Old West Tales - Why Humans Rule

For an introduction to Old West Tales, click here: Old West Tales - Introduction

Every semester at UNC I had to meet with my student advisor, a professor, to pre-register for classes for the next semester. These were the only times I ever met with my student advisor.

A few weeks after pre-registration I would get a schedule of my classes in the mail. Prior to the invention of telephone and computer registration, when you didn't get the classes that you wanted through pre-registration, you had to go to "drop/add". UNC had drop/add in the old Gymnasium.

While I lived in Old West, I attended the last drop/add before telephone registration took over. The line of students waiting just to get in to drop/add that day was out of the gym, out of the building, and wrapped around the building.

Inside the gym it was Chaos. Students everywhere. Only a fraction of them actively participating in drop/add. There were tables all around the room and as I remember, you would go to the table of a particular department and try to add a class that you wanted. Once you added a class, you would drop the old class and then someone else might add the class that you dropped.

As my friend Tim once explained, "Girls are like classes, you have got to add before you drop." Good advice, except for the times when you are the one who gets dropped.

It was very overwhelming and by the time I stumbled out of drop/add I was enrolled in an upper level sociology class that sounded interesting -

Primate Social Behavior

I learned and remember more from this class than any other class that I took in all of my college career, law school included. Sure, I memorized much more for various classes over the years, and wrote many papers where I did research, but that stuff was short term memory and has long been pushed out by Wiggles lyrics and Dr. Suess books. I learned alot of useless trivia in Primate Social Behavior, and I learned alot about myself.

This is off the top of my head:

Humans are primates. There are many other primates; apes, monkeys, lemurs, loris, marmosetts, just to name a few.

Many primates have highly evolved social groupings. Gorillas are led by the silverback male and sleep in nests.

Coco the gorilla knows sign language. Coco once sat on a sink fixture which tore from the wall. Coco then used sign language to lie and tell her keepers that a 100 lbs. woman broke the sink.

Baboons are territorial and one group may raid the other group's territory and practice infantacide.

Looking another primate in the eyes and showing your teeth is a sign of aggression (try this at the Zoo).

Study Group

In many classes I would join a Study Group. Studying in a group doesn't really work, but a study group is made of attractive sorority girls with boyfriends. I never hit on my study group, but I got inside many girl dorms and even sorority houses and met a lot of roomates through study groups. I made friends with a cute girl in Primate Social Behavior who was dating a guy on the tennis team. I was supposed to ride with her to the Duke Primate Center for a field trip, but I overslept and missed out.

Why do humans rule the earth?

Humans are intelligent mammals with convoluted brain tissue. But, intelligence alone doesn't explain why Humans rule the earth. Dolphins are smart mammals.

What humans have that dolphins do not is opposable thumbs with which we can manipulate the environment.

But wait, many primates are intelligent mammals with opposable thumbs. Why do humans rule the earth as opposed to Gorillas or Chimps?

Chimpanzees are the closest relative to the human. Chimps can smile, kiss, have sex face-to-face, act in movies and television, have pets, and make tools.

Apart from some body hair, only 1 thing seperates us from the other primates ...

... the thing that allows us to dominate the earth, build the pyramids, and fly to the moon, while other primates live in zoos and throw feces at each other ...

... a social prohibition against public masterbation!

That's right, other primates spend a large majority of their waking hours touching themselves. Time that could otherwise be spent evolving. Don't believe me, go to the zoo. They just have no problem with it. If little baby monkey-boy cries, momma touches his tee-tee. Want to show that other monkey that you are dominant, go rub your manhood on him.

I propose to you that if it suddenly became acceptable to touch one's-self in public, we would all get hairier and we would stand around on our knuckles picking fleas off of each other.