetic reasons, combine marvelous understanding of mechanical techniques with utter obtusity in human relations, and which are of a suggestibility so extreme that they are more easily possessed by devils than were the Gadarene swine.”

On democracy : “The suffrages of morons inevitably put into office persons of similar endowment. . . .”

Twilight of Man is illustrated with Hooton’s own drawings, one of which thoroughly illustrates the phenomenon of steatopygia — an accumulation of fat on the posterior — which appears in the females of some primitive human types, and which probably helped some women of the Glacial Period to keep warm when skimpier males crowded them from the fire. Hooton “apologizes” for his drawings thus: “Amateur illustration by an author is like profanity in conversation. It probably serves no useful purpose and certainly is shocking and objectionable to many, but the perpetrator enjoys it.”

*Putnam ($3).