The Well-Dressed Ape: A Natural History of Myself

The well-dressed ape, aka Homo sapiens, is a strange mammal. It mates remarkably often, and with unprecedented affection. With similar enthusiasm, it will eat to the point of undermining its own health-behavior unthinkable in wild animals. The human marks its territory with doors, fences, and plastic flamingos, yet if it's too isolated it becomes depressed. It thinks of itself as complex, intelligent, and in every way superior to other animals-but is it, really?

With wit, humility, and penetrating insight, science journalist Hannah Holmes casts the inquisitive eye of a trained researcher and reporter on...herself. And not just herself, but on our whole species — what Shakespeare called the paragon of animals. In this surprising, humorous, and edifying book, Holmes explores how the human animal-the eponymous well-dressed ape-fits into the natural world, even as we humans change that world in both constructive and destructive ways.

Comparing and contrasting the biology and behavior of humans with that of other creatures, Holmes demonstrates our position as an animal among other animals, a product of — and subject to — the same evolutionary processes. And not only are we animals-we are, in some important ways (such as our senses of smell and of vision), pitiably inferior ones. That such an animal came to exist at all is unlikely. That we have survived and prospered is extraordinary.

At the same time, Holmes reveals the ways in which Homo sapiens stands apart from other mammals and, indeed, all other animals. Despite the vast common ground we share with our fellow creatures, there are significant areas in which we are unique. No other animal, as far as we know, shares thehuman capacity for self-reflective thought or our talent for changing ourselves or our environment in response to natural challenges and opportunities. One result of these extraordinary characteristics is the spread of our species across the entire planet; another, unfortunately, is global warming.

Deftly mixing personal stories and observations with the latest scientific theories and research results, Hannah Holmes has fashioned an engaging and informative field guide to that oddest and yet most fascinating of primates: ourselves.

Humans are strange creatures, biologically speaking. We're fixated on the topic of mating, though we're the only species that often makes the evolutionarily illogical choice to mate without reproducing. We're also the only creatures on Earth obsessed with analyzing themselves — which is precisely the drive behind Hannah Holmes' new book, "The Well-Dressed Ape," in which she explores herself (and her... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) human mate) as if discovering a new species.

Biologists have long created fact sheets on other animals, organizing their traits into categories including physical appearance, habitat, behavior and reproduction. While researching her previous book, "Suburban Safari," in which she explored the wildlife of her backyard, Holmes realized that no field description existed for Homo sapiens. She set out to create one, and the result is sometimes illuminating and often funny.

While examining herself for the Physical Description chapter, Holmes explains how extra food that isn't burned off as energy gets converted to oil stored in fat tissue. "Evidently I've done this a few times," she writes, "because cookies are too damned easy to capture." Her mate's nonfunctional male nipples are "useless as an eye on the bottom of a foot." And in the chapter on Reproduction, while discussing the length of time it takes to raise human offspring, she writes, "I've encountered legitimate and degree-holding theorists who argue that offspring need parental guidance and assistance for only their first ten years of life. Having been eleven years old myself, I respectfully disagree."

"The Well-Dressed Ape" is full of interesting facts, such as: "A male boxer in top condition can punch with a force of a thirteen-pound mallet swung at twenty miles an hour." Holmes covers hormones and brains, our use of tools, how we see, smell and hear, our tendency toward territoriality and our complicated relationship to food.

"Of all the human young that perish each year (twelve million)," she writes, "the failure to find food is the underlying cause for about half the deaths." At the same time, she points out, humans in developed countries often eat with a "foraging style" that "borders on suicidal." This is "an anomaly in the natural world," she notes, as is the preference for an impossibly thin female body. Cultures that "passionately prefer fat females to the hourglass ones" make more biological sense, she writes, since "reproducing is a primal drive, and it's fueled by fat."

Holmes touches briefly on such complicated and socially loaded topics as race, homosexuality and gender differences. At points, she does this with refreshing frankness. About race, she writes: "While one scientist has characterized racial variation in the genome as being 'scientifically and mathematically trivial,' these differences are certainly not ecologically trivial." Humans evolved different skin colors based on their proximity to the equator; regions with more sun produced darker people. Scientists have long thought this was to protect against skin cancer, Holmes writes, but some now believe it's for maintaining vitamin balance instead: Ultraviolet rays penetrating the skin break down folate, an essential vitamin, but also provide vitamin D. People with darker skin fared better in sunny climates because extra melanin in their skin prevented too much folate breakdown. Lighter skinned humans fared better in darker climates because their skin let in the right amount of vitamin D.

Holmes generally does a good job of conveying scientific ideas. But she dips into some large topics so briefly that the result is vague at best, scientifically skewed at worst. An example: After mentioning that men with ring fingers longer than their index finger may have high testosterone levels, Holmes provides "a list of traits you may be able to predict from a male's high-testosterone ring finger." These include being more likely "to be aggressive," "to mate with many females" and "to be gay." Then, in a move that may rile left-handed people, she lists traits correlated with being a leftie: autism, dyslexia, stuttering, deafness and homosexuality.

But research on finger length and such traits as sexuality and aggression has been dubbed pseudoscience by some experts. Studies linking similar traits with left-handedness also have been questioned because of small sample sizes. The connections Holmes lists aren't proven fact, and there is no agreement on what they might mean if they were. But the average reader wouldn't know that, because Holmes doesn't mention any criticisms of the studies. She sometimes goes for the laugh rather than the science, as in describing her ring finger as "a dipstick displaying the strength of the hormonal marinade that gave my brain its sexual slant."

Nevertheless, "The Well-Dressed Ape" is aimed at educating a general audience about human biology, and for the most part it succeeds. One essential point Holmes returns to several times is this: Many traits often touted as being uniquely human — such as self-recognition, intelligence and complex communication skills — actually exist in other animals. Biologically speaking, humans aren't as unusual as they might like to think.

Rebecca Skloot teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Memphis.

Reviewed by Rebecca Skloot, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"A pellucid spin through the contours of the human brain and the folds of the human body....Careful science meets good writing — a pleasure for fans of Lewis Thomas, Natalie Angier and other interpreters of scientific fact." Kirkus Reviews

"With humor and clarity, she explores the facts, fictions, and hopes about the species Homo sapiens....Highly recommended for all science collections." Library Journal (Starred Review)

Hannah Holmes is the author of Suburban Safari and The Secret Life of Dust. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Discover, Outside, and many other publications. She was a frequent contributor on science and nature subjects for the Discovery Channel Online. She lives with her husband and dog in Portland, Maine.